discussed in a society of philosophers than in
that of a pretty woman of Paris," said Rousseau. This constant habit of
reducing thoughts to a clear and salient form was the best school for
aptness and ready expression. To talk wittily and well, or to lead
others to talk wittily and well, was the crowning gift of these women.
This evanescent art was the life and soul of the salons, the magnet
which attracted the most brilliant of the French men of letters, who
were glad to discuss safely and at their ease many subjects which
the public censorship made it impossible to write about. They found
companions and advisers in women, consulted their tastes, sought
their criticism, courted their patronage, and established a sort of
intellectual comradeship that exists to the same extent in no country
outside of France. Its model may be found in the limited circle that
gathered about Aspasia in the old Athenian days.

It is perhaps this habit of intellectual companionship that, more than
any other single thing, accounts for the practical cleverness of the
Frenchwomen and the conspicuous part they have played in the political
as well as social life of France. Nowhere else are women linked to
the same degree with the success of men. There are few distinguished
Frenchmen with whose fame some more or less gifted woman is not closely
allied. Montaigne and Mlle. de Gournay, La Rochefoucauld and Mme. de
La Fayette, d'Alembert and Mlle. de Lespinasse, Chateaubriand and Mme.
Recamier, Joubert and Mme. de Beaumont--these are only a few of the
well-known and unsullied friendships that suggest themselves out of a
list that might be extended indefinitely. The social instincts of
the French, and the fact that men and women met on a common plane of
intellectual life, made these friendships natural; that they excited
little comment and less criticism made them possible.

The result was that from the quiet and thoughtful Marquise de Lambert,
who was admitted to have made half of the Academicians, to the clever
but less scrupulous Mme. de Pompadour, who had to be reckoned with in
every political change in Europe, women were everywhere the power behind
the throne. No movement was carried through without them. "They form a
kind of republic," said Montesquieu, "whose members, always active, aid
and serve one another. It is a new state within a state; and whoever
observes the action of those in power, if he does not know the women who
govern them, is