mosphere of the salon begins to enervate. His clever assistant,
the Abbe Genest, poet and Academician, was a sort of Voiture, witty,
versatile, and available. He tried to put Descartes into verse, which
suggests the quality of his poetry. Sainte-Aulaire, who, like his friend
Fontenelle, lived a century, frequented this society more or less for
forty years, but his poems are sufficiently light, if one may judge from
a few samples, and his genius doubtless caught more reflections in
the salon than in a larger world. He owed his admission to the Academy
partly to a tender quatrain which he improvised in praise of his lively
patroness. It is true we have occasional glimpses of Voltaire. Once
he sought an asylum here for two months, after one of his numerous
indiscretions, writing tales during the day, which he read to the
duchess at night. Again he came with his "divine Emilie," the learned
Marquise du Chatelet, who upset the household with her eccentric ways.
"Our ghosts do not show themselves by day," writes Mlle. de Launay;
"they appeared yesterday at ten o'clock in the evening. I do not think
we shall see them earlier today; one is writing high facts, the other,
comments upon Newton. They wish neither to play nor to promenade; they
are very useless in a society where their learned writings are of no
account." But Voltaire was a courtier, and, in spite of his frequent
revolts against patronage, was not at all averse to the incense of the
salons and the favors of the great. It was another round in the ladder
that led him towards glory.

The cleverest women in France were found at Sceaux, but the dominant
spirit was the princess herself. It was amusement she wanted, and even
men of talent were valued far less for what they were intrinsically than
for what they could contribute to her vanity or to her diversion. "She
is a predestined soul," wrote Voltaire. "She will love comedy to the
last moment, and when she is ill I counsel you to administer some
beautiful poem in the place of extreme unction. One dies as one has
lived."

Mme. du Maine represented the conservative side of French society in
spite of the fact that her abounding mental vitality often broke through
the stiff boundaries of old traditions. It was not because she did not
still respect them, but she had the defiant attitude of a princess whose
will is an unwritten law superior to all traditions. The tone of her
salon was in the main dilettante, as is apt to be