sel, and that he owed to her much of his knowledge of the world.

"Unhappy those who depend upon the pen," she said to him; "nothing is
more chimerical. The man who makes shoes is sure of his wages; the man
who makes a book or a tragedy is never sure of anything." She advises
him to make friends of women rather than of men. "By means of women,
one attains all that one wishes from men, of whom some are too
pleasure-loving, others too much preoccupied with their personal
interests not to neglect yours; whereas women think of you, if only from
idleness. Speak this evening to one of them of some affair that concerns
you; tomorrow at her wheel, at her tapestry, you will find her dreaming
of it, and searching in her head for some means of serving you."

Prominent among her friends were Bolingbroke and Fontenelle. "It is not
a heart which you have there," she said to the latter, laying her hand
on the spot usually occupied by that organ, "but a second brain." She
had enlisted what stood in the place of it, however, and he interested
himself so far as to procure her final release from her vows, through
Benedict XIV, who, as Cardinal Lambertini, had frequented her salon,
and who sent her his portrait as a souvenir, after his election to the
papacy.

Through her intimacy with the Duc de Richelieu, Mme. de Tencin made
herself felt even in the secret councils of Louis XV. Her practical mind
comprehended more clearly than many of the statesmen the forces at work
and the weakness that coped with them. "Unless God visibly interferes,"
she said, "it is physically impossible that the state should not fall in
pieces." It was her influence that inspired Mme. de Chateauroux with
the idea of sending her royal lover to revive the spirits of the army
in Flanders. "It is not, between ourselves, that he is in a state to
command a company of grenadiers," she wrote to her brother, "but his
presence will avail much. The troops will do their duty better, and the
generals will not dare to fail them so openly... A king, whatever he may
be, is for the soldiers and people what the ark of the covenant was for
the Hebrews; his presence alone promises success."

Her devotion to her friends was the single redeeming trait in her
character, and she hesitated at nothing to advance the interests of her
brother, over whose house she gracefully presided. But she failed in her
ultimate ambition to elevate him to the ministry, and her intrigues were
so much fea