ossess good breeding and gentle courtesy. The
coarse passions which had disgraced the court were refined into subtle
sentiments, and women were raised upon a pedestal, to be respectfully
and platonically adored. In this reaction from extreme license,
familiarity was forbidden, and language was subjected to a critical
censorship. It was here that the word PRECIEUSE was first used to
signify a woman of personal distinction, accomplished in the highest
sense, with a perfect accord of intelligence, good taste, and good
manners. Later, when pretension crept into the inferior circles which
took this one for a model, the term came to mean a sort of intellectual
parvenue, half prude and half pedant, who affected learning, and paraded
it like fine clothes, for effect.

"Do you remember," said Flechier, many years later, in his funeral
oration on the death of the Duchesse de Montausier, "the salons which
are still regarded with so much veneration, where the spirit was
purified, where virtue was revered under the name of the incomparable
Arthenice; where people of merit and quality assembled, who composed
a select court, numerous without confusion, modest without constraint,
learned without pride, polished without affectation?"

Whatever allowance we may be disposed to make for the friendship of the
eminent abbe, he spoke with the authority of personal knowledge, and at
a time when the memories of the Hotel de Rambouillet were still fresh.
It is true that those who belonged to this professed school of morals
were not all patterns of decorum. But we cannot judge by the Anglo-Saxon
standards of the nineteenth century the faults of an age in which a
Ninon de L'Enclos lives on terms of veiled intimacy with a strait-laced
Mme. de Maintenon, and, when age has given her a certain title to
respectability, receives in her salon women of as spotless reputation as
Mme. de La Fayette. Measured from the level of their time, the lives of
the Rambouillet coterie stand out white and shining. The pure character
of the Marquise and her daughters was above reproach, and they were
quoted as "models whom all the world cited, all the world admired, and
every one tried to imitate." To be a precieuse was in itself an evidence
of good conduct.

"This salon was a resort not only for all the fine wits, but for every
one who frequented the court," writes Mme. de Motteville. "It was a sort
of academy of beaux esprits, of gallantry, of virtue, and of science