d social centers their
prestige and their fame. It is not the salons of the high nobility that
suggest themselves as the typical ones of this age. It is those which
were animated by the habitual presence of the radical leaders of French
thought. Economic questions and the rights of man were discussed as
earnestly in these brilliant coteries as matters of faith and sentiment,
of etiquette and morals, had been a hundred years before. Such subjects
were forced upon them by the inexorable logic of events; and fashion,
which must needs adapt itself in some measure to the world over which
it rules, took them up. If the drawing rooms of the seventeenth century
were the cradles of refined manners and a new literature, those of the
eighteenth were literally the cradles of a new philosophy.

The practical growth and spread of French philosophy was too closely
interwoven with the history of the salons not to call for a word here.
Its innovations were faintly prefigured in the coterie of Mme. de
Lambert, where it colored almost imperceptibly the literary and critical
discussions. But its foundations were more firmly laid in the drawing
room of Mme. de Tencin, where the brilliant wit and radical theories of
Montesquieu, as well as the pronounced materialism of Helvetius, found
a congenial atmosphere. Though the mingled romance and satire of the
"Persian Letters," with their covert attack upon the state and society,
raised a storm of antagonism, they called out a burst of admiration
as well. The original and aggressive thought of men like Voltaire,
Rousseau, d'Alembert, and Diderot, with its diversity of shading, but
with the cardinal doctrine of freedom and equality pervading it all, had
found a rapidly growing audience. It no longer needed careful nursing,
in the second half of the century. It had invaded the salons of the
haute noblesse, and was discussed even in the anterooms of the court.
Mme. de Pompadour herself stole away from her tiresome lover-king to
the freethinking coterie that met in her physician's apartments in the
Entresol at Versailles, and included the greatest iconoclasts of the
age. If she had any misgivings as to the outcome of these discussions,
they were fearlessly cast aside with "Apres Nous le Deluge." "In the
depth of her heart she was with us," said Voltaire when she died.

There were clairvoyant spirits who traced the new theories to their
logical results. Mme. du Deffand speaks with prophetic vision of t