6, he was elected Senator from the Aisne. In December of
the following year he once more entered the Cabinet as Minister of
Public Instruction, later accepting the portfolio for Foreign Affairs.

During this period, of course, Madame Waddington lived the brilliant
social and political life of the capital. M. Waddington began his
diplomatic career in 1878 as the first Plenipotentiary of France to
the Congress of Berlin. In 1883 he was sent as Ambassador
Extraordinary to represent France at the coronation of Alexander III;
and it was then that Madame Waddington began to send history through
the diplomatic pouch, and sow the seeds of that post-career which
comes to so few widows of public men.

Madame Waddington's letters from Russia, and later from England where
her husband was Ambassador from 1883 to 1893 are now so famous, being
probably in every private library of any pretensions, that it would be
a waste of space to give an extended notice of them in a book which
has nothing whatever to do with the achievements of its heroines in
art and letters in that vast almost-forgotten period, Before the War.
Suffice it to say that they are among the most delightful epistolary
contributions to modern literature, the more so perhaps as they were
written without a thought of future publication. But being a born
woman of letters, every line she writes has the elusive qualities of
style and charm; and she has besides the selective gift of putting
down on paper even to her own family only what is worth recording.

When these letters were published in _Scribner's Magazine_ in 1902,
eight years after M. Waddington's death, they gave her an instant
position in the world of letters, which must have consoled her for the
loss of that glittering diplomatic life she had enjoyed for so many
years.

Not that Madame Waddington had ever dropped out of society, except
during the inevitable period of mourning. In Paris up to the outbreak
of the war she was always in demand, particularly in diplomatic
circles, by far the most interesting and kaleidoscopic in the European
capitals. I was told that she never paid a visit to England without
finding an invitation from the King and Queen at her hotel, as well as
a peck of other invitations.

I do not think Madame Waddington has ever been wealthy in our sense of
the word. But, as I said before, her career is a striking example of
that most precious of all gifts, personality. And if she lives until