their reunions in Paris, and this court soon became more
important to the vain than the royal one itself, and it was proved by
experience that reputation and glory might be gained without the
aid or protection of the court at Versailles. This no one could have
previously believed, but the public soon learnt to do homage to the
tone-giving scholars, to the ladies and gentlemen who fostered them,
as it had formerly paid its homage to the ministers of the court.
This gave to the ladies, who collected around them the celebrated men
of the time (for reputation was much more the question than merit,)
and who protected and entertained them, a degree of weight in the
political and literary world, which made them as important in
the eighteenth century as Richelieu and Colbert had been in the
seventeenth.

The queen, on her part, might have been able to exercise a beneficial
influence, however little power she had in other respects, when
compared with the mistresses of the king; but the daughter of
Stanislaus Leckzinski was a gentle, admirable woman, although somewhat
narrow-minded, and wholly given up to irrational devotional exercises
and bigotry. Like her father, she was altogether in the hands of the
Jesuits, blindly and unconditionally their servant; such an attachment
to a religious order, and such blind devotedness as hers would be
quite incredible, if we did not possess her own and her father's
autograph letters, as proofs of the fact. We shall present our readers
with some extracts from these letters, which are preserved in the
archives of the French empire, when we come to speak of the abolition
of the order of Jesuits.

As to the enlightened mistresses who had much more power and influence
than the queen, Pompadour seemed, as we learn from Marmontel, desirous
of participating in the literature of the age and of doing something
for its promotion, when she saw how important writers and the
influence of the press had become; but partly because both she and
the king were altogether destitute of any sense for the beautiful
in literature or art, and partly because the better portion of the
learned men at the time neither could nor would be pleased with what
a Bernis, Dueclos and Marmontel were disposed to be, who undoubtedly
received some marks of favor from her. Voltaire is therefore quite
right when he lays upon the court the blame of allowing the influence
which literature then exercised upon the people, to be withdraw