taste of all the things of her time appertained to Madame de Pompadour.
She marked with her _cachet_, it might almost be said with her arms, all
that world of matter which seems to be animated from one end to the
other by the ideal of the habits of a people, and the needs of a
society. The whole century is like a great relic of the royal
favorite.... She presides over that variety and that wide range of
objects, so diverse in the universality of their type, that the
eighteenth century created in her image to surround her existence, to
serve her and to adorn her." This graceful and pleasing picture,
however, was largely superficial in the case of her less favored
sisters. The inevitable limitations of the life and of the times, the
ignorance, the social prejudices, the inexplicable dissatisfaction which
really haunted all things, all combined to undermine this brilliant
social life, and there was a general consciousness of its hollowness.

"Under all this fever of fashion and customs, under all these
dissipations of the imagination and the life, there remains something
unappeased, unsatisfied, and empty in the heart of the woman of the
eighteenth century. Her vivacity, her affectation, her eagerness to run
after fancies, seem to be a disquietude; and a sickly impatience appears
in this continual search for attraction, in this furious thirst for
pleasure. She searches in every direction, as if she wished to expand
herself outside of herself. But it is vainly that she displays her
activity, that she seeks all around her a species of deliverance;--she
may plunge herself, drown herself, in that which the fashion of the
times designates as an 'ocean of worlds,' run after distractions, new
faces, those passing liaisons, those accidental friends, for whom the
century invents the word _connaissances_; dinners, suppers, fetes,
voyages of pleasure, tables always filled, salons always crowded, a
continual passage of personages, variety of news, visages, masks,
toilettes, absurdities, all this spectacle ceaselessly changing cannot
entirely satisfy her with its distractions. Though all her nights are
brilliant with candles, though she summon--as she grows older--more
movement still around her, she ends always by falling back upon herself;
she finds herself again in wishing to flee from herself, and she admits
to herself secretly the suffering which devours her. She recognizes in
herself the secret evil, the incurable evil which this