easures. Do not believe that your only virtue is modesty; there are
many women who know no other virtue, and who imagine that it relieves
them of all duties toward society; they believe they are right in
lacking all others and think themselves privileged to be proud and
slanderous with impunity. You must have a gentle modesty; a good
woman may have the advantages of a man's friendship without abandoning
honesty and faithfulness to her duties. Nothing is so difficult as to
please without the use of what seems like coquettishness. It is more
often by their defects than by their good qualities that women please
men; men seek to profit by the weaknesses of good and kind women,
for whose virtues they care nothing, and they prefer to be amused by
persons not very estimable than to be forced merely to admire virtuous
persons."

This is a most faithful description of the society of her time, and
it was because her treatises struck home that they were severely
criticised; but, nothing daunted, she carried out her plans in her own
way, resorting neither to intrigue nor artifice. Many of her sayings
became household maxims, such as--"It is not always faults that undo
us; it is the manner of conducting ourselves after having committed
them."

Her reflections on women might be called the great plea, at the end
of the seventeenth century, for woman's right to use her reason. After
the severe and cruel satire of Moliere, attacking women for their
innocent amusements, they gave themselves up entirely to pleasure.
"Mme. de Lambert now wrote to avenge her sex and demand for it the
honest and strong use of the mind; and this was done in the midst of
the wild orgies of the Regency."

Mme. de Lambert was not a rare beauty, but she possessed recompensing
charms. M. Colombey asserts that she became convinced of two things,
about which she became highly enthusiastic: first, that woman was more
reasonable than man; secondly, that M. Fontenelle, who presided over
or filled the functions of president of her salon, was always in the
right. He was indeed in harmony with the tone of the salon, being
considered the most polished, brilliant, and distinguished member of
the intellectual society of Paris, as well as one of the most talented
drawing room philosophers. He made the salon of Mme. de Lambert the
most sought for and celebrated, the most intellectual and moral of the
period.

Mme. de Lambert has, possibly, exercised more influence upon me