nd,
spreading out and circulating in a thousand hotels, showed itself in
all its force, splendor, and elegance. The celebrated women of the
regency--Mme. de Prie, Mme. de Parabere, Mme. de Sabran--had no salon,
while those of the Marquis d'Alluys and the Hotels de Sully, de Duras,
de Villars, and the suppers of Mme. de Chauvelin were of a distinctly
different type from those of the earlier and the later periods.

In a certain sense, the salons changed the complexion of the age. The
eighteenth century itself was friendly and generous; it was, also,
impatient and inexperienced, seeing things not as they were but as it
wished them to be, compelling science and art to serve its purpose.
It was frank, often brutally frank, a characteristic due partly to the
conversational license of the salons. With its Fontenelle, Voltaire,
Piron, etc., it was indeed a happy century. A _bon mot_ was the event
of the day and travelled over all the civilized world.

Feeling keenly the need of a guiding principle, the need of a more
substantial foundation in education, the women of the century thought
and wrote much on that subject; such was, for the most part, the work
of the great salons, but in them the philosophical tenets of the
age were also discussed. The spirit of criticism thus created and
cultivated, which finally spread through all classes of society,
gradually conquered the new power in the state--public opinion which,
at the end of the century, ruled supreme in all its strength and
vehemence, defying every effort of the government to stifle it. The
highest form of agreeable and intellectual society which the world has
ever seen attained to its most complete development in these salons.

Every century has had its specialty: the twelfth had its crusades, the
sixteenth its religious struggles, the seventeenth its grand _gout_,
the eighteenth its conversation and love of reason, the nineteenth
its political struggles; and each one displayed the French passion for
_esprit_; the eighteenth, however, was, _par excellence_, the century
of _esprit_, and it was most remarkably developed in woman.

"Such astonishingly loquacious people as lived in Paris in the
eighteenth century! ineffective, sardonic, verbose, sociable,
intellectual, elegant, immoral--grand gentlemen and ladies, with tears
for mimic woes and none for actual ones, praise for wit, rewards
for cleverness, and absolute ignorance of the destinies they were
preparing for them