rature. It also encouraged progress
and displayed acute discrimination, keeping pace with the time in all
that was new and meritorious. It developed individual liberty, public
interest, criticism, good taste, and the elegant, clear, and precise
conversational language in which France has excelled up to the present
day.

When about to build the Hotel Pisani, Mme. de Rambouillet, having
no love for architects, planned its construction without their
assistance. She revolutionized the architecture of the time by
introducing large and high doors and windows and putting the stairway
to one side in order to secure a large suite of rooms. She was also
the first to decorate a room in other colors than red or tan. The
construction of her hotel completely changed domestic architecture;
and it may be noted that when the Luxembourg was to be built,
the designers were instructed to examine, for ideas, the Hotel de
Rambouillet.

Legouve gives as the object and mission of Mme. de Rambouillet:
"to combat the sensualism of Rabelais, Villon, and Marot, to reform
society through love by reforming love through chastity; to place
women at the head of civilization, by beginning a crusade against vice
in the disguise of sentiment. The word 'fame' must, in the seventeenth
century, apply to both man and woman, meaning honor for the one and
purity for the other. Her ideal falls with the accession of Louis
XIV.; the dazzling luxury of royalty hardly conceals, under its
exterior elegance, the profound and deep-seated grossness of
Versailles and Marly."

To Mme. de Rambouillet, then, belongs the distinction of having
been the first to bring together men of letters and great lords on
a footing of social equality and for mutual benefit. Her salon
and friends continued in the seventeenth century what Marguerite
d'Angouleme had begun in the first part of the sixteenth--an
intellectual, social, and moral reform.

Many salons which were all more or less patterned after that of
Rambouillet sprang into existence. Among these the Academy of the
Vicomtesse d'Auchy, with Malherbe as president and tyrant, was of
little influence as far as women were concerned. The members were all
of second-rate importance, and Malherbe tolerated only the discussion
of his verses, while Mme. d'Auchy was better known for her splendid
neck than for any intellectuality. Every salon had a master of
ceremonies, who performed the rite of presentation; these men were
frequently