ead to Italy and to the north of
France, and Normandy became pre-eminently a country of noble deeds,
though not the land of song. It was in Italy that the poetical
development was greatest.

After chivalry as an institution had passed away, it still left its
spirit on society. There was not, however, much society in Europe
anywhere until cities arose and became centres of culture and art. In
the feudal castle there were chivalric sentiments but not society, where
men and women of cultivation meet to give expression and scope to their
ideas and sentiments. Nor can there be a high society without the aid of
letters. Society did not arise until scholars and poets mingled with
nobles as companions. This sort of society gained celebrity first in
Paris, when women of rank invited to their _salons_ literary men as well
as nobles.

The first person who gave a marked impulse to what we call society was
the Marquise de Rambouillet, in the seventeenth century. She was the
first to set the fashion in France of that long series of social
gatherings which were a sort of institution for more than two hundred
years. Her father was a devoted friend of Henry IV., belonged to one of
the first families of France, and had been ambassador to Rome. She was
married in the year 1600, at the age of fifteen. When twenty-two, she
had acquired a distaste for the dissipations of the court and everything
like crowded assemblies. She was among the first to discover that a
crowd of men and women does not constitute society. Nothing is more
foreign to the genius of the highest cultivated life than a crowded
_salon_, where conversation on any interesting topic is impossible;
where social life is gilded, but frivolous and empty; where especially
the loftiest sentiments of the soul are suppressed. From an early period
such crowds gathered at courts; but it was not till the seventeenth
century that the _salon_ arose, in which woman was a queen and an
institution.

The famous queens of society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
do not seem to have mixed much in miscellaneous assemblies, however
brilliant in dress and ornament. They were more exclusive. They reserved
their remarkable talents for social reunions, perhaps in modest
_salons_, where among distinguished men and women they could pour out
the treasures of the soul and mind; where they could inspire and draw
out the sentiments of those who were gifted and distinguished. Madame du
Deffand