styled "the last flower of the seventeenth
century." Sainte-Aulaire, tired of the perpetual excitement at Sceaux,
characterized this salon by a witty quatrain:

Je suis las de l'esprit, il me met en courroux,
Il me renverse la cervelle;
Lambert, je viens chercher un asile chez vous,
Entre La Motte et Fontenelle.

The wits of the day launched many a shaft of satire against it, as they
had against the Hotel de Rambouillet a century earlier; but it was
an intellectual center of great influence, and was regarded as the
sanctuary of old manners as well as the asylum of new liberties. Its
decorous character gave it the epithet of "very respectable;" but this
eminently respectable company, which represented the purest taste of the
time, often included Adrienne Lecouvreur, who was much more remarkable
for talent than for respectability. We have a direct glimpse of it
through the pen of d'Artenson:

"I have just met with a very grievous loss in the death of the Marquise
de Lambert" (he writes in 1733). "For fifteen years I have been one of
her special friends, and she has done me the favor of inviting me to her
house, where it is an honor to be received. I dined there regularly on
Wednesday, which was one of her days.... She was rich, and made a good
and amiable use of her wealth, for the benefit of her friends, and above
all for the unfortunate. A pupil of Bachaumont, having frequented only
the society of people of the world, and of the highest intelligence, she
knew no other passion than a constant and platonic tenderness."

The quality of character and intellect which gave Mme. de Lambert so
marked an influence, we find in her own thoughts on a great variety of
subjects. She gives us the impression of a woman altogether sensible
and judicious, but not without a certain artificial tone. Her
well-considered philosophy of life had an evident groundwork of ambition
and worldly wisdom, which appears always in her advice to her children.
She counsels her son to aim high and believe himself capable of great
things. "Too much modesty," she says, "is a languor of the soul, which
prevents it from taking flight and carrying itself rapidly towards
glory"--a suggestion that would be rather superfluous in this
generation. Again, she advises him to seek the society of his superiors,
in order to accustom himself to respect and politeness. "With equals
one grows negligent; the mind falls asleep." But she does not regar