e about anything
that does not concern her own fame and glory. But she does not cease to
remember her friends, whom she "loves, if possible, better than ever."
Nor does she forget to send a thousand caresses to her kitten.

A messenger from Warsaw meets her with everything imaginable that can
add to the comfort and luxury of her journey, and on reaching there
she finds a room fitted up for her like her own boudoir in the Rue
St. Honore. She accepts all this consideration with great modesty and
admirable good sense. "This tour finished," she writes to d'Alembert,
"I feel that I shall have seen enough of men and things to be convinced
that they are everywhere about the same. I have my storehouse of
reflections and comparisons well furnished for the rest of my life. All
that I have seen since leaving my Penates makes me thank God for having
been born French and a private person."

The peculiar charm which attracted such rare and marked attentions to
a woman not received at her own court, and at a time when social
distinctions were very sharply defined, eludes analysis, but it seems
to have lain largely in her exquisite sense of fitness, her excellent
judgment, her administrative talent, the fine tact and penetration which
enabled her to avoid antagonism, an instinctive knowledge of the art of
pleasing, and a kind but not too sensitive heart. These qualities are
not those which appeal to the imagination or inspire enthusiasm. We
find in her no spark of that celestial flame which gives intellectual
distinction. In her amiability there seems to be a certain languor of
the heart. Her kindness has a trace of calculation, and her friendship
of self-consciousness. Of spontaneity she has none. "She loved nothing
passionately, not even virtue," says one of her critics. There was a
certain method in her simplicity. She carried to perfection the art of
savoir vivre, and though she claimed freedom of thought and action, it
was always strictly within conventional limits.

She suffered the fate of all celebrities in being occasionally attacked.
The role assigned to her in the comedy of "The Philosophers" was not a
flattering one, and some criticisms of Montesquieu wounded her so deeply
that she succeeded in having them suppressed. She did not escape the
shafts of envy, nor the sneers of the grandes dames who did not relish
her popularity. But these were only spots on the surface of a singularly
brilliant career. Calm, reposeful, chari