daughter-in-law of Louis XIV., kept up for many years an almost royal
state among the most distinguished men and women of the time. It was at
Sceaux, with its endless succession of entertainments and
conversations--supper-parties and water-parties, concerts and masked
balls, plays in the little theatre and picnics under the great trees of
the park--that Madame du Deffand came to her maturity and established
her position as one of the leaders of the society in which she moved.
The nature of that society is plainly enough revealed in the letters and
the memoirs that have come down to us. The days of formal pomp and vast
representation had ended for ever when the 'Grand Monarque' was no
longer to be seen strutting, in periwig and red-heeled shoes, down the
glittering gallery of Versailles; the intimacy and seclusion of modern
life had not yet begun. It was an intermediate period, and the
comparatively small group formed by the elite of the rich, refined, and
intelligent classes led an existence in which the elements of publicity
and privacy were curiously combined. Never, certainly, before or since,
have any set of persons lived so absolutely and unreservedly with and
for their friends as these high ladies and gentlemen of the middle years
of the eighteenth century. The circle of one's friends was, in those
days, the framework of one's whole being; within which was to be found
all that life had to offer, and outside of which no interest, however
fruitful, no passion, however profound, no art, however soaring, was of
the slightest account. Thus while in one sense the ideal of such a
society was an eminently selfish one, it is none the less true that
there have been very few societies indeed in which the ordinary forms of
personal selfishness have played so small a part. The selfishness of the
eighteenth century was a communal selfishness. Each individual was
expected to practise, and did in fact practise to a consummate degree,
those difficult arts which make the wheels of human intercourse run
smoothly--the arts of tact and temper, of frankness and sympathy, of