THE WOMEN OF THE FRENCH SALONS

By Amelia Gere Mason

PREFACE

It has been a labor of love with many distinguished Frenchmen to
recall the memories of the women who have made their society so
illustrious, and to retouch with sympathetic insight the features
which time was beginning to dim. One naturally hesitates to
enter a field that has been gleaned so carefully, and with such
brilliant results, by men like Cousin, Sainte-Beuve, Goncourt,
and others of lesser note. But the social life of the two
centuries in which women played so important a role in France is
always full of human interest from whatever point of view one may
regard it. If there is not a great deal to be said that is new,
old facts may be grouped afresh, and old modes of life and
thought measured by modern standards.

In searching through the numerous memoirs, chronicles, letters,
and original manuscripts in which the records of these centuries
are hidden away, nothing has struck me so forcibly as the
remarkable mental vigor and the far-reaching influence of women
whose theater was mainly a social one. Though society has its
frivolities, it has also its serious side, and it is through the
phase of social evolution that was begun in the salons that women
have attained the position they hold today. However beautiful,
or valuable, or poetic may have been the feminine types of other
nationalities, it is in France that we find the forerunners of
the intelligent, self-poised, clear-sighted, independent modern