for creating a social center of sufficient attraction to focus
the best intellectual life of the age, and sufficient power to
radiate its light. Still it was the tact and discrimination to
select from the wealth of material about her, and quietly to
reconcile old traditions with the freshness of new ideas, that
especially characterized Mme. De Rambouillet.

It was this richness of material, the remarkable variety and
originality of the women who clustered round and succeeded their
graceful leader, that gave so commanding an influence to the
salons of the seventeenth century. No social life has been so
carefully studied, no women have been so minutely portrayed. The
annals of the time are full of them. They painted one another,
and they painted themselves, with realistic fidelity. The lights
and shadows are alike defined. We know their joys and their
sorrows, their passions and their follies, their tastes and their
antipathies. Their inmost life has been revealed. They animate,
as living figures, a whole class of literature which they were
largely instrumental in creating, and upon which they have left
the stamp of their own vivid personality. They appear later in
the pages of Cousin and Sainte-Beuve, with their radiant features
softened and spiritualized by the touch of time. We rise from a
perusal of these chronicles of a society long passed away, with
the feeling that we have left a company of old friends. We like
to recall their pleasant talk of themselves, of their companions,
of the lighter happenings, as well as the more serious side of
the age which they have illuminated. We seem to see their faces,
not their manner, watch the play of intellect and feeling, while
they speak. The variety is infinite and full of charm.