Characteristics of the Eighteenth Century - Its Epicurean
Philosophy - Anecdote of Mme. du Deffand--the Salon an Engine of
Political Power--Great Influence of Women--Salons Defined
Literary Dinners--Etiquette of the Salons--An Exotic on
American Soil.

The traits which strike us most forcibly in the lives and
characters of the women of the early salons, which colored their
minds, ran through their literary pastimes, and gave a
distinctive flavor to their conversation, are delicacy and
sensibility. It was these qualities, added to a decided taste
for pleasures of the intellect, and an innate social genius, that
led them to revolt from the gross sensualism of the court, and
form, upon a new basis, a society that has given another
complexion to the last two centuries. The natural result was, at
first, a reign of sentiment that was often over-strained, but
which represented on the whole a reaction of morality and
refinement. The wits and beauties of the Salon Bleu may have
committed a thousand follies, but their chivalrous codes of honor
and of manners, their fastidious tastes, even their prudish
affectations, were open though sometimes rather bizarre tributes
to the virtues that lie at the very foundation of a well-ordered
society. They had exalted ideas of the dignity of womanhood, of
purity, of loyalty, of devotion. The heroines of Mlle. de
Scudery, with their endless discourses upon the metaphysics of
love, were no doubt tiresome sometimes to the blase courtiers, as
well as to the critics; but they had their originals in living
women who reversed the common traditions of a Gabrielle and a
Marion Delorme, who combined with the intellectual brilliancy and
fine courtesy of the Greek Aspasia the moral graces that give so