forever behind and beneath it; little sympathy with inconvenient
ideals and exalted sentiments. The serious and earnest soul to
which divine messages have been whispered in hours of solitude
finds its treasures unheeded, its language unspoken here. The
cares, the burdens, the griefs that weigh so heavily on the great
heart of humanity are banished from this social Eden. The
Frenchman has as little love for the somber side of life as the
Athenian, who veiled every expression of suffering. "Joy marks
the force of the intellect," said the pleasure-loving Ninon. It
is this peculiar gift of projecting themselves into a joyous
atmosphere, of treating even serious subjects in a piquant and
lively fashion, of dwelling upon the pleasant surface of things,
that has made the French the artists, above all others, of social
life. The Parisienne selects her company, as a skillful leader
forms his orchestra, with a fine instinct of harmony; no single
instrument dominates, but every member is an artist in his way,
adding his touch of melody or color in the fitting place. She
aims, perhaps unconsciously, at a poetic ideal which shall
express the best in life and thought, divested of the rude and
commonplace, untouched by sorrow or passion, and free from
personality.

But the representative salons, which have left a permanent mark
upon their time, and a memory that does not seem likely to die,
were no longer simply centers of refined and intellectual
amusement. The moral and literary reaction of the seventeenth
century was one of the great social and political forces of the
eighteenth. The salon had become a vast engine of power, an
organ of public opinion, like the modern press. Clever and
ambitious women had found their instrument and their opportunity.