and soul of the salons, the magnet which attracted the most
brilliant of the French men of letters, who were glad to discuss
safely and at their ease many subjects which the public
censorship made it impossible to write about. They found
companions and advisers in women, consulted their tastes, sought
their criticism, courted their patronage, and established a sort
of intellectual comradeship that exists to the same extent in no
country outside of France. Its model may be found in the limited
circle that gathered about Aspasia in the old Athenian days.

It is perhaps this habit of intellectual companionship that, more
than any other single thing, accounts for the practical
cleverness of the Frenchwomen and the conspicuous part they have
played in the political as well as social life of France.
Nowhere else are women linked to the same degree with the success
of men. There are few distinguished Frenchmen with whose fame
some more or less gifted woman is not closely allied. Montaigne
and Mlle. de Gournay, La Rochefoucauld and Mme. de La Fayette,
d'Alembert and Mlle. de Lespinasse, Chateaubriand and Mme.
Recamier, Joubert and Mme. de Beaumont--these are only a few of
the well-known and unsullied friendships that suggest themselves
out of a list that might be extended indefinitely. The social
instincts of the French, and the fact that men and women met on a
common plane of intellectual life, made these friendships
natural; that they excited little comment and less criticism made
them possible.

The result was that from the quiet and thoughtful Marquise de
Lambert, who was admitted to have made half of the Academicians,
to the clever but less scrupulous Mme. de Pompadour, who had to