the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, leaning to the side of
the latter, intellectually, but retaining much of the finer
morality that distinguished the best life of the former. Her
attitude towards the disorders of the regency was similar to that
which Mme. de Rambouillet had held towards the profligate court
of Henry IV, though her salon never attained the vogue of its
model. It lacked a certain charm of youth and freshness perhaps,
but it was one of the few in which gambling was not permitted,
and in which conversation had not lost its serious and critical
flavor.

If Mme. de Lambert were living today she would doubtless figure
openly as an author. Her early tastes pointed clearly in that
direction. She was inclined to withdraw from the amusements of
her age, and to pass her time in reading, or in noting down the
thoughts that pleased her. The natural bent of her mind was
towards moral reflections. In this quality she resembled Mme. de
Sable, but she was a woman of greater breadth and originality,
though less fine and exclusive. She wrote much in later life on
educational themes, for the benefit of her children and for her
own diversion; but she yielded to the prejudices of her age
against the woman author, and her works were given to the world
only through the medium of friends to whom she had read or lent
them. "Women," she said, "should have towards the sciences a
modesty almost as sensitive as towards vices." But in spite of
her studied observance of the conventional limits which tradition
still assigned to her sex, her writings suggest much more care
than is usually bestowed upon the amusement of an idle hour. If,
like many other women of her time, she wrote only for her
friends, she evidently doubted their discretion in the matter of