over these reunions, of which the Academy furnished the most
distinguished guests, in company with grands seigneurs eager to
show themselves as worthy by intelligence as by rank to play a
role in these gatherings of the intellectual elite. Fontenelle
was the presiding genius of this salon, and added to its critical
and literary spirit a tinge of philosophy. This gallant savant,
who was adored in society as "a man of rare and exquisite
conversation," has left many traces of himself here. No one was
so sparkling in epigram; no one talked so beautifully of love, of
which he knew nothing; and no one talked to delightfully of
science, of which he knew a great deal. But he thought that
knowledge needed a seasoning of sentiment to make it palatable to
women. In his "Pluralite des Mondes," a singular melange of
science and sentiment, which he had written some years before and
dedicated to a daughter of the gay and learned Mme. de La
Sabliere, he talks about the stars, to la belle marquise, like a
lover; but his delicate flatteries are the seasoning of serious
truths. It was the first attempt to offer science sugar-coated,
and suggests the character of this coterie, which prided itself
upon a discreet mingling of elevated thought with decorous
gaiety. The world moves. Imagine a female undergraduate of
Harvard or Columbia taking her astronomy diluted with sentiment!

President Henault, the life-long friend of Mme. du Deffand, whose
light criticism of a pure-minded woman might be regarded as
rather flattering than otherwise, says: "It was apparent that
Mme. de Lambert touched upon the time of the Hotel de
Rambouillet; she was a little affected, and had not the force to
overstep the limits of the prude and the precieuse. Her salon
was the rendevous of celebrated men . . . . In the evening the