The thoughts of Mme. de Lambert, so elevated in tone, so fine in
moral quality, so rich in worldly wisdom, and often so felicitous
in expression, tempt one to multiply quotations, especially as
they show us an intimate side of her life, of which otherwise we
know very little. Her personality is veiled. Her human
experiences, her loves, her antipathies, her mistakes, and her
errors are a sealed book to us, excepting as they may be dimly
revealed in the complexion of her mind. Of her influence we need
no better evidence than the fact that her salon was called the
antechamber to the Academie Francaise.

The precise effect of this influence of women over the most
powerful critical body ot eh century, or of any century, perhaps,
we can hardly measure. In the fact that the Academy became for a
time philosophical rather than critical, and dealt with theories
rather than with pure literature, we trace the finger of the more
radical thinkers who made themselves so strongly felt in the
salons. Sainte=Beuve tells us that Fontenelle, with other
friends of Mme. de Lambert, first gave it this tendency; but his
mission was apparently an unconscious one, and strikingly
illustrates the accidental character of the sources of the
intellectual currents which sometimes change the face of the
world. "If I had a handful of truths, I should take good care
not to open it," said this sybarite, who would do nothing that
was likely to cause him trouble. But the truths escaped in spite
of him, and these first words of the new philosophy were perhaps
the more dangerous because veiled and insidious. "You have
written the 'Histoire des Oracles,'" said a philosopher to him,
after he had been appointed the royal censor, "and you refuse me