and searching in her head for some means of serving you."

Prominent among her friends were Bolingbroke and Fontenelle. "It
is not a heart which you have there," she said to the latter,
laying her hand on the spot usually occupied by that organ, "but
a second brain." She had enlisted what stood in the place of it,
however, and he interested himself so far as to procure her final
release from her vows, through Benedict XIV, who, as Cardinal
Lambertini, had frequented her salon, and who sent her his
portrait as a souvenir, after his election to the papacy.

Through her intimacy with the Duc de Richelieu, Mme. de Tencin
made herself felt even in the secret councils of Louis XV. Her
practical mind comprehended more clearly than many of the
statesmen the forces at work and the weakness that coped with
them. "Unless God visibly interferes," she said, "it is
physically impossible that the state should not fall in pieces."
It was her influence that inspired Mme. de Chateauroux with the
idea of sending her royal lover to revive the spirits of the army
in Flanders. "It is not, between ourselves, that he is in a
state to command a company of grenadiers," she wrote to her
brother, "but his presence will avail much. The troops will do
their duty better, and the generals will not dare to fail them so
openly . . . A king, whatever he may be, is for the soldiers and
people what the ark of the covenant was for the Hebrews; his
presence alone promises success."

Her devotion to her friends was the single redeeming trait in her
character, and she hesitated at nothing to advance the interests
of her brother, over whose house she gracefully presided. But