The women of the salons, and other French portraits . hich withers allminds and all hearts. Vices or virtues are alike indif-ferent, provided only conversation is animated, andennui, outmost dreaded plague, is banished. As an authoress, she was as ecstatic as she was in herprayers and her heart. Her Reflexions sur le Divorce are the most passionate 112 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS and touching argument for the sanctity of Melanges, published by her husband after herdeath, are rich in axioms and epigrams. If there was another woman of the eighteenth cen-tury whose judgment was so unperv
The women of the salons, and other French portraits . hich withers allminds and all hearts. Vices or virtues are alike indif-ferent, provided only conversation is animated, andennui, outmost dreaded plague, is banished. As an authoress, she was as ecstatic as she was in herprayers and her heart. Her Reflexions sur le Divorce are the most passionate 112 THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS and touching argument for the sanctity of Melanges, published by her husband after herdeath, are rich in axioms and epigrams. If there was another woman of the eighteenth cen-tury whose judgment was so unperverted by its shams,she is hard to find. At Coppet, where first Bayle, and then the greatestfinancier and his daughter, the most brilliant literarywoman of modern times, lived, and where all nature hasthat supreme serenity which is peculiar to a moun-tainous lake country, may still be seen the tomb whererests at last the passionate heart of the woman whobegan the world at little Crassier, not six miles away, asthe ministers daughter, Suzanne <&aJ£^ 6 &<& tf(iitf{? ae <y/s/s/. MADAME DE STAEL There is no more dazzling figure in modern Europeanhistory than Madame de Stael. The daughter ofNecker and the Revolution, she lived to see the newcondition of society which was ushered in by thebattle of Waterloo. She was the connecting linkbetween the, eighteenth and nineteenth up in an age when women influenced greatlyindeed, but influenced exclusively from their ownhomes and Salons, she ran about Europe always talkingand always writing, carrying on an immortal warfarewith Bonaparte—the newest of new women, as shewas certainly the cleverest and the most made for herself a life which the concisest ofencyclopaedists and biographers seem unable to com-press into the usual half column. She plunged intopolitics. She was stateswoman, novelist, playwriter,actress, metaphysician, patriot, intriguer, musician,philosopher. Wh
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