



Produced by Theresa Armao





THE WOMEN OF THE FRENCH SALONS

By Amelia Gere Mason




PREFACE

It has been a labor of love with many distinguished Frenchmen to recall
the memories of the women who have made their society so illustrious,
and to retouch with sympathetic insight the features which time was
beginning to dim. One naturally hesitates to enter a field that has
been gleaned so carefully, and with such brilliant results, by men
like Cousin, Sainte-Beuve, Goncourt, and others of lesser note. But the
social life of the two centuries in which women played so important a
role in France is always full of human interest from whatever point of
view one may regard it. If there is not a great deal to be said that is
new, old facts may be grouped afresh, and old modes of life and thought
measured by modern standards.

In searching through the numerous memoirs, chronicles, letters, and
original manuscripts in which the records of these centuries are hidden
away, nothing has struck me so forcibly as the remarkable mental vigor
and the far-reaching influence of women whose theater was mainly a
social one. Though society has its frivolities, it has also its serious
side, and it is through the phase of social evolution that was begun
in the salons that women have attained the position they hold today.
However beautiful, or valuable, or poetic may have been the feminine
types of other nationalities, it is in France that we find the
forerunners of the intelligent, self-poised, clear-sighted, independent
modern woman. It is possible that in the search for larger fields the
smaller but not less important ones have been in a measure forgotten.
The great stream of civilization flows from a thousand unnoted rills
that make sweet music in