WOMAN'S LONG STRUGGLE 89 



noble Roman family of the Savelli began her epoch- 

 making work in the Hotel de Rambouillet, where, after 

 overcoming countless difficulties and prejudices, she even- 

 tually succeeded in bringing together, and in enlisting in 

 a common cause, the nobility of birth and the nobility of 

 intellect, and introducing into the exclusive set of Paris 

 the same kind of social coteries that had so long been popu- 

 lar in Urbino and Ferrara. 



The Hotel de Rambouillet was the exemplar of that long 

 series of salons which, for two centuries, were the favorite 

 trysting-places of the talent, the wit, the beauty of Europe, 

 and which exerted such a potent influence on society and 

 on the progress of science and literature. The mistress of 

 the salon was supreme, and she maintained her supremacy 

 by her tact, sympathy, intelligence and mental alertness, 

 rather than by learning and superior mental power. 



Indeed, it is a singular fact that very few of the salon- 

 ieres were learned women. The most gifted and the most 

 learned of them were Mile. Lespinasse, Mme. de Stael, and 

 Mme. Swetchine. Mme. Geoffrin, who was of bourgeois 

 origin, was so devoid of education that Voltaire said she 

 was unable to write two lines correctly. And yet, despite 

 her educational limitations, she became, by her own un- 

 aided efforts, the queen of intellectual Europe. 



And, if we may judge by their portraits, most of the 

 great leaders of salons were homely, if not positively ugly, 

 and many of them were advanced in years. Thus, Mme. 

 du Deffand the female Voltaire was sixty-eight years 

 old and blind when her friendship with Horace Walpole, 

 one of the wittiest Englishmen who ever lived, began a 

 friendship that endured until her death at the age of 

 eighty-three. The face of Mile, de Lespinasse was disfig- 

 ured by smallpox and her eyesight was impaired ; and yet, 

 without rank, wealth or beauty, she was the pivot around 

 which circled the talent and fashion of Paris, and whose 

 personal magnetism was so great that the state, the church, 



