Then other literary men came into the circle,
among whom were Balzac, Voiture, and Racan
—which last fell madly in love with the marquise,
and wrote a play in which—under the name of
Arthenice, an anagram on Catherine, her own
name—he described his love, but afterwards
suppressed the description, " lest it should make her
unhappy." Surely a trait of noble delicacy and
self-sacrifice quite chivalric! Among other
things, the Hotel Rambouillet assigned to itself
the task of purifying the language from certain
grossnesses and vulgarities; nay, of even adding
new words, if occasion served; as when it coined
the famous word, " urbanity," and the world
accepted the coinage. This small beginning in
the drawing-room of a private lady came
afterwards to its full perfection in the celebrated
Institut, the most successful conservatory of
language ever known. Few know that the French
Académie was originally due to the refinement
and graceful taste of a woman. In time, the
purity of the Hôtel Rambouillet, getting its
exaggerative imitators degenerated into prudery
and affectation, and Les Précieuses Ridicules
of Molière were no bad photographs of what
beauty had become when travestied by folly.
To Richelieu, the jealous, anxious, arbitrary
minister, those pleasant meetings at the Hôtel
were especially distasteful. He wanted to
know all that was said and done there, and
could not believe that so many persons could
be gathered without plotting and evil-speaking.
So, one day, he sent his secretary and
spy, Boisrobert, to the marquise, asking her as
a favour to tell him what her people said of
him there. "Sir," said the marquise grandly,
"my friends know my attachment to his
Eminence, and would not, therefore, be so unpolite
as to speak ill of him in my presence." His
Eminence never asked again, and the meetings
went on as briskly as before.

No cards or music were called in to help the
leaden-footed hours at the Hôtel Rambouillet,
but all the guests talked; they cultivated the
quickness of repartee, the terseness of epigram,
the brilliancy of fancy, the swift bright play of
thought, which give spirit to conversation. They
did not, each, make up his thought into a pellet,
which he launched at the head of his nearest
neighbour, then withdrew nervously from the
fray, as is too often the only talking to be had
here; but they toyed, and sported, and played,
and fenced like Arab warriors in the jereed
game. This new art or grace became one of the
greatest refiners of manner and helps to pleasant
living known to modern society. In those days,
too, the world recognised the possibility of
attachments which should include all the tenderness,
and exclude all the passion, of love. Julie
d'Angennes, the eldest daughter of the marquise,
was a striking exemplification of this, as also of
the greater freedom allowed then than now to
unmarried women. She was her mother's
lieutenant in that graceful army of wit and beauty,
and had as many lovers as there were days in
the year; but she would listen to none of them,
and always said that she would never marry any
one lower than Gustavus Adolphus, the greatest
hero of his age. M. de Montausier, however—a
hero in his way, if not quite equal to the ideal the
fair Julie had made for herself—after nine years of
patient and loyal serving, succeeded in convincing
her that a husband may sometimes remain a
lover. It was M. de Montausier who caused the
famous Guirlande de Julie to be made; a highly
characteristic manner of wooing, with still a dash
of the old chivalric sentiment clinging to it.
This Garland was a folio volume of twenty-nine
pages. On each page was a leaf or flower, painted
in miniature by the best artists of the day; and
underneath each painting was an ode or
madrigal, written by the best poets—the whole
executed by Jarry, the noted caligrapher.

Immediately after the Hôtel Rambouillet, with
its graceful, dignified, and refined mistress, came
the salon of Mademoiselle de Scudéry, where the
two friends, Conrart, the jealous secretary of the
Académie, and Pélisson, the secretary and defender
of Fouquet, met to dispute possession of her
heart. Pélisson, sixteen years her junior, and
painfully disfigured by the small-pox, was the
finally favoured, and Conrart had to digest his
disappointment as he best might. The friendship
between Mademoiselle de Scudéry and
Pélisson stands almost unrivalled in the annals
of Platonism. It lasted through the five years of
solitary confinement in the Bastille, where he was
imprisoned for the defence of Fouquet, and where
he formed that celebrated friendship with the
spider which has made his name more famous,
perhaps, than his friendship with La Scudéry;
and it lasted up to the day of his death, when
he was seventy and she eighty-six, and the grave
parted them for but a brief day. No one ever
dared to slander this noble affection. The
bitterest satirists left it alone; the most cynical
disbelievers in human purity were forced to respect
its innocence. It was a fine-hearted woman's
verdict in favour of intelligence against station,
and of the superior charms of mind against the
mere outside graces of form.

Madame de Sablé next carried on this grand
war of womanhood against the degrading
influences of class and caste, and in her salon, as in
those of her predecessors', the literary man and
the refined man were always welcome—more
welcome than the titled or the wealthy, if brainless
or coarse. She, too, maintained her place as
lawgiver and superior, and recognised no
holiness in the Griselda type of woman.

Our next queen of society was not so true to
her class. The Duchesse de Longueviile forsook
her pride for a lower, if a more natural love, and
her biography shows us the rare phenomena of
a lady who humbled herself to her lover, and
accepted laws instead of framing them. La
Rochefoucault—whose wise and foolish, true and
false Maxims were, like the nobler Thoughts
of Pascal, mainly elaborated from the conversations
held at Madame de Sablé's—found means