degree, those difficult arts which make the wheels of human intercourse run smoothly—­the arts of tact and temper, of frankness and sympathy, of delicate compliment and exquisite self-abnegation—­with the result that a condition of living was produced which, in all its superficial and obvious qualities, was one of unparalleled amenity.  Indeed, those persons who were privileged to enjoy it showed their appreciation of it in an unequivocal way—­by the tenacity with which they clung to the scene of such delights and graces.  They refused to grow old; they almost refused to die.  Time himself seems to have joined their circle, to have been infected with their politeness, and to have absolved them, to the furthest possible point, from the operation of his laws.  Voltaire, d’Argental, Moncrif, Henault, Madame d’Egmont, Madame du Deffand herself—­all were born within a few years of each other, and all lived to be well over eighty, with the full zest of their activities unimpaired.  Pont-de-Veyle, it is true, died young—­at the age of seventy-seven.  Another contemporary, Richelieu, who was famous for his adventures while Louis XIV. was still on the throne, lived till within a year of the opening of the States-General.  More typical still of this singular and fortunate generation was Fontenelle, who, one morning in his hundredth year, quietly observed that he felt a difficulty in existing, and forthwith, even more quietly, ceased to do so.

Yet, though the wheels of life rolled round with such an alluring smoothness, they did not roll of themselves; the skill and care of trained mechanicians were needed to keep them going; and the task was no light one.  Even Fontenelle himself, fitted as he was for it by being blessed (as one of his friends observed) with two brains and no heart, realised to the full the hard conditions of social happiness.  ’Il y a peu de choses,’ he wrote, ’aussi difficiles et aussi dangereuses que le commerce des hommes.’  The sentence, true for all ages, was particularly true for his own.  The graceful, easy motions of that gay company were those of dancers balanced on skates, gliding, twirling, interlacing, over the thinnest ice.  Those drawing-rooms, those little circles, so charming with the familiarity of their privacy, were themselves the rigorous abodes of the deadliest kind of public opinion—­the kind that lives and glitters in a score of penetrating eyes.  They required in their votaries the absolute submission that reigns in religious orders—­the willing sacrifice of the entire life.  The intimacy of personal passion, the intensity of high endeavour—­these things must be left behind and utterly cast away by all who would enter that narrow sanctuary.  Friendship might be allowed there, and flirtation disguised as love; but the overweening and devouring influence of love itself should never be admitted to destroy the calm of daily intercourse and absorb into a single channel attentions due to all.  Politics were to