be tolerated, so long as they remained a game; so soon as they grew serious and envisaged the public good, they became insufferable.  As for literature and art, though they might be excellent as subjects for recreation and good talk, what could be more preposterous than to treat such trifles as if they had a value of their own?  Only one thing; and that was to indulge, in the day-dreams of religion or philosophy, the inward ardours of the soul.  Indeed, the scepticism of that generation was the most uncompromising that the world has known; for it did not even trouble to deny:  it simply ignored.  It presented a blank wall of perfect indifference alike to the mysteries of the universe and to the solutions of them.  Madame du Deffand gave early proof that she shared to the full this propensity of her age.  While still a young girl in a convent school, she had shrugged her shoulders when the nuns began to instruct her in the articles of their faith.  The matter was considered serious, and the great Massillon, then at the height of his fame as a preacher and a healer of souls, was sent for to deal with the youthful heretic.  She was not impressed by his arguments.  In his person the generous fervour and the massive piety of an age that could still believe felt the icy and disintegrating touch of a new and strange indifference.  ‘Mais qu’elle est jolie!’ he murmured as he came away.  The Abbess ran forward to ask what holy books he recommended.  ’Give her a threepenny Catechism,’ was Massillon’s reply.  He had seen that the case was hopeless.

An innate scepticism, a profound levity, an antipathy to enthusiasm that wavered between laughter and disgust, combined with an unswerving devotion to the exacting and arduous ideals of social intercourse—­such were the characteristics of the brilliant group of men and women who had spent their youth at the Court of the Regent, and dallied out their middle age down the long avenues of Sceaux.  About the middle of the century the Duchesse du Maine died, and Madame du Deffand established herself in Paris at the Convent of Saint Joseph in a set of rooms which still showed traces—­in the emblazoned arms over the great mantelpiece—­of the occupation of Madame de Montespan.  A few years later a physical affliction overtook her:  at the age of fifty-seven she became totally blind; and this misfortune placed her, almost without a transition, among the ranks of the old.  For the rest of her life she hardly moved from her drawing-room, which speedily became the most celebrated in Europe.  The thirty years of her reign there fall into two distinct and almost equal parts.  The first, during which d’Alembert was pre-eminent, came to an end with the violent expulsion of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.  During the second, which lasted for the rest of her life, her salon, purged of the Encyclopaedists, took on a more decidedly worldly tone; and the influence of Horace Walpole was supreme.