Madame Waddington has had four separate careers quite aside from the always outstanding career of girlhood.  Her father was Charles King, President of Columbia College and son of Rufus King, second United States Minister to England.  When she married M. Waddington, a Frenchman of English descent, and educated at Rugby and Cambridge, he was just entering public life.  His chateau was in the Department of the Aisne and he was sent from there to the National Assembly.  Two years later he was appointed Minister of Public Instruction, and in January, 1876, he was elected Senator from the Aisne.  In December of the following year he once more entered the Cabinet as Minister of Public Instruction, later accepting the portfolio for Foreign Affairs.

During this period, of course, Madame Waddington lived the brilliant social and political life of the capital.  M. Waddington began his diplomatic career in 1878 as the first Plenipotentiary of France to the Congress of Berlin.  In 1883 he was sent as Ambassador Extraordinary to represent France at the coronation of Alexander III; and it was then that Madame Waddington began to send history through the diplomatic pouch, and sow the seeds of that post-career which comes to so few widows of public men.

Madame Waddington’s letters from Russia, and later from England where her husband was Ambassador from 1883 to 1893 are now so famous, being probably in every private library of any pretensions, that it would be a waste of space to give an extended notice of them in a book which has nothing whatever to do with the achievements of its heroines in art and letters in that vast almost-forgotten period, Before the War.  Suffice it to say that they are among the most delightful epistolary contributions to modern literature, the more so perhaps as they were written without a thought of future publication.  But being a born woman of letters, every line she writes has the elusive qualities of style and charm; and she has besides the selective gift of putting down on paper even to her own family only what is worth recording.

When these letters were published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1902, eight years after M. Waddington’s death, they gave her an instant position in the world of letters, which must have consoled her for the loss of that glittering diplomatic life she had enjoyed for so many years.

Not that Madame Waddington had ever dropped out of society, except during the inevitable period of mourning.  In Paris up to the outbreak of the war she was always in demand, particularly in diplomatic circles, by far the most interesting and kaleidoscopic in the European capitals.  I was told that she never paid a visit to England without finding an invitation from the King and Queen at her hotel, as well as a peck of other invitations.