Feeling keenly the need of a guiding principle, the need of a more substantial foundation in education, the women of the century thought and wrote much on that subject; such was, for the most part, the work of the great salons, but in them the philosophical tenets of the age were also discussed.  The spirit of criticism thus created and cultivated, which finally spread through all classes of society, gradually conquered the new power in the state—­public opinion which, at the end of the century, ruled supreme in all its strength and vehemence, defying every effort of the government to stifle it.  The highest form of agreeable and intellectual society which the world has ever seen attained to its most complete development in these salons.

Every century has had its specialty:  the twelfth had its crusades, the sixteenth its religious struggles, the seventeenth its grand gout, the eighteenth its conversation and love of reason, the nineteenth its political struggles; and each one displayed the French passion for esprit; the eighteenth, however, was, par excellence, the century of esprit, and it was most remarkably developed in woman.

“Such astonishingly loquacious people as lived in Paris in the eighteenth century! ineffective, sardonic, verbose, sociable, intellectual, elegant, immoral—­grand gentlemen and ladies, with tears for mimic woes and none for actual ones, praise for wit, rewards for cleverness, and absolute ignorance of the destinies they were preparing for themselves;” such is the story of women and society of the eighteenth century.  Among these women the salon leaders will be found the most attractive, and the most influential in literature, theory of government, and social and moral development; to the mistresses belongs the title of “politicians.”

La Menagerie de Mme. de Tencin was one of the earliest of the eighteenth-century salons, although, in the strict sense of the word, Mme. de Tencin’s salon was of a political rather than a literary nature.  Successively nun, mistress, mother, she was one of the shrewdest women of the century.  Born in 1681, she early became a nun; but such was the character of her life at the convent that it was not long before she became a mother.  In 1714 she abandoned her conventual life and went to Paris, where she rose to influence as the mistress of Cardinal Dubois and of the regent, the Duke of Orleans.  At Paris her real activity began; she arrived at that gay capital with no other collateral than a pretty face and an extraordinary cunning, which soon brought her a fortune.  Fertile in resources of all kinds, she succeeded immediately, and gained for her nephew the cardinal’s hat.  In 1717 was born to her the afterward famous d’Alembert, whom she left upon the steps of the church Saint-Jean-le-Rond; afterward, when he had become eminent and her power was waning, she unsuccessfully used every means at her command to gain his favor and recognition; the father of that child was the Chevalier Destouches.