In her salon, for nearly fifty years, no pedantry, no loose manners, no questionable characters, no social or political intrigues, no discourtesies of any kind, were recorded; hers was a reign of dignity and grace, of purity of language, manners, and morals.  She died in 1665, at the advanced age of seventy-seven, esteemed and mourned by the entire social and intellectual world of France.  Her influence was incalculable; it was the first time in the history of France that refined taste, intellectuality, and virtue had won importance, influence, and power.

It must be remembered that in the first period of the salon there were no blue-stockings, no pedants:  these were later developments.  It was, primarily, a gathering which found pleasure in parties, excursions, concerts, balls, fireworks, dramatic performances, living tableaux; the last form of amusement very strongly influenced the development of the art, for in the galleries there appeared a surprisingly large number of portraits of the women of the day in character—­sometimes as a nymph, sometimes as a goddess.

The salon, in its first phase, showed and developed tolerance in religion as well as in art and literature.  It also encouraged progress and displayed acute discrimination, keeping pace with the time in all that was new and meritorious.  It developed individual liberty, public interest, criticism, good taste, and the elegant, clear, and precise conversational language in which France has excelled up to the present day.

When about to build the Hotel Pisani, Mme. de Rambouillet, having no love for architects, planned its construction without their assistance.  She revolutionized the architecture of the time by introducing large and high doors and windows and putting the stairway to one side in order to secure a large suite of rooms.  She was also the first to decorate a room in other colors than red or tan.  The construction of her hotel completely changed domestic architecture; and it may be noted that when the Luxembourg was to be built, the designers were instructed to examine, for ideas, the Hotel de Rambouillet.

Legouve gives as the object and mission of Mme. de Rambouillet:  “to combat the sensualism of Rabelais, Villon, and Marot, to reform society through love by reforming love through chastity; to place women at the head of civilization, by beginning a crusade against vice in the disguise of sentiment.  The word ‘fame’ must, in the seventeenth century, apply to both man and woman, meaning honor for the one and purity for the other.  Her ideal falls with the accession of Louis XIV.; the dazzling luxury of royalty hardly conceals, under its exterior elegance, the profound and deep-seated grossness of Versailles and Marly.”

To Mme. de Rambouillet, then, belongs the distinction of having been the first to bring together men of letters and great lords on a footing of social equality and for mutual benefit.  Her salon and friends continued in the seventeenth century what Marguerite d’Angouleme had begun in the first part of the sixteenth—­an intellectual, social, and moral reform.