bon, Hume, Horace Walpole, and, the only woman besides the hostess, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. Can't one hear the conversation? Madame Geoffrin has the supreme art of making other people talk their best. She knows just where to put in a word or to ask a question. She has in perfection that finer accomplishment-how to listen. She might very well know more about books than she does. But it is impossible that she should sympathize better with the makers of books, their hopes, cares, fears, ambition. These men tell her their difficulties. She advises them, helps them, cheers them. She is their good angel-quite a human good angel, with that prim exactness about her dress, lavender-scented, dainty, quiet, with her spotless muslins about her neck, the little cap tied under her chin-the very soul of gentle good sense, gay, kind, wise, natural, orderly.

After the dinners she receives all her world. What an assembly it is! This Salon is at once the most catholic and the most particular of all the Salons. Here, it is said, sovereigns meet their people. The aristocracy of genius is brought close to the aristocracy of birth. Is one clever, poor, obscure-or titled and famous? The two meet on common ground and are both the better. Here are Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Algarotti and Lord Shelburne. Stanislas Augustus, afterwards King of Poland, is a "host" of the company, and brings in his train the Polish nobles and notabilities of the day. Here D'Alembert meets often his fatal passion, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. Here is Grimm, who has come straight from another and very different Salon and influence that of his mistress, Madame d'Epinay. Horace Walpole, perhaps, has been at Madame du Deffand's.

In this corner one is complimenting Bernardin de Saint-Pierre on his "Paul

et Virginie," "that swan song of old. dying France." In another there is a group of laughing girls-for Madame loves such, as they love her. Women of fashion talk with the rugged old bourgeois reformers, who first of all should reform their class and character. The broken French of those "foreigners of distinction," who never pass through Paris without visiting Madame Geoffrin, is audible everywhere. Vanloo and Vernet are looking at the priceless pictures and statuary-bought out of the trompette's ice-money. And over all, the genius of good taste, good order, good sense, presides that woman who is well called the "invisible Providence" of her assemblies, Madame Geoffrin.

Though she must be very young when she first begins to receive a society more illustrious than any since the days of Madame de Rambouillet, she has from the very first the quiet sageness of middle life, and that aversion to change, hastiness and discord which one does not associate with youth. Are they talking politics? Madame knows nothing of politics. They make people bitter, argumentative, quarrelsome. She listens a little while; then when the discussion grows too heated, interposes with her "Voilà qui est bien." That is her oil on troubled waters, her password to harmony, fairness and reason. In her rooms there is always a calm-though it be but the calm before the storm. The distant rumble of the thunder of that tempest that is soon to burst over France is not heard in this quiet place. By Madame's fireside, indeed, and under Madame's peaceful influence, one whispers of those doctrines which will presently bouleverser the world. But it is the writers, not the actors, of that great drama who gather here, and when they get too fiery and hot-headed in their discussions, as some needs must, they drift away naturally from

the gathering of Madame Geoffrin to the greater liberty allowed by Holbach and Helvétius.

Madame has a little supper-party for a few chosen intimates when her world has gone away. She does not even now talk much herself-only interposes now and then with a gay little story or a kind little axiom. All her sayings are kind, it seems. It is not so difficult to be witty if one is permitted to be a little bitter too. But to be witty and to see persistently the best side of people and motives is by no means so easy.

If Madame believed less in her friends she could not help them half so much. It is not hard to understand why these impulsive, brilliant Frenchmen come to this wise little bourgeoise with their confidences and confessions. She scolds them well-à part-when supper is over; but she understands them perfectly, and has the charity that believeth and hopeth all things, and that makes the most fallen once more believe and hope in himself.

the

All her friends are not, of course, brilliant people. Is it Madame Geoffrin Shenstone is thinking of in particular when he writes of

the Frenchwoman in general? "There is a quality in which no woman in the world can compete with her -it is the power of intellectual irritation. She will draw wit out of a fool." There is a charming story told of Madame Geoffrin, who finds herself têteà-tête for a whole long winter evening with a worthy and insufferable old bore of an abbé. What is to be done? Yawn in each other's faces? Die of tristesse and ennui under a mask of social smiles? Madame, "inspired by the desperate situation," sets herself to work to make the bore amusing; and succeeds so well that when he leaves her she gives him a little compliment on his "bonne conversation." "Madame," says he, "I am only the instru

ment on which you have played beau'tifully."

This is the key at once to her character and to her social success. She "plays beautifully" the noble music of the great masters on instruments from which others only extract the vile jingle of street songs or the fierce passions of the "Marseillaise." She does not only draw cleverness from the stupid, but goodness from the corrupt. Instead of the license and indecency of the gatherings of Mademoiselle Quinault, there are her modest little suppers, where even Burigny, her dear major-domo, is not required to keep order, because she knows so well how to keep it herself. She still stands out, with her carefully regulated home and her serene mind, as the noblest highpriestess of decency and right. She still gives the lie to the delusion (which even now obtains in her country, if one can judge by its fiction and plays) that virtue must be stupid. If in reading of her, with that lack of events in her history and that gentle regularity in her daily life, she seems dull even for a moment, the fault lies only with her biographer and not with the woman who for fifty years is as a mother, beloved, worshipped, honored by the most brilliant spirits of her age.

It is in her own Salon that she first learns that affection, which she carries with her to her grave, for Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski, afterwards King of Poland. He appears to be an honest, well-intentioned person, not at all incapable of warm feelings, or at all adequate to the tremendous situation in which he finds himself. То Madame he is her "fils" and her "bien aimé." A prince? A king-elect? A king? What does that matter? He is first of all, as it were, her son. She has the gift of looking straight through the trappings of royalty, fame, position, at the man within them.

In 1764 the Cabinets of Petersburg

and Berlin set him on the Polish throne, and Madame writes to him as "Sire," and "Majesty," and regards him forever as the child who wants help and sympathy on a difficult way, with whom one may quarrel a little, but whom, feeble or strong, in or out of power, one must needs love to the end.

The letters the pair exchange are not remarkable as literary compositions. Madame's are full of the faults of orthography for which she is famous. They have very few of the blithe little anecdotes and epigrams which make her conversation delightful. She is writing to a man always in danger, fear and difficulty; and is herself the most sympathetic of women. So what would one have? They have no great political interest, or only that feminine view of politics which always centres on the politician. But they are not the less letters which even a king might have been glad to receive. If any one will look back on some cherished correspondence of his own, he will find in it, it may be pretty safely said, less wit and brilliancy even than Stanislas found in Madame Geoffrin's. It is only posterity which demands cleverness and comment on contemporary history in a letter; the receiver only needs the touch of the writer's hand, the assurance of affection and faithfulness, and the reminder that the only real separation is that which causes no pain.

Madame has been corresponding with her son and King only a few months when the idea of visiting him at Warsaw takes possession of her heart. She is now sixty-five years old. She has never been out of Paris in her life. She has preferred her "ruisseau de la rue de Saint-Honore" to all the splendid places of the world. The difficulties of travelling in that time are hardly estimable. She has no one to go with her. Her daughter is married and has her own ties. Madame has to tear herself from a Salon of perhaps forty years'

standing. But the idea grows and then dominates her. She and her King have a quarrel on paper, and the scheme seems likely to be abandoned. They have a reconciliation, and their reunion is the necessary consequence. One has to be a woman, perhaps, and to understand that maternal yearning in every woman's heart, to realize the absorbing nature of the desire to see her "bien aimé" again which makes Madame Geoffrin pursue her plan against everybody's advice, and carry it out in the teeth of difficulty. Her "bien aimé” himself has been more than a littledoubtful about his "chère maman" attempting a journey so hazardous. He has warned her often of the drawbacks she will find. He will do his best for her-she shall be infinitely honored and beloved-but drawbacks there will be; and she pays no attention to his cautions-or, rather, listens, and persists.

A

In the end of June, 1766, escorted by the Comte de Loyko, Chamberlain to Stanislas, Madame Geoffrin, bourgeoise, starts with an almost royal progress and with, it is said, the eyes of Europe upon her, on the first stage of her travels. Can't one see her looking out from the windows of that "berline," built for the occasion, upon the new world? widely-travelled generation can hardly fancy the excitement and eagerness, doubt, fear, anticipation which such a journey must represent in the mind of a woman who belongs to the most stayat-home people of a stay-at-home age. And behold this is Vienna! Not Paris, indeed, but not all contemptible. Madame parts here from Loyko, who is replaced by the Captain Bachone, whospeaks all languages, and is prepared, it appears, to travel with suites of furniture, cooks, provisions, silver plate, to render Madame's journey as littleinconvenient as may be. At Vienna, the greatest nobility of the land receive this clever, dignified daughter of the people with their very best parties and wel

come. Maria Theresa shows her the finest kindness and sympathy. She sees all the Austrian Royal Family"the prettiest thing one can imagine"at Schoenbrunn. Here is the young Marie Antoinette, hardly twelve years old and already lovely as an angel. "The Archduchess told me to write to France and say I have seen her, this little one, and find her beautiful." Is this the first footstep of that grim destiny which is to overtake "the Austrian," falling on the threshold of her life? "Arrièrepetite-fille du roi de France." "Lovely as an angel." "Write to your country and say you found her so." It would be but a part of the fitness of fate that one of the first little nails in the coffin of monarchy and of the Queen should be driven there by the daughter of a valet de chambre.

Madame would be sorry to leave Vienna, no doubt, if she could have room for such a feeling of sorrow in her heart when she is getting nearer every hour to this son of her age and her affection. She has expressed herself so warmly and decidedly in that quarrel they have had! She is so anxious to see him and tell him that she would not have been half so angry if she had loved him less. To her serene nature the omnipotence of fate or death to dash the cup of realization from one's lips, even at the last moment, is not so vivid as to a less sanguine temperament. She looks forward to their meeting with a sure heart. They are to be so happy, son and mother once more-a French son and mother, be it understood, between whom is that intimacy and confidence not half so well known to the relationship in other countries. He is to tell her what he has done, is doing, is going to do. They will talk over his marriage, his prospects, his thousand daily difficulties in that stormy kingdom, which needs the strongest man at its head, and has a

very amiable one. She will advise him, scold him, help him. She does not know much about his Polish politics, but she can learn. She is all for him and not at all for herself. She wants no advancement, no place for her friends, no influence used here or word spoken there-nothing but the good of one person-Stanislas Augustus Poniatowski.

No one who has lived long in the world will wonder that this meeting at Warsaw does not fulfil all it promised. It is a truism, but not less a truth, that the only unalloyed happiness of life is anticipation, and that the happiest people are those whose dreams are unrealized. These two, who love each other sincerely, disagree upon a thousand minor and immaterial points, as many other sincere lovers have done before and after them. They can't consent to differ. (Has one ever met a woman who could let a man think differently from her without dragging that difference to the fore, and discussing and threshing it out a hundred times a day?) Madame suffers not a little. Stanislas lodges her with splendor and honor. She obtains-if that is any advantage -a very good idea of the tottering state of this poor little kingdom, torn by internal dissension, the plaything of the greater Powers. She receives, during her stay in Poland, letters from Voltaire and Marmontel. Her whole visit there lasts only a little more than two months. When she is back again in Paris she is able to write of it with enthusiasm. But there are not the less those clouds on her happiness. When she has gone away Stanislas writes in terms of a passionate regret, and she answers him from Vienna that the "tu" in which he addresses her is an "illusion of Satan," and recalls "all that I have suffered." There have been, it is said, influences at work upon the King which Madame dreads for him, and of which she can't persuade him to rid

himself. They will love each other better when they are separated. It is from a distance that one obtains the best view of a city. Too near, one sees the defects of a part, and not the beauty of the whole.

The pair resume their correspondence with all their old fervor when Madame is back again in her Paris. She sympathizes once more with all Stanislas's difficulties and trials, which do not get fewer as the years go on. She is now as ever, the genius of common-sense and quiet reason-calm, far-seeing, judicious. Petty jealousies are quite forgotten in the very real and daily growing need Stanislas has of her faithful friendship. In 1769 she is able to write to him,

"When one is young, one's pleasure, passions, tastes even, form attachments and break them. My feeling for you depends on none of these things; therefore it has lasted. It has lasted in spite of candor and plain speaking, and will last to the end of my life."

Madame is now seventy years old. Famine, financial disorder, and parties in the Court and Government, who sacrifice the public good to gratify private malice, make the condition of France appear deplorable, even to a woman whose nature is at all times gently optimistic. But the misfortunes of her own country are light beside those of her King's.

In 1772 takes place the first partition of Poland. By 1792, when the second partition breaks Poniatowski's heart, and he retires to Petersburg, to live there till his death in 1798, with, it is said, no consolation but that taste for letters he learnt of Madame Geoffrin, she has long gone the way of all flesh. She writes to him so long as she can handle a pen, loves him as long as she has a heart to love with; and in her last letter to him tells him that she cannot express her joy at leaving him happy and content. So that even Fate is sometimes merciful.

The close of Madame Geoffrin's life is like its beginning, well-ordered and regular. She continues to receive her friends in her Salon when she is a very old woman. In the summer of 1776 she is attacked by paralysis. The attack is brought on, say some, by too close an attendance at a Church festival. It may be. Though Madame has been the intimate of the philosophers, has listened many times in her rooms to the free expression of free-thought, and has been a warm patroness of the Encyclopædia, yet it is not a little in keeping with the tranquil conservatism of her character that orthodoxy should claim her at last. Her daughter, Madame la Marquise de la Ferté-Imbault, who is properly aristocratic and conventional, takes possession of her mother's bed, and won't let those adventurous souls, Morellet, D'Alembert, Marmontel, come near it. The sick woman is past troubling at their exclusion; or perhaps, like many others, after having in life reasoned and wondered, is glad to die in the bosom of that Church whose great attraction to the soul is that it admits no doubts, saying with that self-confidence which gives confidence, "Behold, I am the Truth! Rest in me." Madame at least only smiles when she learns that her daughter is thus "guarding her tomb from the infidels." It is thought that her reason is dimmed a little. But she is able to make her preparations for death “gaiement" almost as she made them for her journey to Poland. She has been always gently cheerful, and she is cheerful now. When she overhears the people about her bed making fine sugges tions of the means Government might employ to make the masses happy, she rouses herself to say: "Ajoutez-y le soin de procurer les plaisirs." It is her last recorded utterance.

The character of Madame Geoffrin is quite simple. She is less a great woman than a good one. A great woman is