"No,
It isn't decent, and for many reasons,
That womankind should study and know too much.
To teach her children what is right and wrong,
Manage her household, oversee her servants,
And keep expenses within bounds, should be
Her only study and philosophy.
Our fathers, on this point, showed great good sense;
They said a woman always knows enough
If but her understanding reaches
To telling, one from t'other, coat and breeches.
Their wives, who couldn't read, led honest lives,
Their households were their only learned theme,
And all their books were thimble, thread and needles.
With which they made their daughters' wedding outfits.
But now our women scorn to live like that;
They want to write and all be authoresses.
They think no knowledge is too deep for them."[77]
Molière's intention in writing these justly famous comedies was not, as is so often asserted, to ridicule women of learning, but only those superficial pedants who affected knowledge or loved to make a display of the little knowledge they happened to possess. The result, however, was quite different from what had been intended, for the poet's pleasantries were taken so seriously, that even women of real learning, in order to avoid ridicule, were condemned to absolute silence. The comic dramatist, Destouches, expressed the prevailing opinion when he wrote:
"Une femme savante
Doit cacher son savoir, ou c'est une imprudente."[78]
Few French women thereafter had the courage to defend their sex, as did their sisters in Italy, and the result was that, with a few exceptions, like Mme. du Châtelet, Sophie Germain, and Mme. Lepaute, there were no more learned women in France for fully two centuries.
Never did satire and ridicule accomplish more, except probably in the case of Don Quixote—that masterly creation of Cervantes which dealt the death-blow to knight-errantry—than did Les Femmes Savantes and Les Précieuses Ridicules. The learned woman became as much an object of derision in France as was the knight-errant in Spain.
It was not, however, in the nature of the French woman, with all her vivacity and energy, to be suppressed entirely or to be relegated for long to the background in things of the mind. But, not then daring to face the ridicule which was inevitable, if she devoted herself to science or philosophy, she sought a substitute for her intellectual activity in the salon.
The first salon was established by an Italian woman, the Marquise de Rambouillet, in 1617, and was modeled after the famous reunions held at the court of Urbino under Elizabetta Gonzaga, a century before. Although it never exhibited the splendor of its Italian prototype, the Hôtel de Rambouillet was for more than fifty years the most important literary center of the kind in France. Here, owing to the tact, esprit, and magnetic personality of Mme. de Rambouillet, were gathered the most distinguished men and women of the time. Among them were poets, philosophers, statesmen, ecclesiastics and ladies of rank, whose names still dazzle us by their brilliancy. Bossuet, Molière, La Fontaine, Corneille and the great Condé were there; so were Fléchier, Balzac, Voiture, Saint-Evremont, Descartes and La Rochefoucauld; and so, too, were Mme. de Sevigné, the Duchess of Montpensier, Madeleine de Scudéry, La Comtesse de La Fayette, Charlotte de Montmorency, and Cardinal Richelieu who got from this noted salon the idea which led to his greatest foundation—the French Academy.
It was Mme. de Rambouillet who, through her reunions in her exquisite Chambre Bleue, for the first time brought together elements that were previously considered as belonging to different castes. It was she, also, who created modern society with its purely intellectual hierarchy, by having the representatives of the nobility meet men of science and letters on an equal footing. It seems to us now the most natural thing in the world for a great savant, a great poet, or a great philosopher, to be received in the same salon with the Duchess of Montpensier—La Grande Mademoiselle—but it was far from being so when the brilliant young Italian matron—for she was a daughter of the noble Roman family of the Savelli—began her epoch-making work in the Hôtel de Rambouillet, where, after overcoming countless difficulties and prejudices, she eventually succeeded in bringing together, and in enlisting in a common cause, the nobility of birth and the nobility of intellect, and introducing into the exclusive set of Paris the same kind of social coteries that had so long been popular in Urbino and Ferrara.
The Hôtel de Rambouillet was the exemplar of that long series of salons which, for two centuries, were the favorite trysting-places of the talent, the wit, the beauty of Europe, and which exerted such a potent influence on society and on the progress of science and literature. The mistress of the salon was supreme, and she maintained her supremacy by her tact, sympathy, intelligence and mental alertness, rather than by learning and superior mental power.
Indeed, it is a singular fact that very few of the salonières were learned women. The most gifted and the most learned of them were Mlle. Lespinasse, Mme. de Staël, and Mme. Swetchine. Mme. Geoffrin, who was of bourgeois origin, was so devoid of education that Voltaire said she was unable to write two lines correctly. And yet, despite her educational limitations, she became, by her own unaided efforts, the queen of intellectual Europe.