In France, a country for which King had a lifelong affinity, she heard Ernest Renan lecture at the Sorbonne and saw Alexandre Dumas
fils in the audience of the Théâtre d'Art. She met the most-noted
femmes de lettres in Paris, including Madame Blanc and Baronne de Bury, and frequented their salons.
For all these connections, King remained a child of her past. In The American Scene (1907) Henry James noted that whereas the "ancient order" in the South was "masculine, fierce and mustachioed," the post-Civil era was marked by a "strange feminization." The reason for the change is obvious: the "fierce and mustachioed" men had died on the battlefields, leaving their wives and daughters behind. Writers such as King elaborated the feminine Southern viewpoint in a way that James, with all his mastery, could not. The specific incident that propelled King into the world of letters was a conversation in 1885 with Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Gilder had asked King for the reason behind the enmity of the people of New Orleans toward George Washington Cable and his works.
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