expounded and explained the subtile metaphysics of love in every possible way:  a peerless lady was supposed to unite every possible moral virtue with beauty and rank; and hence chivalric love was based on sentiment alone.  Provence gave birth both to chivalry and poetry, and they were singularly blended together.  Of about five hundred troubadours whose names have descended to us, more than half were noble, for chivalry took cognizance only of noble birth.  From Provence chivalry spread to Italy and to the north of France, and Normandy became pre-eminently a country of noble deeds, though not the land of song.  It was in Italy that the poetical development was greatest.

After chivalry as an institution had passed away, it still left its spirit on society.  There was not, however, much society in Europe anywhere until cities arose and became centres of culture and art.  In the feudal castle there were chivalric sentiments but not society, where men and women of cultivation meet to give expression and scope to their ideas and sentiments.  Nor can there be a high society without the aid of letters.  Society did not arise until scholars and poets mingled with nobles as companions.  This sort of society gained celebrity first in Paris, when women of rank invited to their salons literary men as well as nobles.

The first person who gave a marked impulse to what we call society was the Marquise de Rambouillet, in the seventeenth century.  She was the first to set the fashion in France of that long series of social gatherings which were a sort of institution for more than two hundred years.  Her father was a devoted friend of Henry IV., belonged to one of the first families of France, and had been ambassador to Rome.  She was married in the year 1600, at the age of fifteen.  When twenty-two, she had acquired a distaste for the dissipations of the court and everything like crowded assemblies.  She was among the first to discover that a crowd of men and women does not constitute society.  Nothing is more foreign to the genius of the highest cultivated life than a crowded salon, where conversation on any interesting topic is impossible; where social life is gilded, but frivolous and empty; where especially the loftiest sentiments of the soul are suppressed.  From an early period such crowds gathered at courts; but it was not till the seventeenth century that the salon arose, in which woman was a queen and an institution.

The famous queens of society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries do not seem to have mixed much in miscellaneous assemblies, however brilliant in dress and ornament.  They were more exclusive.  They reserved their remarkable talents for social reunions, perhaps in modest salons, where among distinguished men and women they could pour out the treasures of the soul and mind; where they could inspire and draw out the sentiments of those who were gifted and distinguished.  Madame du Deffand lived quietly