herself.  Her great object is to understand, not to instruct.  The great art (since it is recognised that art is required even in the commerce of words) is not to pit against one another two arrogant opponents, eager to parade their learning and to amuse the company by discussing questions the solution of which no one troubles about, but to illumine every unprofitable disputation by bringing in the help of all who can throw a little light on the points at issue.  This is a talent of which I can see no signs among the hostesses who are so cried up.  In their houses I always find two fashionable barristers, and a thunderstruck audience, in which no one dares to be judge.  The only art these ladies have is to make the man of genius ridiculous, and the ordinary man dumb and inert.  One comes away from such houses saying, ’Those were fine speeches,’ and nothing more.”

I really think that I was in the right here; but I cannot forget that my chief cause of anger against these women arose from the fact that they paid no attention to people, however able they might think themselves, unless they happened to be famous—­the people being myself, as you may easily imagine.  On the other hand, now that I look back on those days without prejudice and without any sense of wounded vanity, I am certain that these women had a way of fawning on public favourites which was much more like childish conceit than sincere admiration or candid sympathy.  They became editors, as it were, of the conversation, listening with all their might and making peremptory signals to the audience to listen to every triviality issuing from an illustrious mouth; while they would suppress a yawn and drum with their fans at all remarks, however excellent, as soon as they were unsigned by a fashionable name.  I am ignorant of the airs of the intellectual women of the nineteenth century; nay, I do not know if the race still exists.  Thirty years have passed since I mixed in society; but, as to the past, you may believe what I tell you.  There were five or six of these women who were absolutely odious to me.  One of them had some wit, and scattered her epigrams right and left.  These were at once hawked about in all drawing-rooms, and I had to listen to them twenty times in a single day.  Another had read Montesquieu, and gave lessons in law to the oldest magistrates.  A third used to play the harp execrably, but it was agreed that her arms were the most beautiful in France, and we had to endure the harsh scraping of her nails over the strings so that she might have an opportunity of removing her gloves like a coy little girl.  What can I say of the others, except that they vied with one another in all those affectations and fatuous insincerities, by which all the men childishly allowed themselves to be duped.  One alone was really pretty, said nothing, and gave pleasure by her very lack of artificiality.  To her I might have been favourably inclined because of her ignorance, had she not gloried in this, and tried to emphasize her difference from the others by a piquant ingenuousness.  One day I discovered that she had plenty of wit, and straightway I abhorred her.