Both Catherine's position and her temperament made the society of her own sex of little use or interest to her. "I don't know whether it is custom or inclination," she wrote, "but somehow I can never carry on conversation except with men. There are only two women in the world with whom I can talk for half an hour at once." Yet among her most intimate correspondents was one woman well known in the Encyclopaedic circle. She kept up an active exchange of letters with Madame Geoffrin--that interesting personage, who though belonging to the bourgeoisie, and possessing not a trace of literary genius, yet was respectfully courted not only by Catherine, but by Stanislas, Gustavus, and Joseph II.[77] [77] See M. Mouy's Introduction to her Correspondence with Stanislas. On the whole then we must regard Catherine's European correspondence as at least in some measure the result of political calculation. Its purposes, as has been said, were partly those to which in our own times some governments devote a Reptile-fund. There is a letter from the Duchesse de Choiseul to Madame du Deffand, her intimate friend, and the friend of so many of the literary circle, in which the secret of the relations between Catherine and the men of letters is very plainly told. "All that," she writes--protection of arts and sciences--"is mere luxury and a caprice of fashion in our age. All such pompous jargon is the product of vanity, not of principles or of reflection.... The Empress of Russia has another object in protecting literature; she has had sense enough to feel that she had need of the protection of the men of letters. She has flattered herself that their base praises would cover with an impenetrable veil in the eyes of her contemporaries and of posterity, the crimes with which she has astonished the universe and revolted humanity.... The men of letters, on the other hand, flattered, cajoled, caressed by her, are vain of the protection that they are able to throw over her, and dupes of the coquetries that she lavishes on them. These people who say and believe that they are the instructors of the masters of the world, sink so low as actually to take a pride in the protection that this monster seems in her turn to accord to them, simply because she sits on a throne."[78] [78] _Corresp. Complete de Mdme. du Deffand_, i. 115. (Ed. 1877.) June, 1767.