Everybody knows the initial story of the French _salon_, and the fortunate influence on manners and literature of the prestige of the Hôtel de Rambouillet; Molière, who laughed at everything, even at his own desperate sufferings, laughed at it in his _Les Précieuses Ridicules_, for nothing on earth is sacred to a Frenchman. Whatever his name, in whatever century he was born, he must, in consistency with his nationality, prove himself a scoffer; and as he has the art of mocking admirably, it is always very difficult to know when he is serious or when he is laughing in his sleeve. A Frenchman will work night and day with frenzy for a purpose dearer to him than anything on earth, and all the while will deliberately make a mockery of his labour and his devotion. Writing to me on this subject, the eternal passion of the French for _blagues_ (my correspondent defines in lucid English the word _blaguer_, “To say about somebody or something one admires or respects, jokes of which one does not believe the first word,” and I leave the definition with its pleasing French savour of composition and sentiment), a Frenchman says: “There is not a man in the whole of France about whom we have more joked than about M. Brisson, the ancient minister, the only political man to whom nothing could ever be reproached, but the epithet ‘austere’ deprived him of three-fourths of his authority, though Frenchmen are, after all, as sensible as other people to the virtue of honesty.” And so may be said of Molière. He was as well aware as anyone could be of the immense benefit to his race and to his language of the establishment of the _salon_, even when he laughed at it.