were numerous, they were seated in a large room, or the table, ready served, was carried into any room large enough to hold the company. It was all a matter of chance. Banquets were given in the corridor, in the _salle_, in the ante-room, or in the sleeping-room,[46] because literary intuition was undeveloped. Madame de Rambouillet was the first to realise that the spirit of conversation is too rare and too delicate a plant to thrive under unfavourable conditions, and that in order to establish conversational groups, a place must be provided in which they who favour conversation may talk at ease. Every one recognises that fact now, and every one ought to recognise it. No one--man or woman--is justified in ignoring the influences of the localities that he or she frequents. It should be generally known that sympathies will not group, that the current of thought will not flow freely when a table is unfavourably placed for the seating of society expected to converse. Three hundred years ago the creator of the first French salon discovered this fact, and her discovery marked a date in the history of our social life. Mme. de Rambouillet owned a dilapidated mansion standing between the Tuileries and the courtyard of the Louvre, near the site of the now existing Pavillon de Rohan.[47] She had determined to rebuild the house, and no one could draw a plan suited to her ideas. Her mind was incessantly busy with her architectural scheme, and one evening when she had been sitting alone deep in meditation she cried out! "Quick! A pencil! paper! I have found a way to build my house."[48] She drew her plan at once, and the arrangement was so superior to all known architectural designs that houses were built according to "the plans of Mme. de Rambouillet all over France." Tallemant says: They learned from Mme. de Rambouillet how to place stairways at the sides of houses so that they might form great suites of rooms[49] and they also learned from her how to raise floors and to make high and broad windows, placed one opposite another so that the air might circulate with freedom; this is all so true that when the Queen-mother ordered the rebuilding of the Luxembourg she sent the architects to glean ideas from the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Until that time the interiors of houses had been painted red or tan colour. Mme. de Rambouillet was the first to adopt another colour and her innovation gave the "Blue Room" its name. The famous Blue Room in which the seventeenth century acquired the even and correct tone of conversation was disposed with a skilful and scientific tact which has survived the rack of three hundred years of changes, and to-day it stands as the perfect type of a temple fully adequate to the exigencies of intellectual intercourse.