Then there followed an invitation to one of the great lady’s evenings. This was a high honour. For Mme. d’Agoult’s salon in the Rue Presbourg was not only the centre of the Republican opposition to the Empire, it was a brilliant and cosmopolitan assembly, a meeting-place for many of the most distinguished men of the day. Renan, Littré and Émile de Girardin, here foregathered with Emerson, Heine and Kossuth. The life of Mme. d’Agoult herself had been as eventful as that of any of her guests. Born at Frankfort in 1805, she was the daughter of a German banker’s daughter and the Comte de Flavigny, a French _emigré_, who had been page to Marie Antoinette. When the Revolution had subsided, the Comte de Flavigny brought his wife and his daughter, Marie, back to France. Marie soon grew into an intelligent and beautiful girl of Germanic type—tall, golden-haired and blue-eyed. Having set her heart upon a man who married some one else, she refused offer after offer until well on in what was then regarded as spinsterhood. At the age of twenty-two she submitted to a _mariage de convenance_ with the Comte d’Agoult. In a loveless life she found consolation in that joy of every clever Parisienne’s heart, the creation of a salon. She delighted to gather the élite of the aristocracy round her in her town house on the Quai Malaquais, facing the Louvre, or in her country château of Croissy, fifteen miles out of Paris. Soon this “Corinne of the Quai Malaquais,” as she was called, became one of the most attractive of Parisian hostesses. She aspired even to emulate the seductive Mme. Récamier, whose salon at L’Abbaye-aux-Bois was then at the height of its glory. But the Comtesse realised that without _le grand homme_, in other words, without a literary lion, a salon is nothing. Mme. Récamier had her Chateaubriand. Mme. d’Agoult selected for her “great man” the poet, Alfred de Vigny. So, while Chateaubriand was entrancing Mme. Récamier’s guests by the reading of his _Mémoires d’Outre Tombe_, the Countess invited her friend, Alfred de Vigny, to read his new poem, _La Frégate_, to an assembly of ambassadresses, duchesses, and countesses at Croissy. But alas! de Vigny, though a gifted poet, was no reader. And the chilling silence at the end of the reading was broken by the freezing question: “Is your friend an amateur, madame?” “Decidedly,” said de Vigny to his hostess, “my frigate has been shipwrecked in your salon.” But a worse shipwreck than that of _La Frégate_ was to attend the fair châtelaine of Croissy. Some one had described this statuesque beauty in terms she herself found _not_ inaccurate as “six inches of snow on twenty feet of lava.” And the lava was soon to melt the snow. Mme. d’Agoult’s apparent coldness vanished before the noontide heat of an irresistible attraction, that of the most fatal Don Juan of Europe, none other than the musician, Franz Liszt, who had already melted many a distinguished feminine heart.