“For the love of Greece, remain Greek,” pleaded de Ronchaud. But, indeed, there was no fear of the Opéra Bouffes perverting Juliette from Hellenism; for Offenbach’s caricaturing of her Homeric deities in _Orphée aux Enfers_ so outraged her Grecian sympathies that Mme. d’Agoult was constrained to make amends by inviting her to a neo-Grecian dinner. “It will be a pagan party,” the Countess said. “De Ronchaud has arranged it.” The other guests were two brilliant Hellenists, Ménard and Saint Victor. They began by discussing the now much-disputed importance of a classical education. These neo-Grecians were firmly persuaded that the classics alone can inculcate those superior ideas of justice and heroism, which are all the more salutary because for ages they have permeated the race. Naturally they lamented over what seemed to them the decadence of French society under the Empire. Ménard maintained that periods of intellectual decadence are invariably periods of mechanical progress and of political despotism. Then the worshippers of ancient Hellas fell with equal zest and vivacity to discussing the antiquity of the Orphic mysteries. How intensely alive for Juliette was this Hellenic past she has proved over and over again in her literary work, and most notably in three novels she was to produce some years later, _Laide_ (1878), _Grecque_ (1879), and _Païenne_ (1883).[60] That great wave of philosophic speculation which was sweeping through France could not fail to affect so intellectual a salon as Mme. d’Agoult’s. An earlier dinner-party, Juliette’s first at the Rue Presbourg, had been a veritable symposium of philosophers. The great Littré,[61] the eloquent exponent of Comte’s philosophy, was the lion of the evening. His famous _Etymological Dictionary of the French Language_ was then going through the Press. “Littré,” writes Juliette, “inspired me with a sentiment which was almost worship.” When they had met before they had talked of Greece. The editor of Hippocrates and Pliny, though laughing at his young friend’s fervent passion for ancient Hellas, had been able to reveal to her things in the _Iliad_ which neither she nor her father had dreamed of.