_La Femme_ has always played a most important role in France; nowhere is she so much discussed, nowhere is she so much respected as Mother, and nowhere, it may be said, is she so little respected as Woman. The women of the eighteenth century enjoy a species of popular renown as somewhat more _piquant_, brilliant, and peculiarly feminine, as it were,--thanks largely to the chroniclers and the romancers in literature and art; there is a very general idea that they were all, more or less, of the type of Madame de Pompadour, we will say, as set forth by one of her most recent biographers: "It would seem that the grace and the good taste of all the things of her time appertained to Madame de Pompadour. She marked with her _cachet_, it might almost be said with her arms, all that world of matter which seems to be animated from one end to the other by the ideal of the habits of a people, and the needs of a society. The whole century is like a great relic of the royal favorite.... She presides over that variety and that wide range of objects, so diverse in the universality of their type, that the eighteenth century created in her image to surround her existence, to serve her and to adorn her." This graceful and pleasing picture, however, was largely superficial in the case of her less favored sisters. The inevitable limitations of the life and of the times, the ignorance, the social prejudices, the inexplicable dissatisfaction which really haunted all things, all combined to undermine this brilliant social life, and there was a general consciousness of its hollowness.