Feeling keenly the need of a guiding principle, the need of a more substantial foundation in education, the women of the century thought and wrote much on that subject; such was, for the most part, the work of the great salons, but in them the philosophical tenets of the age were also discussed. The spirit of criticism thus created and cultivated, which finally spread through all classes of society, gradually conquered the new power in the state--public opinion which, at the end of the century, ruled supreme in all its strength and vehemence, defying every effort of the government to stifle it. The highest form of agreeable and intellectual society which the world has ever seen attained to its most complete development in these salons. Every century has had its specialty: the twelfth had its crusades, the sixteenth its religious struggles, the seventeenth its grand _goût_, the eighteenth its conversation and love of reason, the nineteenth its political struggles; and each one displayed the French passion for _esprit_; the eighteenth, however, was, _par excellence_, the century of _esprit_, and it was most remarkably developed in woman. "Such astonishingly loquacious people as lived in Paris in the eighteenth century! ineffective, sardonic, verbose, sociable, intellectual, elegant, immoral--grand gentlemen and ladies, with tears for mimic woes and none for actual ones, praise for wit, rewards for cleverness, and absolute ignorance of the destinies they were preparing for themselves;" such is the story of women and society of the eighteenth century. Among these women the salon leaders will be found the most attractive, and the most influential in literature, theory of government, and social and moral development; to the mistresses belongs the title of "politicians."