In her best years, she was intimately associated with the Encyclopædists, to whom she paid over one hundred thousand francs for the publication of their work. Of all the great women of that century, she was the closest friend of the philosophers and free-thinkers, being called _La Fontenelle des Femmes_. She was always ready with an answer; one day a friend pointed out to her the house of the farmer-general Bouvet, and asked her: "Have you ever seen anything as magnificent and in better taste?" She replied: "I would have nothing to say if Bouvet were the _frotteur_ [floor polisher] of it." Mme. Geoffrin, more than any other woman of the salons, possessed the three essential qualifications of a salon leader,--good sense, tact, and intelligence. She had also _esprit_, perfect simplicity, precision, and faultless taste; though a sceptic, she was a diplomat who perfectly understood the art of manoeuvring. In short, Mme. Geoffrin was an intellectual authority, a sort of minister to society, and her salon was the great centre and rendezvous, a veritable institution of the eighteenth century. This seems the more remarkable when we consider that she belonged to the bourgeoisie, and that by dint of her exquisite tact, her almost infallible judgment, her admirable taste in dress, and her keen intelligence, she created for herself a position which was the envy of all Europe. Such women are rare. During the last eighteen months of her life, though suffering from paralysis and rheumatism, which she contracted at a religious fête at Notre-Dame, she was unremitting in her attention to her friends and the poor; and up to her death, in 1777, her friends were faithful to her.