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One writer, Esme Wingfield-Stratford, writes startlingly, "The salon was the mother of the guillotine." He describes how in eighteenth-century France, it became the fashion to talk philosophies, to extend, as it was held, the new "empire of light and reason." Established faiths and sanctities were questioned and ridiculed, and one might be godless if only one were not dull. The writer goes on, The salon was thus the means by which the civilization of Versailles accomplished its own eventual downfall. The forces of authority were completely powerless to silence the voice of criticism; they might order dangerous literature, when they were capable of detecting its sting, to be burnt by a common |
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