Excerpt from Madame Geoffrin: Her Salon and Her Times, 1750-1777 The secret is largely explained by the spirit of the times. Paris was seething with new thoughts and ideas; the desire for reform was working as secretly and surely as leaven among the accumulated abuses of that corrupt and vicious period, and Madame Geofl'rin's house, though not so recognised or labelled in her own day, was, nevertheless, the stronghold of the reform party. It was one of those singular little ironies of life that Madame Geofl'rin, who hated disturbance, who shrank from disorder as from a plague, who once said to Diderot. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.