Memoirs of Anne C.L. Botta,: written by her friends. With selections from her correspondence and from her writings in prose and poetry.

2nne C. X.:3otta
tain, the financier, the merchant, the man of letters,
the artist, the professional man of any kind, achieves
eminence, within his opportunities, by the exercise of
precisely the same foresight, application, energy, and
industry. And by similar forces and similar methods
the woman of society forms and maintains the salon
which gathers within its walls the cream of her entourage, and forms an exchange not for the coarser
if essential-commodities of the field and the mine,
but for those gifts of intellect, breeding, and courtesy
which, to the highly trained man or woman, are
such essential elements to happiness, and which so
largely contribute to refine and sweeten every-day
life. But every man who leads must have some
special gift from nature, without which he could not
have got to the top level of his specialty. And it is
so with the woman who makes and presides over
a distinguished salon.
My observations have made it clear to my mind
that the failure of not a few women who were otherwise well-endowed by nature and training, and sufficiently favored by fortune and opportunity for such a
r6le,-and who would fain have filled it,-generally
resulted, in the main, from the fact that they lacked
a sufficiency of the foundational quality for fulfilling
that r6le-that is, a sympathetic nature; or that
they did not recognize the necessity for exercising it.
With this must be united the gifts of intuition and
amiability. The worth of simple amiability is, in
fact, greatly undervalued, not alone by the great
majority of men, but by many women. It is natural
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