Women, too, pressed into the great work.

Unknown ladies volunteered sprightly explanations of the technicalities of costume, from the falbala which adorned the bottom of their skirts, up to that little knot of riband in the hair, which had come to replace the old appalling edifice of ten stories high, in hierarchic succession of duchess, solitary, musketeer, crescent, firmament, tenth heaven, and mouse.[117] The oldest contributor was Lenglet du Fresnoy, whose book on the Method of Studying History is still known to those who have examined the development of men's ideas about the relations of the present to the past.

Lenglet was born in 1674.

The youngest of the band was Condorcet, who was born nearly seventy years later (1743).

One veteran, Morellet, who had been, the schoolmate of Turgot and Lomenie de Brienne, lived to think of many things more urgent than Faith, Fils de Dieu, and Fundamentals.