Chapter IV: Part 4

In 1752 or 1753, when he was about thirty years old, he began writing articles for that Encyclopædia which set on almost all its other contributors the ban of Government ill-favour. Only Paul-Henri--writing always judiciously under a pseudonym--gained nothing but pleasure and approbation from his excellent papers on mineralogy and chemistry. He formed the happiest life-long friendships with his fellow-writers in that immortal book. He married a pretty and charming wife, Mademoiselle d’Aine. She died, in August 1754, after a very brief married life. D’Holbach travelled abroad with Grimm for a while.

In 1755, he obtained a special dispensation from the Pope, and married his deceased wife’s sister, Mademoiselle Charlotte-Suzanne d’Aine, and began to live with her a life which presented the very rare combination of perfect domestic contentment and the most brilliant social success.

In the very heart and core of Paris, Rue Royale _butte_ Saint-Roch, the Baron held in his town house what Rousseau calls the ‘club holbachique,’ Diderot ‘the synagogue of the Rue Royale,’ and Garat ‘the Institute of France before there was one.’ Here, at two o’clock every Sunday and Thursday, unless the d’Holbachs were in the country, their friends were certain to find a free and affluent hospitality, the most intellectual society of the capital, the most distinguished foreigners who visited it, a host as liberal in idea as in the very good cheer to which he made his guests welcome, and the most daring speculative conversation of the eighteenth century.

But, after all, it was not in the Rue Royale that d’Holbach and his friends found their most characteristic setting. Grandval, near Charenton, remains not only the most influential _salon_ of the age, the great headquarters of a great party and the arsenal in which were forged the armaments which destroyed a king, a dynasty, and a state religion, but also _the_ country house of the period.

When Talleyrand, in that much quoted phrase, declared that no one knew how delightful a thing life could be unless he had belonged to the upper classes before the Revolution, he might have been thinking of the life at Grandval in particular.

There was a fine and charming _château_, and the most delightful of gardens. Grandval was just near enough to Paris, and just far enough away--which is to say, it was absolute country, within easy reach of town, in an age when the suburb was not, or, at least, when the social drawbacks comprehended in the word ‘suburban’ had no existence. The estate actually belonged to Madame d’Aine, d’Holbach’s mother-in-law, who was as ‘lively as any romp of fifteen,’ always thoroughly enjoying herself, determined her guests should do the same, and with the rare wisdom to leave them to do it in their own way.

Madame d’Holbach was pretty, gay, and charming. She played on the lute, adored her husband and children, and hated philosophy. If her guests like to talk it--and they are always talking it--well, by all means, so they shall! Live and let live, do as you like come what may--these would have been the Grandval rules, if it had ever bothered itself to have anything so tiresome as rules.

The d’Holbach children were adorable--or despatched to governesses and servants if they even threatened to become less than adorable. There were two little boys and a couple of little girls, the elder ‘as pretty as a cherub,’ said Diderot, and the younger ‘a ball of fat, all pink and white.’

Then there was an _ami de la maison_, a household fixture, a chimney-corner _habitué_--a Scotchman named Hope, and nicknamed Père Hoop--a shrivelled, withered, pessimistic person, who suffered, or said he suffered, from ‘life-weariness’ and bad health, who was an excellent foil to what Sterne called the ‘joyous sett’ in which he found himself, and the perpetual and dismally good-natured butt of Madame d’Aine’s rippling jokes.

The Baron had all the virtues of the host. He was not only rich and generous--with that cook and cellar beyond reproach. In those days to be a perfect entertainer something more even than this was required. An agreeable talker, and a still more agreeable listener, really learned, but with the most pleasing human weakness for a little scandal, as easy-going as his mother-in-law and his wife, entirely simple in manner, with no faintest touch of pretension or affectation, a _bon vivant_ in the pleasantest and most harmless sense of the phrase--who would not delight to have been among his guests?

There were generally three or four of them staying in the house, and sometimes very many more. Diderot was here often for weeks together, and sometimes for months. He had a special bedroom always reserved for him. In d’Holbach’s most intimate confidence, his abundance, fecundity, and inspiration were in piquant contrast to the Baron’s calm learning and well-regulated sense. Here too came, but not very often, Diderot’s partner in the Encyclopædia, d’Alembert. Too shy and retiring to enjoy Grandval’s freedom and liveliness as a recreation, d’Alembert’s work for his party was not to be advanced, as his brethren certainly advanced their work, by speculative talk in clever company--but always in solitude, in silence, and in simplicity.

Turgot, like d’Alembert, was from time to time a guest, but a rare one. Turgot was beginning to Do, what most of his friends were still discussing How to do.

Little Galiani skipped down very often from the Italian Embassy, and the Paris he worshipped, to amuse the Baron’s house-party by telling it those stories, ‘like dramas,’ which no one ever found too long. ‘That man is a pantomime from his head to his feet,’ said admiring Diderot, watching him. After 1761, the heavy Abbé Morellet, the would-be refuter of Galiani’s wit on the Corn Laws, was constantly at the Baron’s ‘developing my theories on public economy’ to his own great satisfaction. His audience have not left _their_ feelings on record.

Grimm, Diderot’s dear Damon, was here very often, with that slightly nauseous affection for his Pythias, which, said the frankly vain Denis, made d’Holbach jealous. For jealous, one may be allowed to read ‘disgusted.’

Grimm’s _chère amie_, Madame d’Épinay, sometimes accompanied him. Her sister-in-law, Madame d’Houdetot, often drove down to Grandval with her superb Marquis de Saint-Lambert in her train. Pitted deeply with the smallpox, with a cast in her eye, and a little given to too much wine, the secret of Madame d’Houdetot’s charm is hard to be found by this generation. But in that one, it was not only Rousseau who discovered it to his cost. Saint-Lambert’s ‘faith unfaithful kept him falsely true’ to her for so many years that it came to be considered quite praiseworthy, and he would have been admitted to Grandval as Madame d’Houdetot’s constant lover, if his passion for Madame du Châtelet and his poem on the ‘Seasons’ had not given him the _entrée_ as a literary character as well.

His rival, Jean Jacques Rousseau, was also an _habitué_ at d’Holbach’s. The peaceful Baron could agree even with that fretful child of genius, until one unlucky day, when, Grandval having suffered gladly and politely a curé’s reading of his own stupid tragedy, Jean Jacques bounces furiously out of his armchair, seizes the manuscript from its author, and throws it to the ground--‘Do you not see these people are laughing at you? Go back to your curacy.’ The kindliest and politest of hosts tries to smooth the ruffled plumage of both playwright and Rousseau. If the curé was appeased is not a matter of moment. Jean Jacques burst out of the house in a rage, and despite all the efforts of Grimm and of Diderot, as well as of d’Holbach himself, never returned to it. ‘He imagined all his misfortunes our doing ... and thought we had incited ... all Europe against him,’ says Grimm. He did try, however, to make some amends to his good host by portraying him in the ‘New Éloïsa’ in the character of Wolmar--‘benevolent, active, patient, tranquil, friendly, and trustful.’

Marmontel came here very often: and that dreadful, garrulous old bore, the Abbé Raynal, was constantly to be found seeking ideas among the Baron’s guests for his ‘History of the Two Indies,’ which received, and did not deserve, the advertisement of burning.

The cautious Buffon soon edged away from this _salon_, as he also edged away from the gatherings of Helvétius. The monstrous things these people talk about might come to the ears of the authorities--accompanied by the fact that the politic author of the ‘Natural History’ was among the talkers! Helvétius himself was often at d’Holbach’s, until the storm of fury and hatred which assailed his book ‘On the Mind’ banished him, astounded and embittered, to his estates in Burgundy.

Madame Geoffrin, with her prim little cap tied under her firm old chin, drove down to play picquet with the Baron and to scold Diderot for neglecting his wife.

It was partly owing to the influence of Diderot--himself greatly bitten by the Anglomania just creeping into fashion--that the Baron entertained Englishmen so largely both in Paris and in the country.

In the years 1762-64-66 Sterne accepted the hospitality of the host, whom he called ‘the great protector of wits and the _sçavans_ who are no wits,’ to so large an extent that he could say the Baron’s house was as his own. To be sure, d’Holbach’s ‘joyous sett’ must have admirably suited this Parson Yorick, who had ‘no religion but in appearance,’ and a domestic morality very little better than the worst of the Baron’s French _convives_.

The ‘broad, unmeaning face’ of Hume, the historian, was sometimes to be seen at d’Holbach’s table, where he found himself for the first time with thinkers not too narrow, but too emancipated, for his liking. It was the Baron who, speaking from experience, warned Hume against nourishing in his bosom a serpent like Rousseau, and from d’Holbach’s house, says Hume’s biographer, Burton, that the story of the famous quarrel between Hume and Rousseau spread all over France ‘in a moment.’

David Garrick came to Grandval, and delighted an age and a company passionately devoted to histrionic talent. A sprightly Madame Riccoboni used to write accounts of d’Holbach’s society to the actor when he had gone back to England; and whenever she saw the Baron looked bored or worried, made that expression a text on which to moralise on the worthlessness of riches.

The Baron did not often appear anything but placid, however, and there are very few of his guests who even hint at anything in himself or his gatherings which was not smooth and delightful.

Horace Walpole, indeed, talks of ‘dull d’Olbach’s.’ But then Horace was the intimate friend of Madame du Deffand, who loathed ‘les philosophes’ and all their ways and works, and on one occasion at least was so unlucky as to find himself at one of the Baron’s dinner parties, not only the solitary Englishman out of a party of twelve, but next to that tedious Raynal. ‘I dreaded opening my mouth in French before so many people and so many servants,’ says Horace; and to avoid being bored by the ‘Two Indies,’ he made signs to Raynal that he was deaf. After dinner, Raynal discovered the trick, and naturally was not pleased.

John Wilkes, with his ugly face, his flaming past, and his irresistible charm, also sat at the Baron’s cosmopolitan board; as did Benjamin Franklin, Lord Shelburne, and Priestley--Non-conformist, chemist, and one of the founders of modern scientific criticism.

Some of these people, of course, only dined, or were merely invited to spend a long day in the Grandval grounds and gardens; but many became part of the house party for days, like Galiani, for weeks, like Grimm, for months, like Diderot, or for ever, like Father Hoop.

In the forenoon, the guests were left entirely to their own devices, and unless by special arrangement, never met each other or their host until dinner-time at half-past one or two. Some of them had arrived with a _chef-d’œuvre_ in their pockets--or, it might be, up their sleeves. Here, in the pleasant solitude of these morning hours, Galiani, no doubt, was ‘settling the question of the Corn Laws,’ Grimm engrossed with his ‘Literary Correspondence,’ and Hoop arranging his pessimism into a regular system. (Madame d’Aine had thoughtfully provided Hoop with a bedroom overlooking the moat, so that he could at any moment put his principles into practice and throw himself into it.) Diderot, beside his open windows and with the solace of a cup of tea, wrote for Mademoiselle Volland those descriptions of life at Grandval to which all narrators of it are indebted.

As for the Baron--the Baron always seemed to have plenty to do in that magnificent library, where he could invariably find chapter and verse for the maddest of Diderot’s theories, but where the actual nature of his occupation was known only to Diderot himself, to a certain very useful friend called Naigeon, who, having been painter and sculptor, had finally settled into a philosopher, and to La Grange, the d’Holbach children’s tutor.

It is charitable to suppose that the women also performed their duties in the morning, since it is certain they performed none at any other time of day. But in this age, if a woman was witty and charming, her _métier_ was considered to be fulfilled, and she not only did nothing practical for the good of humanity, but, better still, never even felt she ought to be doing something. Madame d’Holbach had her lute and her embroidery frame, the kindest of clever husbands, those engaging babies, and a perpetual house party. What more _could_ be expected of her? Of Madame d’Aine, it is not recorded that she had any other _rôle_ than that of adding to the gaiety of her household.

At about half-past one, then, the work of the day was done, and hosts and guests met in the _salon_, and went in to dinner--the famous dinner, exquisitely arranged and appointed; servants numerous, noiseless, and perfectly _au fait_ in their duties; the most delicate wines, and the most irreproachable of _chefs_. A couple of Englishmen, perhaps, and half a dozen French men and women had driven down to it from Paris. There were generally from twelve to fifteen persons at table, and sometimes more. Good as the fare was--much too good for the health of some of the diners--‘the only intoxication’ at this table ‘was of ideas.’

The talk ranged from the history and customs of the Chinese to the final annihilation of the human race. Sometimes it lit on ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ and the company divided itself into For and Against Sentiment as understood by the bookseller Richardson. Occasionally the meal was given up to buffoonery, and Madame d’Aine led the way with jokes of such a character that if Morellet is conscientious in declaring in his ‘Memoirs’ that all freedoms, except freedoms as to speculation, were banished from d’Holbach’s gatherings, he must certainly have been deaf. One day, a story going the round of the Paris cafés, holds the table curious and laughing. The Baron, says Grimm, was as amusingly credulous of gossip as he was sceptical of everything else. Another day, it is a question of _ton_ or of _mode_; and a third, of art or of literature.

There was scarcely one of d’Holbach’s _convives_--there was not one of Voltaire’s co-operators--who did not contribute, at one time or another, a masterpiece, or at least a Book of the Moment, for d’Holbach’s table to discuss.

In 1755, it is the famous article on ‘Existence’ in the Encyclopædia, by young Turgot, our shy, rare guest, which brings the heads of the older Encyclopædists together over the walnuts and the wine, and inspires them with prophecies of a great future for its quiet author. Three or four years later, the great suppression of that Encyclopædia itself inflames the passions of the party, goads Diderot to fury, and d’Alembert to despair.

In 1759, the ‘Candide’ of the Master sets the table in a roar of delight. ‘The Social Contract’ of our impossible, impassioned Jean Jacques sounds for us, in 1762, the trumpet-note of battle in that sonorous opening sentence: ‘Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains.’ The next year, the guests give their ever-generous admiration to a far wiser work--one of the mightiest weapons ever forged against ‘the greatest of human curses’--‘The Treatise on Tolerance.’ In 1765, d’Alembert comes out of his shell again with his ‘History of the Destruction of the Jesuits;’ while Diderot is for ever finger deep in ink--up to the neck in ideas.

Only, at the head of the table, d’Holbach, host and president, always applauding, encouraging, (and sometimes also financing) the producers, himself produces nothing. Yet it is not because he does not go, as it were, with his guests. He goes far beyond them. Here, the women of the party left the table after dinner as they do in England, to exchange what Diderot called their ‘little confidences.’ Then the conversation took, not the kind of freedoms which Morellet declared he did not hear, but speculative liberties which, said he, ‘would have brought down thunderbolts on the house a hundred times if they ever fell for that.’

At d’Holbach’s table, with d’Holbach pushing, urging, with a quiet, invincible persistence, with Diderot waving the flag, leading, pleading, inciting, the ‘club holbachique’ dragged every dogma, every so-called fact of existence, every creed, into court before them; judged by the tribunal of their own reason, and cast away all that failed to satisfy it, as fagots for the burning.

Grandval did not speculate, as did Voltaire and his guests at Ferney, on the attributes of God and the nature of the Soul. It began where he left off: asked not, What is God? but, Is there a God? not, What is the Soul? but, Have we a Soul? and in each case answered, No.

Gagged for hundreds of years, Grandval used the newly seized freedom of thought and speech as a very little later the mob used its social and political liberty. The bloody extremes of the Terror, and the speculative extremes of d’Holbach’s table, were alike the result of long slavery and repression.

That d’Holbach at least was strongly and honestly persuaded of the truth of his own unbelief, and was convinced that he did well to destroy in men those faiths which, looking back on history, he saw were responsible for the intolerable miseries of religious persecution, is not doubtful. D’Holbach was an honest man. It is true, indeed, that he was not one of the highest intellectual capacity. His seems to have been just the kind of clever mind--much more common among women than men--which is the dupe of its own cleverness, and easily led by it into absurdities which both wise people, and very simple ones, detect and avoid.

Set the problem of deriving Everything from Nothing, it is not marvellous that the Grandval talkers descended sometimes to the wildest nonsense. Horace Walpole said acidly that they soon turned _his_ head with ‘a new system of antediluvian deluges which they have invented to prove the eternity of matter.... Nonsense for nonsense, I prefer the Jesuits.’ No wonder poor little Galiani (he _was_ an Abbé, though he very often forgot it) fled to the more circumspect gatherings of Madame Geoffrin, that the wise Turgot also turned away from Grandval, and d’Alembert drew back from an atheism so positive and arrogant.

By the time the philosophers joined the women it was four, five, or even six o’clock. It _does_ take some hours to construct Man and the Universe out of Chaos, with nothing but blind Force to help us! Then came for the host himself, and some few of the other men of the party, a walk in the beautiful gardens. Most of the Baron’s guests, however, sat indoors with the women, Nature and exercise being both greatly out of fashion in the eighteenth century.

When the walkers returned the evening was drawing in, and there were lights and cards on the table. Some of the guests rested on long chairs. Some played picquet, some billiards, some tric-trac. Some visited their host’s picture gallery or his famous cabinet of natural history. He was himself always pleasant, courteous, cheerful. He loved to rally gently ‘the old mummy,’ as he called Father Hoop, and, perhaps, other Fathers, certain Jesuit priests, whom, in defiance of all his own principles, he generously made free of his house.

Old Madame d’Aine entertained the whole company with her perfectly indecorous and perfectly good-natured wit. Madame d’Holbach, always ‘douce et honnête,’ ‘très aimable,’ and exquisitely dressed (the description is Madame d’Épinay’s), accepted her mother’s buffooneries with absolute complacency.

Coarse as this society was in its speech--worse as it was in its easy condonation of vice than the worst social sets of our own day--in one respect at least it was immeasurably superior. Except for an occasional desultory game proposed by their hosts, the guests at Grandval were expected to bring, and did bring, their own entertainment with them in their own heads. To be bored would have been to confess oneself stupid. For the costly freaks of amusement, the elaborately idiotic devices of modern times to prevent the visitor having to fall back for an instant on his own resources or intelligence, Grandval had no need. If materialism was its creed, there was, as has been justly said, a great deal of ‘indirect spiritualism’ in its practice. Its lengthy dinners _were_ feasts of reason (in spite of those intellectual extravagances) as well as of costly meats and wines, and the ill-flavoured jests were only interludes in the midst of brilliant and fruitful talk on literature, history, politics, and the new world beginning for France.

Supper came about nine--‘wit, gaiety, and champagne,’ Diderot described it. Then more conversation, until sometimes the party were still ardently philosophising with their bedroom candle-sticks in their hands.

When d’Holbach had been entertaining, apparently without a break, for at least ten years, he took what seemed to his friends the foolhardy, not to say desperate, resolve of crossing the Channel. To bury himself in what Diderot called ‘the depths of England’ for two months is a very different thing, the Baron will find, from entertaining Englishmen (and those quite the most enlightened of their species) in Paris! He did find it so. If England delighted Voltaire, soothed wounded Helvétius, and pleased even critical Grimm, she thoroughly disgusted d’Holbach. He gave Diderot his vivid first impressions of her, and Diderot retailed them, red-hot, for Sophie Volland and for posterity.

The Baron was hospitably received and entertained in this island by a rich and generous host, whose name has not transpired; he had the best of health during his visit, and he paid that visit in August, when even the British climate can be very tolerable; he had the pleasure of calling on his guest, Garrick; he went to Oxford and Cambridge; travelled in some of the prettiest English counties, and he was bored--to extinction.

Our confessedly bad manners he found worse than anyone had ever found them before, and was dreadfully disgusted with people ‘on whose faces one never sees friendliness, confidence, or gaiety, but which all wear the inscription, “What is there in common between you and me?”’ The aristocracy struck him as cold and haughty, the common people as rough and violent. As for the dinner parties, ‘where people sit according to their rank, and formality and ceremony are beside each guest,’ after the gracious ease of Grandval, the Baron may be forgiven for finding them intolerable.

Then the public entertainments: ‘This people is sad and melancholy, especially in places built for pleasure. You can hear a pin drop. A hundred stiff and silent women promenade round an orchestra discoursing the most delicious music,’ and the promenade can only be compared to ‘the processions of the Egyptians round the mausoleum of Osiris.’

Then the gambling: ‘Englishmen lose incredible sums in perfect silence. By thirty they have exhausted all the pleasures, even beneficence. Ennui ... conducts them to the Thames, unless they prefer a pistol.’

At the universities, the good Baron found many ‘rich do-nothings drinking and sleeping half the day;’ at Court, corruption; among the people, no public education and great inequality of riches. The King, to be sure, was powerful chiefly to do good, but still he was much the master. With regard to religion, ‘the Christian religion,’ said the Baron, ‘is almost extinct in England.’ This was an advantage from his point of view. But then, though there were innumerable Deists, like Hume, there was not an atheist, or not an avowed one. The travelling facilities he praised--there were always post-horses in plenty; and at the meals at inns, he found himself ‘served promptly, but with no affability.’ It must be owned that now and again the Baron has us on the hip.

But, after all, there was very great good in England: it made one so delighted to get back to France. D’Holbach, who had left Paris about August 1, 1765, had returned there by September 20. He dined that same evening with his dear Diderot and a whole colony of English, ‘who had left their _morgue_ and sadness on the banks of the Thames.’

Two years after his return, there appeared, not only to the horror of Court, Church, and Government, but to the horror of the philosophers also, a book called ‘Christianity Unveiled, or an Examination of the Principles and Effects of Revealed Religion.’

It purported to be by a person called Boulanger. It asserted Christianity to be unnecessary for the maintenance of law and order; declared its dogmas incoherent, its morals fit only to make enthusiasts and fanatics, and its political results infinitely fatal and disastrous.

Voltaire fell upon the thing tooth and nail. ‘Impiety Unveiled,’ he called it. It was not Christianity, but the perversions of Christianity, with which _he_ quarrelled. In the margin of his own copy of the book he wrote criticisms as scathing as they are brief. That it was both discussed and condemned at d’Holbach’s table, is practically certain. Galiani at least professed Christianity; Turgot practised it. There are many men--there were some even round d’Holbach’s board--who, having themselves relinquished a faith, are yet greatly averse to hearing that faith blasphemed; and who would fain leave for the souls of others the consolations their reason denies to their own. D’Holbach, to be sure, would commend the thing. ‘A proselytising atheist,’ as his friends had long known him to be--he _must_ approve this daring effort to make men think as he did.

Soon came talk of other books--from the same hand it might be--certainly from a hand as bold. In 1767 appeared a pamphlet called ‘The Mind of the Clergy;’ in 1768 ‘Priests Unmasked,’ and ‘Portable Theology.’ The last was condemned to be burnt.

Then came whispers of yet another work on the same lines, but on a far larger scale, written with an even greater daring, with ‘the zeal of a missionary for atheism,’ with a passion, a fanaticism, an enthusiasm, usually associated with the ‘heated pulpiteer’ of some narrow sect; and yet having in it, too, something of the serenity, the calm and confident faith of the believer wholly satisfied with his belief. Who has written it? A. M. Mirabaud, Perpetual Secretary to the French Academy, is to be the name, it is said, on the title-page. But the real author? Diderot, whose Encyclopædic labours bring him in touch with all the literary men in Paris, is impulsively positive that he has not the slightest idea. Naigeon--Naigeon, the Baron’s factotum--is abroad on some business of the Baron’s and cannot be appealed to. Most of the company condemn the book unseen. The extremists of the party are always the worst enemies the party has to dread. At the head of his table, fingering his glass thoughtfully, the Baron, with his benevolent, leisurely air, is only following his usual custom in saying little and listening much.

In August 1770, there was published in London and Amsterdam ‘The System of Nature, or The Laws of the Physical and Moral World,’ by Mirabaud, Perpetual Secretary to the French Academy.

The best kept literary secret in history is the authorship of the ‘Letters of Junius,’ for that remains a secret still. But the Baron d’Holbach’s authorship of ‘The System of Nature’ is certainly among the most piquant concealments in literature.

He had begun by sitting and listening to criticisms, mostly adverse, on his ‘Christianity Unveiled’ and the pamphlets which followed it, which were all from his pen. Many people start a literary career under as thick a veil of anonymity. A few have died still under the disguise. But no book has ever attracted such howls of rage and imprecation, such a storm of universal loathing and opprobrium as did ‘The System of Nature,’ while its author sat in perfect peace and comfort, beloved by all his fellows, safe, unsuspected, and serene. D’Holbach, said Grimm long after, when d’Holbach was dead and the secret out, never ran any danger from his books, save the danger of being bored by them.

Naigeon, La Grange, and Diderot were in his confidence. Diderot was more than in it. To most of the Baron’s works--certainly to ‘The System of Nature’--he lent some of the colour and fire of his genius. Poor Diderot was always suspect of anything rash and extreme. ‘The System of Nature’ was published quite early in August. On the 10th of that month, Denis slipped off to Langres and the baths of Bourbonne. The Baron went on having dinner parties. On the 18th, the book was condemned to be burnt. The Baron continued to dine in peace. Then, as men read it, and passed it secretly from one to the other, the murmurs of horror and hatred swelled to a roar--the roar of the great multitude, always deafening and terrible. Above it, d’Holbach heard, close, distinct, and scathing, the bitter condemnations of his own guests and friends. He went on dining to that accompaniment.

From Ferney, Voltaire pronounced the work ‘a philippic against God’ and ‘a sin against nature;’ swore it had wrought irreparable harm to philosophy; passionately refuted it in his article on ‘God’ in the Philosophical Dictionary; while it wrung from him, in a letter to the Duc de Richelieu, that famous confession: ‘_I_ think it very good to sustain the doctrine of the existence of a punishing and rewarding God: society has need of this opinion.’ Galiani declared ‘this Mirabaud’ to be ‘the Abbé Terrai of metaphysics: he causes the bankruptcy of knowledge, of happiness, and of the human mind.’ La Harpe called it ‘this infamous book.’ Young Goethe said he fled from it as from a spectre. It caused Frederick the Great to break with the philosophic party. Grimm, indeed--but this was after d’Holbach’s death, when it was no longer dangerous to hold such opinions--praised the purity of its author’s intentions, and the passages of ‘imposing eloquence’ the book contained--though these, he added, Grimm-like, ‘were by Diderot.’

Who reads ‘The System of Nature’ now? It never was in any sense a great book. But it certainly was one of the three or four most famous books of an age richer in them than any other age in history. It was, after all, simply the logical outcome, the natural, though the extreme result of the rationalistic criticism of the fifty or sixty years which preceded it. The philosophers had sought to define God. D’Holbach said aloud, what the fool of David’s time said in his heart, ‘THERE IS NO GOD.’

In Part I. he disposed of Kings as effete, luxurious, war-making, and tyrannical. Then he expounded his views on Happiness. Men will never be happy till they are enlightened, and never enlightened till they have ceased to believe in a God. Study Nature, and obey Nature’s laws--that is the way to felicity, if way there be. Then he went on to Mind. All Mind is Matter. Of Free Will he denied the existence, as twelve years earlier his friend Helvétius had denied it in his book ‘On the Mind.’ Still, even if one cannot help one’s wrong-doing, punishments there must be, for the good of society; only such punishments should be reformative and never cruel. In his protest against torture and the brutalising effect of public executions, one sees for a moment the man behind the book. With regard to the Immortality of the Soul, since there is no such thing as soul, it cannot be immortal. The false doctrine of Hell is useless even as a deterrent from sin.

Part II. contains what is certainly the most burning and outspoken attack on the Existence of God to be found in literature. That there is a Force behind Matter, I admit. He who does not admit this, must be a madman. But further I will not go. As for morality depending on a belief in a Deity--not at all. Nature bids man do right as his own best interest. Let each try to do his utmost for the greatest good of the greatest number, and there stands established a high and an unselfish ideal.

Preached, as these doctrines were, in a style not a little vehement and abundant, with much Teutonic pomposity and rhetoric, it could soon be said of d’Holbach that he had ‘accommodated atheism to chambermaids and to hairdressers.’ More learned critics disliked his manner as much as his matter. ‘Four times too many words in the book,’ says Voltaire acidly. But the uneducated, or the half-educated, prefer both their oratory and their literature rich and fruity.

Simple and learned alike would, or should, had they known him, have given the author credit for the certain fact that ‘no sordid end, no personal consideration, attached him to his dismal system.’ If his anonymity shielded him from danger, it kept from him fame and celebrity too, and gave him the wholesome, but not soothing, experience of hearing expressed to his face criticisms of the kind generally only made behind one’s back. He did not gain even the painful glories of martyrdom; and had money been an object to him, by the publication of such works as his, he can only have lost it.

Long before the tumult ‘The System of Nature’ raised had passed away, the Baron was busy supplementing it. In 1772 appeared ‘Good Sense, or Natural Ideas opposed to Supernatural Ideas,’ which was a sort of simplification of ‘The System of Nature.’ It was burnt. Then appeared ‘The Social System,’ which tried to establish a rule of morality totally unfounded on religion. That was burnt too. Then there was a translation from Hobbes. The last, or one of the last, of d’Holbach’s published works was entitled ‘Universal Morality, or the Duties of Man founded on his Nature.’ This appeared in 1776. He had the pleasure of watching all the bonfires from a distance where there was not the least danger of scorching.

In 1781 one of his daughters was married. Her father was now fifty-eight years old. Did philosophy, as Galiani inquired (Galiani had returned to Italy in 1769), still eat at his table with its old appetite? Grimm said--in Grimm’s caustic fashion--that the guests fell off somewhat when the Baron had to retrench his expenses to establish his children. Some of the _convives_ had gone before that, to solve for themselves those questions on a future world, and the existence of the soul, which they had discussed so often. In 1771 died Helvétius; in 1778 Voltaire himself. In 1783, d’Alembert, who had indeed long ceased to frequent the Baron’s society, or any society, laid down the burden of his life. In the next year, Diderot, the friend of his heart, the fruitful inspiration of his work, was called away from d’Holbach’s side for ever.

It must have been with this society, as it is with all societies at last: the sight of vacant chairs stops the mirth, and among the living guests glide others, dear and dead. When one has more memories than hopes, the time has come to give up such gatherings. That time came even to _the_ Host of his generation. By his own fireside he had to the end the wife he loved. She long survived him. He had, too, that tranquil and even disposition which is surely one of the best of assets--a possession indeed.

The Baron was as prudent in the time of his death as he had been in the conduct of his life. He died on January 21 of that _annus mirabilis_, 1789. Five years more, and he would have seen his own principles enthroned with the Goddess of Reason at Notre-Dame, and as, in part at least, the consequence of her reign, the streets of Paris running with blood. Directly after his death, the secret of his authorship became public property.

It is permissible only to think of d’Holbach now as his guests and friends thought of him in life--not as the author of ‘The System of Nature’ at all, but as the liberal patron of letters, the best and kindliest of good, easy men. One may be permitted to hate as bitterly as Voltaire did the unreasonableness of his philosophy of pure reason; and yet to regard the philosopher with gratitude and appreciation, as the man who played in the great intellectual revival of his time one of the homeliest, yet one of the most necessary of parts.

For d’Holbach provided the _rendez-vous_.

VI

_GRIMM: THE JOURNALIST_

The great Encyclopædia of Diderot and d’Alembert was to bring light to the people; the ‘Literary Correspondence’ of Melchior Grimm was to bring light to kings. The Encyclopædia was the conception of those who knew that they were preparing mighty changes, but who did not live to see them; the ‘Literary Correspondence’ was the work of a man whose shrewd eyes foresaw little, but who lived to see all. The Encyclopædia is dead, as a great man dies, having finished his work. The ‘Correspondence’--which could not cure those royal maladies, blindness, ignorance, and hardness of heart--still lives a gay little life as the most perfect contemporary record of any literary epoch in history.

* * * * *

In 1753, the sensibilities of sentimental Paris were most agreeably touched by the pathetic story of a young gentleman who, having had his suit rejected by a charming opera-dancer, Mademoiselle

_From an Engraving, after Carmontelle, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris._]

Fel, straightway took to his bed and to a trance in which he passed whole nights and days, ‘without speaking, hearing, or answering, as if he were dead.’ The Abbé Raynal and Jean Jacques Rousseau constituted themselves his nurses. They were both too romantic, and too much the children of their time, to try the common-sense expedient of leaving the rejected lover severely alone, or of throwing a bucket of cold water over him. But when Rousseau saw a smile on the doctor’s face as he left the patient’s room, his heart began to harden a little. And, sure enough, one fine morning up gets the invalid, dresses, resumes his ordinary course of life and never again mentions his malady to his nurses--even to thank them.

Frédéric Melchior Grimm was, however, no sentimental fool. He was, indeed, one of the most keen-witted of his great nation, though, like many other children of the Fatherland, he had on the surface of his worldly wisdom a fine layer of Teutonic sentimentality. If the Briton finds the sentiment mawkish, not so the Frenchman. Grimm’s extraordinary disease became his passport into the most exclusive circles in Paris.

Born at Ratisbon on September 26, 1723, with a poor Lutheran pastor for a father, he had always known that he must make his own way in life, and had always made it. At school he found a useful friend in one of Baron Schomberg’s sons, and continued the friendship at the University of Leipzig. When he was still a student there, he wrote a play, ‘Banise,’ which, before he left, he was a sufficiently just and astute critic to find ‘pitiable.’ On leaving Leipzig he went to live in the Schombergs’ house, as tutor to his friend’s younger brother. Frederick the Great had already made the French language the fashion; and as at the Schombergs’ Grimm heard nothing else, he soon learnt to speak and read it. In 1748 came the first opportunity of his life; he took his pupil to Paris, and remained there after the boy had returned to his family.

To say that Grimm throughout his existence always fell on his feet, would be a misleading idiom. He always fell on his head. The moment he found himself thrown into a new set of circumstances, his calm judgment skilfully arranged them to the very best advantage. At this time he was twenty-five years old, rather tall and imposing looking, something of a dandy in his dress (his enemies declared that he powdered his face and scented himself like a woman), with very little money in hand, no prospects, and a retrospect of that dismal failure ‘Banise,’ and that ‘thin travelling tutorship.’ In a very short time he got himself appointed as reader to the Duke of Saxe-Gotha. The salary was thin enough here too; but the Duke was a great person, and the Duchess was the friend and the correspondent of Voltaire, and to be, for the rest of her life, the friend and correspondent of Melchior Grimm as well. He was not long in finding a situation much more lucrative and responsible.

In 1749, he became secretary, guide, and friend to a certain dissipated young dog of a Comte de Frise, or Frisen, who was always borrowing money of his famous uncle, Marshal Saxe, and certainly needed a prudent Grimm to look after him.

If Grimm was only, or principally, honest because honesty is the best policy, if he did his duty because in the long run duty is the surest road to happiness, yet the facts remain that he did act uprightly, and that he had settled principles, a strict course of conduct and a strong line of action, in an age when no motives, good, bad, or indifferent, produced such happy results in his friends.

Beneath that veneer of German emotionalism he was, perhaps, something cold and selfish, stern and reserved. But if he was never ardent, he was always faithful; if he was not generous, he was just. He occupied in his life many positions of great trust and responsibility, and came out of them all with honour. One can love a Diderot, but one must needs respect a Grimm.

He had plenty of work to do in Paris. Besides the impossible task of keeping Frisen in order, he had his own way and fortune to make and his own friends to cultivate. His passion for Mademoiselle Fel was not his only introduction to Parisian society. Jean Jacques Rousseau (then a brilliant pauper copying music for his support and dreaming masterpieces of which he had not yet written a line) introduced him to d’Holbach and to Madame d’Épinay. He soon became fast friends with Madame Geoffrin (to whose tranquil common-sense his judicious and well-ordered mind particularly appealed), with Helvétius, and with Marmontel; he began a life-long friendship with Diderot, and once a week at Frisen’s house, in the Faubourg St. Honoré, he gave the most delightful bachelor dinner to his friends, played exquisitely on the clavecin for their benefit, took their amusement at his German-French in perfectly good part, and was entirely witty and agreeable, while keeping always a certain reserve and remaining entirely master of the situation.

In a very short time the poor German tutor was one of the most sought after persons in Paris, fêted and petted by all the great people, and minded to live no longer as bear-leader to boys, but by his own head and pen.

His taste for music gave him a golden opportunity. Shall we have French music at the opera, or Italian? Paris was as hotly divided on the question, said Rousseau, as if the affair had been one of religion. The French side had all the money, the fashion, and the women, and the Italian side a very little party of real connoisseurs. Grimm joined the Italians and wrote on their behalf, in 1753, a pamphlet called ‘The Little Prophet of Boehmischbroda,’ in which the style is profanely imitated from the prophets of the Old Testament. As Madame de Pompadour was on the French side, which she protected by force and by summarily dismissing the Italian singers on the spot, the pamphlet did no harm to French music; but it made Grimm famous. Voltaire read it, and asked how this Bohemian dares to have more wit than We have? And this Bohemian, having made so successful a literary venture in a small part, now looked round with his clever eyes for a larger one.

In 1754, he travelled for a time with d’Holbach, who had just lost his wife; and in the following year Frisen, whom Grimm’s guardianship had not been able to save from the fatal consequences of his depravity, died, and left his mentor a free man.

In 1755 he began what was to be the work of his life and is his true title to glory, the ‘Literary Correspondence.’

The idea of communicating to the sovereigns of Europe by letter, news of the literature, science, and philosophy of Paris, that centre of the world’s cultivation, was not a new one. In limiting the freedom of the press, sovereigns had limited their own freedom. Newspapers were official bulletins, not daring to utter unacceptable truths or unpalatable opinions on any truths. Kings, as well as their subjects, yawned over journals of this kind. So King Frederick the Great originated the idea of paying an intelligent man in Paris to write him direct the news and the gossip of the capital. Theriot, Voltaire’s friend, filled the post very unsuccessfully, and Frederick complained bitterly that Theriot never had a cold in his head without scribbling four pages of rodomontade to tell him about it. La Harpe occupied the same position to the Czarevitch Paul, and Suard and the Abbé Raynal, Grimm’s nurse and friend, to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha.

The idea was good, but it had been badly worked out. As Diderot and d’Alembert quickened into mighty life the little Encyclopædia of Chambers, so Grimm breathed vitality into the languishing ‘Literary Correspondence.’ He saw in it, first of all, the germ of a great career; but he saw in it, too, an influence which, by informing the minds of kings, might change the destiny of kingdoms. To teach the people was difficult in those days; to teach their rulers was well nigh impossible. Here, then, was a chance, the one splendid chance, of showing them the progress of the world, the ominous advance of knowledge and of the old order towards the new. Raynal handed over to Grimm the correspondence he had established with the Courts of the north and south of Germany; and with this small connection Grimm began his work.

The ‘Literary Correspondence’ remains to-day the only literary review which has survived the passage of time, and is still not merely a great name, but a great living work. The ‘Spectator’ and the ‘Tatler’ of Addison and Steele are kept eternally fresh by an exquisite charm of style; but they rarely aspired to serious criticism, and are mainly a record of modes and manners, not of literature or of science. The ‘Literary Correspondence’ is as much to-day as on the day it was written, the guide-book to the letters, the art, and the drama of the eighteenth century; the open door to its society and to the mind of cultivated Paris; a book which is equally indispensable to the scholar or to the novelist writing of its period, and which is certainly both the most instructive and the most amusing literary compilation extant.

Of no settled length and in manuscript, it was despatched to its subscribers twice a month. It had no fixed price, its readers paying as much as they chose for it, or as much as Grimm could make them pay. His old friend the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha was, as has been seen, one of his first subscribers. The Landgrave of Hesse, the Queen of Sweden, and Catherine the Great of Russia soon joined his select and limited _clientèle_. Stanislas Augustus, King of Poland, the Margrave of Anspach, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany joined later. Frederick the Great, after his unlucky experience with Theriot, was extremely dilatory and vacillating in having anything to do with it; when he did add his name to the list of subscribers he never paid his subscription and harried Grimm to insert the scandals and the _on dits_ of the _cafés_ and the Court, which Grimm declined to do.

For greater security, the sheets did not go through the post, but through the legations of the various countries. The thing was, in fact, a secret, and a well-kept secret, for more than half a century, and never knew the danger of print until it was published in 1812, under the Empire, with many cautious Napoleonic omissions. In the meantime, its secrecy and the limited number of its readers gave the discreet Grimm, who declared that the most enlightened reasoning was not worth a night in the Bastille, and who was cautious to the very fibre of his bones, the opportunity of being at once candid, impartial, and safe.

He set forth a flaming prospectus, promising an ‘unlimited truthfulness.’ The sheets shall be ‘dedicated to confidence and frankness!’ They were. To those distant Courts and Kings there went forth every fortnight the inimitable criticisms of the most bold, just, and cool critic who ever breathed. He not only analysed, with extraordinary brilliancy and fairness, the writings of Voltaire, of friend Rousseau, and of Buffon, but he sat in discerning judgment on the works of English novelists and poets. He criticised books which have not lived, in criticisms which are undying. As to the value and the longevity of the productions, he was sometimes, naturally and inevitably, mistaken; but as a rule his opinions have been confirmed by posterity and have weathered the test of time.

He also described to his readers the condition of the drama, the plots of the plays, the art of the players. Of course he was clever enough if the season was rather a dull one, to fill out his pages with extracts from a tragedy or from a novel; sometimes, it is said, the ingenious man gave quotations from works which had never been written.

He dealt with medical questions, and did not think it beneath his dignity to examine the merits of a mouth-wash. He wrote many pages on Tronchin, the great physician, and on inoculation. Here, surely, was one of the chances to enlighten kings--kings who, more than any other class of men, suffered and died from the ignorant tyranny of their physicians, and who had to wait eighteen centuries before any man told them that fresh air was a valuable property, and health a kingdom to be taken by temperance, soberness, and chastity.

If there was a scientific marvel in the air, such as ventriloquism, why, of course, Grimm must tell his correspondents about that; and the music, French or Italian, of the capital, must also receive its comment. Then there was the news of the day, and of Academical disputes, and, though Grimm had declared he would not report them, occasional piquant anecdotes with a sufficient spice of scandal in them to have pleased King Frederick.

He further drew pen-portraits of celebrities. Nothing could be more fair and shrewd than Grimm’s character-sketches. He solves in them the supreme difficulty--how to be at once honest and charitable.

Next there is an epigram to be reported. While a charade that has amused a Parisian line lady is surely good enough for a German duchess!

Politics were supposed to be excluded, and they were excluded in the sense that there were no remarks on public events until those events had become so notorious that the ‘Correspondence’ did not add to its readers’ knowledge of them. But though, or because, he wrote for governors, Grimm adduced his theories on government, he himself believing in the divine rights neither of the ‘Social Contract’ nor of kings. To his views on tolerance, finance, and education, he gave utterance soberly, thoughtfully, and at length. He had a subscription list in his paper for Voltaire’s unfortunate protégés, the Calas; and if his pen was to flow freely, as he had promised, how could he stay his indignation against the trial and the sacrifice of the Chevalier de la Barre?

To the friend and intimate of the philosophers, the most ordinary event suggested philosophical reflections. His religious views could hardly help appearing; but Grimm’s was a quiet agnosticism, and had nothing in common with the excited certainties of Diderot’s unbelief. He had, of course, his theories on women, on art, and on languages; and he aired them all. He brought out, in the same tantalising fashion in which serials are now produced in weekly illustrated newspapers, Diderot’s two novels.