He did not expect them. As he worked in his miserable lodgings, ill lit
and ill warmed, already a prey to consumption, and suffering often
acutely from the old frost-bites--no such hopes had buoyed him. But he
did what he had told other men to do--worked for the work’s sake--and he
found what he had told them they would find, joy in the working and
satisfaction in a noble aim, be it unrewarded for ever.
The book dropped from the press perfectly stillborn. Reflections and
moralities in the Paris of 1746! No, thank you. No one even troubled to
abuse it. No one, except Marmontel, who was Vauvenargues’ personal
friend, reviewed it. But Voltaire loudly pronounced it one of the best
books in the language: ‘The age ... is not worthy of you, but it has
you, and I bless Nature. A year ago I said you were a great man, and you
have betrayed my secret.’ After Vauvenargues’ death he wrote of him,
‘How did you soar so high in this age of littleness?’ and spoke of the
‘Maxims’ as characteristic of a profoundly sincere and thoughtful mind,
wholly above all jealousies and party spirit. For sixty years the book
lay germinating in a hard and barren soil, unworthy of it; and then rose
fresh and strong from oblivion to the just and growing fame it enjoys
to-day. It has been well said ‘to give the soul of man an impetus
towards truth.’
Though his tastes, his poverty, and his health alike precluded
Vauvenargues from joining in the socialities of the cafés and the salons
during his brief life in Paris, he saw sometimes Marmontel and
d’Argental, and often Voltaire. Marmontel was still only a boy who had
just started literary life on a capital of six louis and the patronage
of Voltaire; and d’Argental, Voltaire’s dear ‘guardian angel,’ was the
nephew of Madame de Tencin, and, perhaps, the author of her novels.
Marmontel was on a very different plane of intellect and character from
Vauvenargues--while the one was a lusty boy beginning the world, the
other was a patient thinker who was leaving it. But in those bare and
dreary surroundings, in the disfigured invalid of whom men had never
heard, even the commonplace cleverness of a Marmontel worshipped a hero.
Long years after, he speaks of Vauvenargues’ ‘unalterable serenity’--of
his brave and tender heart. ‘With him one learnt to live and learnt to
die.’
As for Voltaire, one can picture him just elected to the French Academy,
the protégé of Madame de Pompadour, the dearest friend of young
Frederick the Great, and fast becoming the most astonishing man in
Europe, entering into the dull room, full of liveliness and animation,
ay, and full too of real kindness and sympathy, while the invalid sat by
the fireside listening silently awhile, and then striking across the
Master’s brilliant volubility with some quiet truth which he had long
proved and pondered. That he found Voltaire’s conversation a powerful
stimulus to his own mind, and a very real delight, is not doubtful.
There are few Voltaires in the world, and it was one of Vauvenargues’
misfortunes that, save Victor Mirabeau, he had known scarcely anyone who
was his intellectual equal.
But if Voltaire roused the mind, Vauvenargues strengthened the soul.
After his death, Voltaire wrote of him that he had always seen him ‘the
most unfortunate and the most tranquil of men.’ It was this lucky genius
of an Arouet who brought his fumings and his impatience, his
irritableness over this, his chagrins about that, for the consolation of
the man to whose sufferings his own had been as a drop in the ocean.
Vauvenargues always seems the elder of the two, as it were. He was as
certainly the wiser, as he was certainly the far inferior genius.
What were his thoughts when those few friends had left him? It is on
their testimony that he never uttered a complaining or a bitter word.
His writings contain not an angry line--not one rebellion against God
and Fate. It was the happy people who grumbled--perhaps it always is.
Once, only once, there is a striving against destiny. In a moment of
relaxation from bodily pain he wrote to an intimate friend, ‘I have need
of all your affection, my dear Saint-Vincens: all Provence is in arms,
and I am here at my fireside.’ He went on to offer his feeble help to
the service he had loved, and to beg for the smallest post in his old
active career.
But in a second came realisation. He was too ill to be of any use. Only
thirty-two, he saw life slipping from him, and leaving him at that
fireside a wreck, only fit for the hulks. But he bore ‘his dark hour
unseen,’ and troubled no man with his troubles.
His disease gained on him daily now. For the last year he was too ill to
write. How far harder to die bravely by inches, unable even to do one’s
work, than to rush a smiling hero upon the swords in a glorious moment
of exaltation, unweakened by disease, and uplifted by the applause of
just men and of one’s own heart!
Vauvenargues saw death coming slowly while it was yet a great way off,
and was not afraid. No saint this, beholding in fervid ecstasy the
vision of a world to come; but a strong man who had done his best with
the world he had, and had written of that unknown future only in patient
hope. ‘My passions and thoughts die but to be born again: every night I
die on my bed but to take again new strength and freshness: this
experience of death reassures me against the decay and the dissolution
of my body.’
He had lived to do his duty and to think of others, and thus he died.
The date was May 28, 1747, and the period one of the least honourable in
the life of his friend Voltaire. But from his sycophancy of Pope and
King, from a foul and noisy Court, from feverish bickerings with his
Madame du Châtelet, and the coarse worldliness of his old Duchesse du
Maine, Vauvenargues’ death recalled him to his truer self, and roused
him to the real work of his life. No other loss he ever suffered, it is
said, affected him more profoundly.
If the fact that Vauvenargues loved him bears high testimony to the
character of Voltaire, the virtue of Vauvenargues, like the virtue of
Addison, may well give ‘reputation to an age.’
Flippant and false, at once supremely clever and supremely silly, the
eighteenth century, to whom Duty was a mockery and Wit was a god, is in
some sort redeemed by the brave, silent life, and the high ideals he
proved practical and not visionary by fulfilling himself, of this
soldier aphorist.
While of all the Brothers of Progress, Vauvenargues alone approached
Truth as a suppliant, and thus gained, surely, the nearest vision of her
face.
V
_D’HOLBACH: THE HOST_
In the most sociable city, in the most sociable age in the history of
the world, there is one man who stands out as the host _par excellence_.
In the Rue Royale at Paris and in his country house at Grandval, near
Charenton, Baron d’Holbach entertained for more than thirty years the
wit and the celebrity of all nations. His name runs like a thread
through the English memoirs and letters of the mid-eighteenth century.
There was not a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman of fame and fashion who had
not dined at the Rue Royale on the immortal Thursdays and Sundays, or
driven down from Paris to Grandval for a few days of a company and a
conversation unequalled and, perhaps, unrivalled.
But it is not only or chiefly as the Host of All the World that
d’Holbach is remarkable. He was the ‘_maître d’hôtel_ of philosophy.’
Voltaire, banned and exiled, could only encourage
[Illustration: PAUL-HENRI-THIRY. BARON D’HOLBACH.
_From a Portrait in the Musée Condé, Chantilly._]
his children from lonely Cirey or far Geneva. D’Holbach was here, in the
midst of them.
Comfortable, cultured, liberal, the freest of all free thinkers, and yet
always in the smiling good favour of the authorities, not shy and
retiring like d’Alembert, not wild and imprudent like Diderot, without a
profession to distract him from his appointed _métier_, with a
well-stocked mind, an enormous income, a fine library, a pretty wife, a
first-rate cook, and an admirable cellar--why, here was the man intended
by Fate to be the link to bind us together and to make for us a
meeting-place, a common ground, where, in words to be first applied only
to the Head of our Party,
In very wantonness of childish mirth
_We_ puffed Bastilles, and thrones, and shrines away,
Insulted Heaven, and liberated earth.
Was it for good or evil? Who shall say?
Paul-Henri-Thiry d’Holbach was born in 1723 at Heidelsheim, in the
Palatinate. His father, said Jean Jacques Rousseau when he had
quarrelled with the son, was a _parvenu_. Another of Paul-Henri’s guests
announced that his host was called Baron because he was ‘of German
origin, had a small estate in Westphalia, and an income of sixty
thousand livres.’ Very little is known with certainty of his family. He
was brought up in Paris, and was from the first French of the French,
Parisian of the Parisians. He seems to have visited Germany as a very
young man, and to have studied natural science there. He made his bow to
the literary world by translating German scientific works into French.
At his death Grimm wrote in the ‘Literary Correspondence’ that the rapid
progress natural history and chemistry had made for thirty years in
France was largely owing to the Baron d’Holbach.
As a young man the Baron was what he remained all his life--a compiler,
an annotator, a transcriber, rather than the possessor of any great
original talent of his own. Boy and man he had in perfection that gift
which surely makes for human happiness more than any other single
quality--a devoted love of learning. He was always rich enough to buy
the books and the leisure to gratify that love. He lived in an age and
in the midst of brilliantly accomplished men and women. He should have
found life delightful. He did. A serene, easy, generous nature, troubled
by no agitating ambitions, everything seems to have fallen out from the
first according to his modest desires. For him, and for him alone among
Voltaire’s co-operators, the path to light and knowledge flowered
pleasantly all the way. The others look out eagerly from their
portraits--furrowed foreheads and burning eyes--or with faces noble and
sad, like d’Alembert or Condorcet. Only the good Baron is seated at his
ease in his pleasant, sumptuous garden, surveying life calmly and
leisurely. Which things are a parable.
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.