The Friends of Voltaire

D’Alembert. _Joseph Bertrand._ Œuvres et Correspondance inédites. _D’Alembert._ Correspondance avec d’Alembert. _Marquise du Deffand._ Diderot and the Encyclopædists. _John Morl...

The Genevan pastors took solemn and heartburning counsel together, and on the head of the quiet worker in the attic in Paris there burst a hurricane which might have beaten down...

The schooldays were all too short. The practical master-cutler at Langres soon intimated to Denis that it was time to choose a profession. But Denis declines to be a doctor, bec...

But this loud, explosive Denis was scarcely a social light. He said himself that he only liked company in which he could say anything. And what Diderot meant by _anything_ was c...

Galiani was more than a match for the laughers. ‘Sire,’ he said to the King, ‘you now see only a sample of the secretary; the secretary will arrive later.’ The King was delighte...

The Abbé Morellet, as large as Galiani was small, and as ponderous in style as the Abbé was light, was employed to answer him. The good man wrote his refutation with such haste...

Disappointed, disfigured, a failure; useless for the career he had loved, incapable of the career he had tried; cast off by his own people; solitary in a great city; often in pa...

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 ear...

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, an...

It is always a vexed point of morals to determine how far right can come out of wrong, how far a cause initially bad can be said to be good in its results. It must certainly be...

As tax-gatherer, it was his interest and profession to extract the uttermost farthing--and he did not do it. Nay, he pleaded in high places for the wretches it was his business...

In their fine hotel in the Rue Sainte-Anne (Rue Helvétius, the municipality of 1792 rechristened it, and Rue Saint-Helvétius, the _cochers_ of Paris!) he and his wife received t...

He began at once. It was nothing to him that his own caste shot out the lip and scorned him. Cold and awkward in manner, regular and austere in habit, and as pure as a good woma...

A pretty young married woman, who had noticed him admiringly at Versailles, came to his shop to have her watch mended. Caron took it back to her house in person. A few months la...

The morals of the piece are throughout the morals of the time--indelicacy, delicately expressed. Figaro hardly ever says anything _inconvenant_, but intrigue is in the very air...

In May, 1776, a Queen of one-and-twenty demanded that ‘le sieur Turgot fût chassé, même envoyé à la Bastille’; and, in part, she had her way, for her own ruin and that of France...

Madame Suard may be remembered as the very enthusiastic and vivacious little lady who once visited Voltaire, who has left behind her entertaining ‘Letters,’ and who has recorded...