Part 11

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 to ruin. When in Bordeaux they rebelled against an iniquitous new tax on wine, he encouraged the rebellion. Though he was constantly at Court and in a position which entailed lavish personal expenditure, he pensioned Thomas, the poet, out of his own pocket; and by an annuity of a thousand écus opened the world of letters to Saurin, hereafter the dramatist. The Abbé Sabatier de Castres declared himself to have been the recipient of his delicate and generous charity. Marivaux, the novelist and playwright, who was personally very uncongenial to Helvétius, received from him a yearly sum of two thousand livres.

It was in Helvétius’ house in Paris, as he afterwards told Hume, the historian, that he concealed, coming and going for ‘nearly two years,’ Prince Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, at a time ‘when the danger was greater in harbouring him in Paris than in London’ on account of the clause in the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle of the year 1748, which stipulated that France should shelter no member of the family in her domains. Helvétius, like many another generous dupe, fell a victim to the Stuart grace and charm: ‘I had all his correspondence pass through my hands; met with his partisans upon the Pont Neuf; and found at last I had incurred all this danger and trouble for the most unworthy of all mortals,’ for a poor coward who ‘was so frightened when he embarked on his expedition to Scotland’ that he had literally to be carried on board by his attendants. (It is fair to say that Helvétius made this statement only on the testimony of a third person whose name is not given.) The sole good quality, indeed, his host ended by finding in this faint hope of Britain, the guest for whom he had risked his safety and spent his money, was that he was ‘no bigot.’ As this meant he had ‘learnt a contempt of all religions from the philosophers in Paris,’ not everyone would consider even this an advantage.

In 1740, Madame de Graffigny, famous as the gossiping visitor at Cirey with whom Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet quarrelled, had arrived in Paris, and there, in the Rue d’Enfer, near the Luxembourg, had set up her _salon_. To insure its success, Madame, who was five-and-forty, fat and unbeautiful, had with her a charming niece, Mademoiselle Anne Catherine de Ligniville, who was then one-and-twenty, fair, handsome, intelligent. A year or two before, her aunt had adopted and so rescued her from a convent, to which the fact of the unfortunate girl having nineteen living brothers and sisters had condemned her.

In 1747, Madame de Graffigny attained celebrity by her ‘Letters from a Peruvian.’ Turgot did her the honour of criticising them: frequented her _salon_, which rapidly became famous, and at which, in 1750, Helvétius, still young, rich, agreeable, and unmarried, became a constant visitor. For a year, he was there perpetually. ‘The sheepfold of _bel esprit_,’ people called it. Helvétius liked to be thought a _bel esprit_, and it was _de rigueur_ to admire the hostess’s ‘Peruvian’ and her play ‘Cénie,’ which was produced in 1750. He soon came to admire something besides her writings. ‘Minette,’ as she nicknamed her niece, was such a woman as fashionable eighteenth-century society rarely produced--such a woman as any fashionable society rarely produces. Strong in mind and body, good, straightforward and serene, refreshingly unconventional in an age which had no god but the _convenances_, not half so clever as that accomplished old fool, her aunt, and a hundred times more sensible--such was Mademoiselle de Ligniville.

Helvétius studied her in his calm manner for a year, and at the end of it proposed to her. Then he resigned his Farmer-Generalship with its rich income; bought, to pacify his father, the post of _maître d’hôtel_ to Queen Marie Leczinska, and the estates of Voré and Lumigny in Burgundy, and, on June 17, 1751, married Mademoiselle de Ligniville, who was a Countess of the Holy Roman Empire, satisfactorily connected with the nobility, and had not a single franc to her _dot_.

All these actions caused something very like consternation in the world in which Helvétius lived. Give up a Farmer-Generalship! The man must be mad! ‘So you are not insatiable, then, like the rest of them?’ says Machault, the Controller-General. As to the estates in Burgundy, one might as well be buried alive at once! While to marry a woman who is by now certainly not a day less than two-and-thirty, has not an écu, and has a tribe of hungry brothers and sisters clinging to her, as it were, is certainly not the act of a sane person! Followed by the mingled pity and contempt of all Paris, Helvétius and his wife left immediately for Voré, and settled down to the eight happiest years of their lives.

Voré was one of those country estates which would still be called dull. In those days, before railways, with a starving peasantry at its gates, with rare posts of the most erratic description, and with the vilest impassable roads between one country house and another, it might have been called not merely dull, but dismal. But, after all, happiness is what one is, not where one is. Perfectly content with each other, the Helvétius would have been contented in a wilderness. Minette, says a biographer, asked nothing better than to adore her husband and perpetually to sacrifice herself to him.

If it was not in his calmer nature to adore anyone, his love for her is on the testimony of the whole eighteenth century. His married happiness ‘bewildered and astonished’ it. ‘Those Helvétius,’ said a country neighbour discontentedly, ‘do not even pronounce the words, _my husband_, _my wife_, _my child_, as we others do.’ ‘Good husband, good father, good friend, good man,’ wrote unfavourable Grimm. The easy prosperity of Helvétius’ love for his wife, its freedom from storm and stress, left it, doubtless, a lighter thing than if it had been forged in the fire and beaten by the blows of affliction and reverse. It was thus with all his qualities. Kind, rather than lovable; charming, rather than great; equable, because nothing in his destiny came to move the deep waters, or because there were no deep waters to be moved: these were the key-notes to Helvétius’ character.

The first child of the marriage, a daughter, was born in 1752, and the second, also a daughter, in 1754. Father and mother devoted themselves to the education of the little girls, though in their time polite society considered that parents had sufficiently obliged their children by bringing them into the world, and that further favours, such as a judicious training, were entirely superfluous.

The household was completed by two superannuated secretaries, whom Helvétius kept, very characteristically, not because he wanted them, but because he feared no one else would want them either. One of them, Baudot, had known his master from a child, and spoke to him as if he were one still. ‘I have certainly not _all_ the faults Baudot finds in me,’ observed Helvétius tranquilly, ‘but I have some of them. Who would tell me of them if I did not keep him?’

Sometimes visitors came to Voré, but for so sociable an age, not very often. Though they were always made generously welcome, they must have known they were not necessary to that _ménage_. Still, they were useful, if only to prove to these married lovers how much happier they were alone--just as the four gay winter months they spent in Paris doubled the delights of peaceful Voré.

The day there began with work. Helvétius was now firmly minded to achieve glory by means of philosophy--fame and sport, it is said, were the only passions he had. He spent the whole morning writing and thinking. In composition he had neither the hot haste of Diderot nor the glittering inspiration of Voltaire. He wrote indeed painfully and laboriously--as the author born writes when he is weary and disinclined--as a man always writes whom nature has intended for another occupation. Sometimes one of the incompetent secretaries had to wait for hours with his pen in his hand, while his master wrestled with the refractory thought in his brain, or waited for the inspired phrase to come down from on high. His wife had not much sympathy with his philosophies. The philosophers talked so much, and as yet had done so little! But in everything else she was entirely at one with her husband.

It would be absurd to pretend that before the Revolution there were no noblemen in France who did their duty by their country estates and tenants, who looked after the poor on their lands, and, so far as they could, realised and acted up to the responsibilities of their position. There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring. But that the conscientious landowner was then a rare and surprising phenomenon is proved by the fact that when Helvétius and his wife began to devote themselves to acts of benevolence, everyone turned and stared at them. To-day, indeed, Helvétius might not be counted extraordinarily charitable. But it is not by modern standards he can be fairly judged. Compare him with the immense majority of the great financial magnates of his day and country, and he stands proven a philanthropist indeed.

When he first bought Voré, he had given a M. de Vasconcelles, a poor gentleman who owed the estate a large sum, a receipt for the whole, putting it into his hands saying, ‘Take this paper to keep my people from bothering you;’ and he further settled a handsome gift of money on him, to help him to educate his family. One of his next actions was to bring a good doctor to the place, establish him on it, and himself pay for the medical services thus rendered the peasants. Daily he and Minette visited the poor, accompanied by this doctor and a Sister of Mercy. He also set up in the place a stocking manufactory--and so, perhaps, supplied an idea to Voltaire. He encouraged and helped the farmers to farm their land; acted as unpaid judge in their disputes; and in hard times let them off their debts. There are a dozen stories of the private individuals he helped. One day, it is a ruined Jesuit priest, who has abused his confidence and kindness. Helvétius finds one of the Jesuit’s friends, and gives him fifty louis for his old enemy. ‘Do not say it comes from me--he has injured me, and he would feel humiliated at receiving a gift from me.’ Could delicacy go further?

Another day, when he was driving, a woodman leading a horse and cart was irritatingly slow in getting out of the way of the carriage. Helvétius lost his patience. ‘All right,’ said the man, ‘I am a _coquin_ and you are an honest man, I suppose, because I am on foot and you are in a carriage.’ ‘I beg your pardon,’ says Helvétius, with his fine instincts instantly awake, ‘you have given me an excellent lesson, for which I ought to pay;’ and he gave the man a sum which, though handsome, was less generous than the apology.

When famine came to Voré, Helvétius’ deep purse and wise judgment were both to the fore. Did the man accomplish less good because, though his heart was kind, it was not warm; because, though he relieved suffering, there was that in his temperament which saved him from suffering with it? If the philanthropist must have either a cool head or a hot heart, better the cool head a thousand times. He will do much less harm.

Many of Helvétius’ charities were performed through his valet, whom he bade say nothing about them, even after his death. Sometimes he concealed from his wife, and she concealed from him, the good deeds of which each had been guilty.

A peasant had been imprisoned for poaching on Helvétius’ grounds, and his gun confiscated. Helvétius went to him, bought back his gun, paid his fine, and had him set free, begging his silence because Minette had warned him to be severe with the man as he deserved. That warning troubled her generous heart. She too went to the culprit, gave him money to pay his fine and repurchase his gun, and vowed him to secrecy. Whether the peasant kept the secrets (as well as the price of two fines and two guns), and husband and wife confessed to each other, history does not relate.

There is, indeed, a reverse side to Helvétius’ character as enlightened landowner. Carlyle, in his ‘Essay on Diderot,’ quotes Diderot’s ‘Voyage à Bourbonne,’ in which the ex-Farmer-General is portrayed as a cruelly strict preserver, living in the midst of peasants who broke his windows, plundered his garden, tore up his palings, and hated him so savagely that he dared not go out shooting save with an armed escort of four-and-twenty keepers. Diderot added that Helvétius had swept away a little village of huts which the poor people had built on the fringe of his preserves; that the good philosopher was a coward, and the unhappiest of men. But it must be remembered that Diderot did not speak from first-hand observation, but drew, and said he drew, all his information from a Madame de Nocé, a neighbour of Helvétius. Now happy, unsociable people like Helvétius and his wife are not likely to be popular in a limited country society, which would expect much from them, and get practically nothing. Saint-Lambert and Marmontel both speak of Helvétius’ liberality, generosity, and unostentatious benevolence. Morellet, who was his closest intimate for many years, adds like testimony, and especially mentions his mercy to poachers. One story illustrating it has been told. Another runs that Helvétius found a man poaching under the very windows of his house, and at first naturally inclined to wrath, curbed himself: ‘If you wanted game, why did you not ask me? I would have given it to you.’

Perhaps the truth of the whole matter lies in that anecdote. The keen sportsman and preserver did sometimes lose his temper and forget his compassion: his better self soon recalled it, and that rare disposition of humility and love for his fellows hastened to make amends.

In 1755, the book to which he had devoted those long, laborious mornings at Voré (by which I must certainly achieve glory, if I am to achieve it at all!) was finished at last. It was to be called ‘De l’Esprit’--not to be translated ‘Wit,’ as Croker translated it, but something much more serious--‘On the Mind.’

It set out to prove a new theory of human action, and a new system of morality. Virtue and vice? There are no such things. Self-interest, rightly understood, is the explanation of the one, and self-interest, misunderstood, of the other. Selfishness and the passions are the sole mainsprings of our deeds. So far from character being destiny, as Novalis is to declare, destiny is in all cases character. Everybody is the creature of his environment and his education. Free Will? What free will to be an honest man has the child of thieves, brought up to thieve in a slum? Change his condition, and you change him. Leave him, and he will steal as certainly as fire burns and the waves beat on the shore. As for the vaunted superiority of the human intelligence over the brutes, ‘an accident of physical organisation’ can account for that. We are _as_ the brutes, only a little better, and the difference is wholly of degree, not of kind.

Put these theories, with their showy falsehood and their substratum of truth, on the library table of any clever man, and get him to do his best to prove them by sophistry and ingenuity, by trick, by subterfuge, by illustration--somehow, anyhow, so that he prove them to the hilt--and the result will be pretty well what Helvétius made it. There was scarcely a good story, or a bad one, he had heard in his early gay life in Paris that he did not bring in, by hook or by crook, to point and enliven his paradox. Madame de Graffigny told Bettinelli that nearly all the notes were the ‘sweepings’ of her _salon_.

‘On the Mind’ is entertaining or nothing--difficulties presented solely that they may be wittily demolished--easy, inaccurate, trifling; a style ‘insinuating and caressing ... made for light minds, young people and women,’ says Damiron; a book which fashion might skip at its toilette, and then, on the strength of remembering two or three of its dubious anecdotes, claim a complete knowledge of its _bizarre_ philosophy. For it was but a _bizarrerie_--a _jeu d’esprit_--and Helvétius knew it. He was merely concerned to see how far his impossible theories could be made plausible, and wrote them to catch the public ear, and turn their author into the lion and darling of the season.

When the thing was ready he took it to Tercier, the censor, who passed it, suggesting only the omission of a few too complimentary references to free-thinking Hume. Helvétius cut them out. Malesherbes, during its printing, observed uneasily that the book contained ‘some very strong things’--insolent remarks, for instance, on that dear, crusted old despotism under which we all live, and certainly a suggestion that any means to overthrow tyranny are permissible. But, all the same, in May 1758 it received its privilege. Majesty was graciously pleased to accept a copy from the author, our _maître d’hôtel_. It was already in the hands of the philosophers. And everybody began to read.

It would not have been wonderful, if the theories had had a little more _vraisemblance_, that most people, particularly people who had devoted their lives and their fortunes to others, who had laboured in poverty that other men might be free and rich, should object to see their self-denial set down as self-interest, and to be informed that the highest aspiration of their soul was really nothing but a morbid condition of the body. But, considering their manifest absurdity, it is wonderful that these assertions were taken seriously.

Madame du Deffand, indeed, might naturally say that in making self-interest the mainspring of conduct, Helvétius had revealed everybody’s secret. He had so certainly discovered hers. But Turgot, whose life was to do good, had better have laughed at an absurdity than have risen up to condemn it as ‘philosophy without logic, literature without taste, and morality without goodness.’ A Condorcet, whose long devotion to duty was rewarded only with ruin and death, need not have troubled to loathe it. Rousseau immediately sat down to refute it: some of the most inspired pages of his ‘Savoyard Vicar’ still glow with the hatred with which it inspired him. Grimm wisely only pooh-poohed it. Voltaire grumbled that his pupil had promised a book on the Mind, and presented a treatise on Matter; that he had ‘put friendship among the bad passions,’ and, much worse than all, has actually compared _me_--ME--to two such feeble, second-rate luminaries as Crébillon and Fontenelle! No wonder that he found the title, ‘De l’Esprit,’ equivocal, the matter unmethodical, all the new things false and all the old ones truisms.

For a very short time, however, approved or disapproved, taken as folly or mistaken for reason, the book went its way gaily. It bade fair to become what Helvétius had meant it to be--the success of a season. But for the besotted stupidity of the Government, it never would have been anything else.

One unlucky day the Dauphin, who was more virtuous than wise, came out of his room with a copy in his hand and fury in his face. ‘I am going to show the Queen the sort of thing her _maître d’hôtel_ prints.’

On August 10, 1758, the privilege for its publication was revoked. Tercier was deprived of his office. ‘On the Mind’ was furiously attacked in the religious papers. The _avocat général_, Fleury, pronounced it ‘an abridgment of the Encyclopædia.’ The Archbishop of Paris declared it struck at the roots of Christianity. At Court, Helvétius was all at once ‘regarded as a child of perdition, and the Queen pitied his mother as if she had produced Anti-Christ.’ Rome banned the accursed thing. On January 31, 1759, the Pope attacked it with his own hand in a letter. On February 6 the Parliament of Paris condemned it. On February 10 it was publicly burned by the hangman, with Voltaire’s ‘Natural Law.’ On April 9 the Sorbonne censured it, and declared it to contain ‘the essence of the poisons’ of all modern literature.

Helvétius, from being the happiest of easy-going, benevolent philosophers, found himself, as it were in a second, in a position of great danger, and what Collé in his Journal called ‘cruel pain.’ His friends hotly urged upon him a retractation to soften the certain punishment awaiting him. His mother begged it from him with tears. Only Minette, a sterner and a braver soul, refused, though ‘a great personage’ besought her, to add her own entreaties to that end.

Still, it had to be done. Something of a coward this Helvétius, as Collé suggested now, as Diderot had suggested before? The rich and easy life he had led does not breed courage certainly. But, after all, Helvétius only did what Voltaire and many a better man declared it was essential to do in that day. He produced a ‘Letter from the Reverend Father ... Jesuit,’ in which he stated that he had written in perfect innocence and simplicity, and (this was undoubtedly true) that he had not had the slightest idea of the effect his book would create. He added, in the stiff phraseology of the time, words to the effect that he was an exceedingly religious man and very sorry indeed. The _amende_ was so far accepted that the Parliament simply condemned him to give up his stewardship, and exiled him for two years to Voré.

What the book could never have done for itself, or for its author, persecution did for them both. ‘On the Mind’ became not the success of a season, but one of the most famous books of the century. The men who had hated it, and had not particularly loved Helvétius, flocked round him now. Voltaire forgave him all injuries, intentional or unintentional. ‘What a fuss about an omelette!’ he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ was his attitude now. But he soon came, as a Voltaire would come, to swearing that there was no more materialism in ‘On the Mind’ than in Locke, and a thousand more daring things in ‘The Spirit of Laws.’ Turgot and Condorcet forgave the philosophy, in their pity for the philosopher. D’Alembert made common cause with the man with whom he had nothing else in common. Rousseau instantly stopped writing his refutation. Diderot roundly swore ‘On the Mind’ was one of the great books of the age. Though Rome had censured it, cardinals wrote to condole with its author on the treatment it had received. It was translated into almost all European languages. Presently, England published an edition of her own. And Helvétius, when that two years’ exile--a punishment surely only in name?--was over, returning to Paris, found himself the most distinguished man in the capital.