Part 8
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.’