BY S. G. TALLENTYRE AUTHOR OF “THE LIFE OF VOLTAIRE,” “THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS,” ETC. LONDON JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W. 1906     All rights reserved    ...

D’Alembert. Joseph Bertrand. Œuvres et Correspondance inédites. D’Alembert. Correspondance avec d’Alembert. Marquise du Deffand. Diderot and the Encyclopædists. John Morley. Éloge de d’Alembert. Condorcet. Œuvres. Diderot. Diderot. Reinach. Diderot, l’Homme et l’Ecrivain. Ducros. Diderot. Scherer. Diderot et Catherine II. Tourneux. Ferdinando Galiani, Correspondance, Étude, etc. Perrey et Maugras. Lettres de l’Abbé Galiani. Eugène Asse. Mémoires et Correspondance. Madame d’Épinay. Jeunesse de Ma

Of that vast intellectual movement which prepared the way for the most stupendous event in history, the French Revolution, Voltaire was the creative spirit. But there was a group of men, less famous but not less great, who also heralded the coming of the new heaven and the new earth; who were in a strict sense friends and fellow-workers of Voltaire, although one or two of them were personally little known to him; whose aim was his aim, to destroy from among the people ‘ignorance, the curse of Go

Some hundred and eighty odd years ago, in a little town in France, a wild boy slipped out of his room at midnight, and crept downstairs in his stocking-feet with the wicked intent of running away to Paris. This time-honoured escapade was defeated by the appearance of Master Denis’s resolute father with the household keys in his hand. ‘Where are you going?’ says he. ‘To Paris, to join the Jesuits.’ ‘Certainly; I will take you there myself to-morrow.’ And Denis retires tamely and ignominiously to

‘How can you say I do not know Galiani?’ wrote Voltaire to Madame d’Épinay. ‘I have read him; therefore I have seen him.’ Of that Brotherhood of Progress, united by a love, sometimes for each other and always for mankind, if Voltaire was the leader, and d’Alembert the thinker, Galiani was certainly the wit. In his own day he was celebrated as the man who made Paris laugh—and ponder—by his famous ‘Dialogues on Corn;’ and in our day he is remembered as the gay little buffoon of the eighteenth cent

The proverb is indigenous to Spain, verse to Italy, and the aphorism to France. In that form of speech in which, in Vauvenargues’ own words, La Rochefoucauld had ‘turned men from virtue by persuading them that it is never genuine,’ Vauvenargues vindicated human goodness, showed man that the best way to reform the world is to reform himself, and taught him how to use the freedom Voltaire gave him. In his delicate thoughtfulness, in his conviction that man’s happiness depends upon his character an

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

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

Most of the reforming philosophers of the eighteenth century were better in word than deed. Helvétius wrote himself down self-seeker and materialist, and in every action of his life gave his utterance the lie. Helvétius was, as Voltaire had been, a courtier—not the teacher of kings, like Grimm, but their friend and servant. Helvétius alone was at once of that body, which of all bodies the philosophers most hated, the Farmers-General—the extortionate tax-gatherers of old France—and of a practical

Among Voltaire’s friends Turgot and Condorcet at least were not merely great, but also good men. Even Condorcet, though himself of virtuous and noble life, had not that high standard of living, that sterner modern code of purity and uprightness, which were remarkably Turgot’s. But Turgot was something more even than the best man of his party. He was the best worker. While Voltaire clamoured and wept for humanity, while d’Alembert thought, Grimm wrote, Diderot talked, and Condorcet dreamed and di

Some men do great things incidentally and unintentionally. Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais bothered his clever head scarcely at all with schemes for the well-being of his country—was little concerned with humanity and very much with one man—himself. Yet by a special irony of destiny the author of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ played one of the chief parts in the prelude to the drama of the Revolution. Born in Paris on January 24, 1732, the son of a watchmaker with a large family, Pierre Augusti

Voltaire was the son of a lawyer, and Diderot the son of a cutler; d’Alembert was a no-man’s child educated in a tradesman’s family; Grimm and Galiani were foreigners in the country to which they gave their talents. Of all Voltaire’s fellowship only Vauvenargues and Condorcet came from the order their work was pledged not to benefit but to destroy. Condorcet alone lived to experience the extreme consequences of his principles, and paid for them by imprisonment and death. The Aristocrat who lost