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[ First Edition, 1839; second and much enlarged edition, 1845.]
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[ An essay which describes my philosophical ideas at this epoch, entitled the “Origine du Langage,” first published in the Liberté de penser (September and December, 1848), faithfully portrays, as I then conceived it, the spectacle of living nature as the result and evidence of a very ancient historical development.]
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[ In the French the phrase is, “L'île de Chio, fortunée patrie d’Homère.”]
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[ I went a short time ago to the National Library to refresh my memory about the Comte de Valmont. Having my attention called away, I asked M. Soury to look through the book for me, as I was anxious to have his impression of it. He replied to me in the following terms:
“I have been a long time in telling you what I think of the Comte de Valmont. The fact is that it was only by an heroic effort that I managed to finish it. Not but what this work is honestly conceived and fairly well written. But the effect of reading through these thousands of pages is so profoundly wearisome that one is scarcely in a position to do justice to the work of Abbé Gérard. One cannot help being vexed with him for being so unnecessarily tedious.
“As so often happens, the best part of this book are the notes, that is to say, a mass of extracts and selections taken from the famous writers of the last two centuries, notably from Rousseau. All the ‘proofs’ and apologetic arguments ruin the work unfortunately, the eloquence and dialectics of Rousseau, Diderot, Helvetius, Holbach, and even Voltaire, differing very much from those of Abbé Gérard. It is the same with the libertines’ reasons refuted by the father of the Comte de Valmont. It must be a very dangerous thing to bring forward mischievous doctrines with so much force. They have a savour which renders the best things insipid, and it is with these good doctrines that the six or seven volumes of the Comte de Valmont are filled. Abbé Gérard did not wish his work to be called a novel, and as a matter of fact there is neither drama nor action in the interminable letters of the Marquis, the Count and Emilie.