PAUL-HENRI-THIRY. BARON D’HOLBACH.
From a Portrait in the Musée Condé, Chantilly.
his children from lonely Cirey or far Geneva. D’Holbach was here, in the midst of them.
Comfortable, cultured, liberal, the freest of all free thinkers, and yet always in the smiling good favour of the authorities, not shy and retiring like d’Alembert, not wild and imprudent like Diderot, without a profession to distract him from his appointed métier, with a well-stocked mind, an enormous income, a fine library, a pretty wife, a first-rate cook, and an admirable cellar—why, here was the man intended by Fate to be the link to bind us together and to make for us a meeting-place, a common ground, where, in words to be first applied only to the Head of our Party,
In very wantonness of childish mirth
We puffed Bastilles, and thrones, and shrines away,
Insulted Heaven, and liberated earth.
Was it for good or evil? Who shall say?
. . . . . .
Paul-Henri-Thiry d’Holbach was born in 1723 at Heidelsheim, in the Palatinate. His father, said Jean Jacques Rousseau when he had quarrelled with the son, was a parvenu. Another of Paul-Henri’s guests announced that his host was called Baron because he was ‘of German origin, had a small estate in Westphalia, and an income of sixty thousand livres.’ Very little is known with certainty of his family. He was brought up in Paris, and was from the first French of the French, Parisian of the Parisians. He seems to have visited Germany as a very young man, and to have studied natural science there. He made his bow to the literary world by translating German scientific works into French. At his death Grimm wrote in the ‘Literary Correspondence’ that the rapid progress natural history and chemistry had made for thirty years in France was largely owing to the Baron d’Holbach.
As a young man the Baron was what he remained all his life—a compiler, an annotator, a transcriber, rather than the possessor of any great original talent of his own. Boy and man he had in perfection that gift which surely makes for human happiness more than any other single quality—a devoted love of learning. He was always rich enough to buy the books and the leisure to gratify that love. He lived in an age and in the midst of brilliantly accomplished men and women. He should have found life delightful. He did. A serene, easy, generous nature, troubled by no agitating ambitions, everything seems to have fallen out from the first according to his modest desires. For him, and for him alone among Voltaire’s co-operators, the path to light and knowledge flowered pleasantly all the way. The others look out eagerly from their portraits—furrowed foreheads and burning eyes—or with faces noble and sad, like d’Alembert or Condorcet. Only the good Baron is seated at his ease in his pleasant, sumptuous garden, surveying life calmly and leisurely. Which things are a parable.