The Friends of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

In 1752 or 1753, when he was about thirty years old, he began writing articles for that Encyclopædia which set on almost all its other contributors the ban of Government ill-favour. Only Paul-Henri—writing always judiciously under a pseudonym—gained nothing but pleasure and approbation from his excellent papers on mineralogy and chemistry. He formed the happiest life-long friendships with his fellow-writers in that immortal book. He married a pretty and charming wife, Mademoiselle d’Aine. She died, in August 1754, after a very brief married life. D’Holbach travelled abroad with Grimm for a while.

In 1755, he obtained a special dispensation from the Pope, and married his deceased wife’s sister, Mademoiselle Charlotte-Suzanne d’Aine, and began to live with her a life which presented the very rare combination of perfect domestic contentment and the most brilliant social success.

In the very heart and core of Paris, Rue Royale butte Saint-Roch, the Baron held in his town house what Rousseau calls the ‘club holbachique,’ Diderot ‘the synagogue of the Rue Royale,’ and Garat ‘the Institute of France before there was one.’ Here, at two o’clock every Sunday and Thursday, unless the d’Holbachs were in the country, their friends were certain to find a free and affluent hospitality, the most intellectual society of the capital, the most distinguished foreigners who visited it, a host as liberal in idea as in the very good cheer to which he made his guests welcome, and the most daring speculative conversation of the eighteenth century.

But, after all, it was not in the Rue Royale that d’Holbach and his friends found their most characteristic setting. Grandval, near Charenton, remains not only the most influential salon of the age, the great headquarters of a great party and the arsenal in which were forged the armaments which destroyed a king, a dynasty, and a state religion, but also the country house of the period.

When Talleyrand, in that much quoted phrase, declared that no one knew how delightful a thing life could be unless he had belonged to the upper classes before the Revolution, he might have been thinking of the life at Grandval in particular.

There was a fine and charming château, and the most delightful of gardens. Grandval was just near enough to Paris, and just far enough away—which is to say, it was absolute country, within easy reach of town, in an age when the suburb was not, or, at least, when the social drawbacks comprehended in the word ‘suburban’ had no existence. The estate actually belonged to Madame d’Aine, d’Holbach’s mother-in-law, who was as ‘lively as any romp of fifteen,’ always thoroughly enjoying herself, determined her guests should do the same, and with the rare wisdom to leave them to do it in their own way.

Madame d’Holbach was pretty, gay, and charming. She played on the lute, adored her husband and children, and hated philosophy. If her guests like to talk it—and they are always talking it—well, by all means, so they shall! Live and let live, do as you like come what may—these would have been the Grandval rules, if it had ever bothered itself to have anything so tiresome as rules.

The d’Holbach children were adorable—or despatched to governesses and servants if they even threatened to become less than adorable. There were two little boys and a couple of little girls, the elder ‘as pretty as a cherub,’ said Diderot, and the younger ‘a ball of fat, all pink and white.’

Then there was an ami de la maison, a household fixture, a chimney-corner habitué—a Scotchman named Hope, and nicknamed Père Hoop—a shrivelled, withered, pessimistic person, who suffered, or said he suffered, from ‘life-weariness’ and bad health, who was an excellent foil to what Sterne called the ‘joyous sett’ in which he found himself, and the perpetual and dismally good-natured butt of Madame d’Aine’s rippling jokes.

The Baron had all the virtues of the host. He was not only rich and generous—with that cook and cellar beyond reproach. In those days to be a perfect entertainer something more even than this was required. An agreeable talker, and a still more agreeable listener, really learned, but with the most pleasing human weakness for a little scandal, as easy-going as his mother-in-law and his wife, entirely simple in manner, with no faintest touch of pretension or affectation, a bon vivant in the pleasantest and most harmless sense of the phrase—who would not delight to have been among his guests?