The Friends of Voltaire

by Evelyn Beatrice Hall

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.