Set the problem of deriving Everything from Nothing, it is not marvellous that the Grandval talkers descended sometimes to the wildest nonsense. Horace Walpole said acidly that they soon turned his head with ‘a new system of antediluvian deluges which they have invented to prove the eternity of matter.... Nonsense for nonsense, I prefer the Jesuits.’ No wonder poor little Galiani (he was an Abbé, though he very often forgot it) fled to the more circumspect gatherings of Madame Geoffrin, that the wise Turgot also turned away from Grandval, and d’Alembert drew back from an atheism so positive and arrogant.
By the time the philosophers joined the women it was four, five, or even six o’clock. It does take some hours to construct Man and the Universe out of Chaos, with nothing but blind Force to help us! Then came for the host himself, and some few of the other men of the party, a walk in the beautiful gardens. Most of the Baron’s guests, however, sat indoors with the women, Nature and exercise being both greatly out of fashion in the eighteenth century.
When the walkers returned the evening was drawing in, and there were lights and cards on the table. Some of the guests rested on long chairs. Some played picquet, some billiards, some tric-trac. Some visited their host’s picture gallery or his famous cabinet of natural history. He was himself always pleasant, courteous, cheerful. He loved to rally gently ‘the old mummy,’ as he called Father Hoop, and, perhaps, other Fathers, certain Jesuit priests, whom, in defiance of all his own principles, he generously made free of his house.
Old Madame d’Aine entertained the whole company with her perfectly indecorous and perfectly good-natured wit. Madame d’Holbach, always ‘douce et honnête,’ ‘très aimable,’ and exquisitely dressed (the description is Madame d’Épinay’s), accepted her mother’s buffooneries with absolute complacency.
Coarse as this society was in its speech—worse as it was in its easy condonation of vice than the worst social sets of our own day—in one respect at least it was immeasurably superior. Except for an occasional desultory game proposed by their hosts, the guests at Grandval were expected to bring, and did bring, their own entertainment with them in their own heads. To be bored would have been to confess oneself stupid. For the costly freaks of amusement, the elaborately idiotic devices of modern times to prevent the visitor having to fall back for an instant on his own resources or intelligence, Grandval had no need. If materialism was its creed, there was, as has been justly said, a great deal of ‘indirect spiritualism’ in its practice. Its lengthy dinners were feasts of reason (in spite of those intellectual extravagances) as well as of costly meats and wines, and the ill-flavoured jests were only interludes in the midst of brilliant and fruitful talk on literature, history, politics, and the new world beginning for France.
Supper came about nine—‘wit, gaiety, and champagne,’ Diderot described it. Then more conversation, until sometimes the party were still ardently philosophising with their bedroom candle-sticks in their hands.
When d’Holbach had been entertaining, apparently without a break, for at least ten years, he took what seemed to his friends the foolhardy, not to say desperate, resolve of crossing the Channel. To bury himself in what Diderot called ‘the depths of England’ for two months is a very different thing, the Baron will find, from entertaining Englishmen (and those quite the most enlightened of their species) in Paris! He did find it so. If England delighted Voltaire, soothed wounded Helvétius, and pleased even critical Grimm, she thoroughly disgusted d’Holbach. He gave Diderot his vivid first impressions of her, and Diderot retailed them, red-hot, for Sophie Volland and for posterity.
The Baron was hospitably received and entertained in this island by a rich and generous host, whose name has not transpired; he had the best of health during his visit, and he paid that visit in August, when even the British climate can be very tolerable; he had the pleasure of calling on his guest, Garrick; he went to Oxford and Cambridge; travelled in some of the prettiest English counties, and he was bored—to extinction.
Our confessedly bad manners he found worse than anyone had ever found them before, and was dreadfully disgusted with people ‘on whose faces one never sees friendliness, confidence, or gaiety, but which all wear the inscription, “What is there in common between you and me?”’ The aristocracy struck him as cold and haughty, the common people as rough and violent. As for the dinner parties, ‘where people sit according to their rank, and formality and ceremony are beside each guest,’ after the gracious ease of Grandval, the Baron may be forgiven for finding them intolerable.
Then the public entertainments: ‘This people is sad and melancholy, especially in places built for pleasure. You can hear a pin drop. A hundred stiff and silent women promenade round an orchestra discoursing the most delicious music,’ and the promenade can only be compared to ‘the processions of the Egyptians round the mausoleum of Osiris.’