CLAUDE-ADRIEN HELVÉTIUS.
From an Engraving by St. Aubin, after the Portrait by Vanloo.
family fortunes were but mediocre. Little Claude-Adrien, who was born in 1715, was at first educated at home by a mother ‘full of sweetness and goodness.’ Her tenderness, perhaps, was an ill preparation for the harsher, wider world of the famous school of Saint Louis-le-Grand, whither Claude-Adrien was presently sent. It was Voltaire’s old school, and it was Voltaire’s old school-master, Père Porée, who helped the shy, sensitive, new boy with kindliness and encouragement, and first roused in him a love of letters. Grimm, who nearly always has his pen pointed with malice when he writes of Helvétius, records that poor Claude-Adrien always seemed stupid at school through being the victim of a chronic cold in the head: an unromantic affliction, which would make genius itself uninteresting. Young Helvétius was no genius, however.
After leaving school he was sent to an uncle, who was a superintendent of taxes at Caen, to learn finance. There he wrote the usual boyish tragedy of promise—never to be performed—and the usual youthful verses, and was made a member of the Caen Literary Academy. The sensitive shyness soon disappeared. Young, healthy, and handsome, loving literature much and women more, an excellent dancer and fencer, clever, cool, agreeable, and much minded to get on in the world, young Helvétius comes up to Paris. At three-and-twenty, in 1738, being the son of his father, and having the necessary financial equipment, he was made Farmer-General, a post certain to bring in two or three thousand a year, and possibly, with the requisite extortion and unscrupulousness, a good deal more.
Paris, in the years between 1738 and 1751, was certainly the most delightful and the most seductive city in the world. In the early part of that period, Madame de Tencin, the mother of d’Alembert and the sister of the Cardinal, was forming the youth of the capital in her famous salon. In the later period, Madame de Pompadour was revealing to it by her example the whole secret of worldly success—a clear head and a cold heart. The Court was eternally laughing, play-acting, intriguing. For the few, the world went with the liveliest lilt; and for the many—the many were dumb.
Helvétius was one of the few. Now at Madame de Tencin’s, ‘gathering in order that he might one day sow;’ now in the foyer of the Comédie, where Mademoiselle Gaussin, the charming comic actress, nourished a hopeless passion for him; now at the opera, seeing for the first time Buffon, Diderot, d’Alembert, and joining hotly in the question of French or Italian music, which agitated the capital a thousand times more than national glory or shame; now at Madame de Pompadour’s famous little dinners of the Entresol, or at Court, daintily distinguishing between the Queen of reality and the poor Queen en titre—the new young Farmer-General was Everywhere where Everybody who is Anybody goes, and Nowhere where Nobody goes. Be sure there was a fashionable shibboleth then as there is now, and be sure Helvétius prattled it and lived up to it. Grimm declared that if the word ‘gallant’ had not been in the French language, it would certainly have had to be invented in order to describe him.
One day, society heard of him dancing at the opera under the mask of the famous dancer, Dupré. The next, he was whispered to be the lover of a modish Countess, who had taken Atheism as other women took Jansenism, Molinism, or a craze for little dogs, and passionately imbued her lover with the exhilarating doctrine of All from Nothing to Nothing. Then he posed as the amant-en-titre of the Duchesse de Chaulnes. For the passions were only a pose—like the opera dancing. Helvétius was merely minded to get on in the world, and was looking about for the shortest cut to glory. He soon saw, or thought he saw, a pleasant road thereto called Verse.