For a very short time, however, approved or disapproved, taken as folly or mistaken for reason, the book went its way gaily. It bade fair to become what Helvétius had meant it to be—the success of a season. But for the besotted stupidity of the Government, it never would have been anything else.
One unlucky day the Dauphin, who was more virtuous than wise, came out of his room with a copy in his hand and fury in his face. ‘I am going to show the Queen the sort of thing her maître d’hôtel prints.’
On August 10, 1758, the privilege for its publication was revoked. Tercier was deprived of his office. ‘On the Mind’ was furiously attacked in the religious papers. The avocat général, Fleury, pronounced it ‘an abridgment of the Encyclopædia.’ The Archbishop of Paris declared it struck at the roots of Christianity. At Court, Helvétius was all at once ‘regarded as a child of perdition, and the Queen pitied his mother as if she had produced Anti-Christ.’ Rome banned the accursed thing. On January 31, 1759, the Pope attacked it with his own hand in a letter. On February 6 the Parliament of Paris condemned it. On February 10 it was publicly burned by the hangman, with Voltaire’s ‘Natural Law.’ On April 9 the Sorbonne censured it, and declared it to contain ‘the essence of the poisons’ of all modern literature.
Helvétius, from being the happiest of easy-going, benevolent philosophers, found himself, as it were in a second, in a position of great danger, and what Collé in his Journal called ‘cruel pain.’ His friends hotly urged upon him a retractation to soften the certain punishment awaiting him. His mother begged it from him with tears. Only Minette, a sterner and a braver soul, refused, though ‘a great personage’ besought her, to add her own entreaties to that end.
Still, it had to be done. Something of a coward this Helvétius, as Collé suggested now, as Diderot had suggested before? The rich and easy life he had led does not breed courage certainly. But, after all, Helvétius only did what Voltaire and many a better man declared it was essential to do in that day. He produced a ‘Letter from the Reverend Father ... Jesuit,’ in which he stated that he had written in perfect innocence and simplicity, and (this was undoubtedly true) that he had not had the slightest idea of the effect his book would create. He added, in the stiff phraseology of the time, words to the effect that he was an exceedingly religious man and very sorry indeed. The amende was so far accepted that the Parliament simply condemned him to give up his stewardship, and exiled him for two years to Voré.
What the book could never have done for itself, or for its author, persecution did for them both. ‘On the Mind’ became not the success of a season, but one of the most famous books of the century. The men who had hated it, and had not particularly loved Helvétius, flocked round him now. Voltaire forgave him all injuries, intentional or unintentional. ‘What a fuss about an omelette!’ he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,’ was his attitude now. But he soon came, as a Voltaire would come, to swearing that there was no more materialism in ‘On the Mind’ than in Locke, and a thousand more daring things in ‘The Spirit of Laws.’ Turgot and Condorcet forgave the philosophy, in their pity for the philosopher. D’Alembert made common cause with the man with whom he had nothing else in common. Rousseau instantly stopped writing his refutation. Diderot roundly swore ‘On the Mind’ was one of the great books of the age. Though Rome had censured it, cardinals wrote to condole with its author on the treatment it had received. It was translated into almost all European languages. Presently, England published an edition of her own. And Helvétius, when that two years’ exile—a punishment surely only in name?—was over, returning to Paris, found himself the most distinguished man in the capital.
In their fine hotel in the Rue Sainte-Anne (Rue Helvétius, the municipality of 1792 rechristened it, and Rue Saint-Helvétius, the cochers of Paris!) he and his wife received the flower of French society. Turgot introduced to them Morellet, who soon became a daily visitor, rode with them in the Bois, and stayed with them in the country. To their Tuesday dinners at two o’clock came Condorcet, d’Alembert, Diderot, d’Holbach, Galiani, Marmontel, Saint-Lambert, Raynal, Gibbon, and Hume—‘the States-General of the human mind,’ says Garat. Only time-serving Buffon, in order not to offend the Court, gave up visiting at the house. If Galiani found the religious, or irreligious, views of the salon too free, Madame his hostess shared his opinion, and would often purposely disturb a too daring conversation by drawing aside one of the coterie to talk with her à part. Helvétius himself was still, as he had ever been, listener rather than talker; or talker chiefly when he laid before his friends, with a naïveté and simplicity wholly at variance with the sophistry and artificiality of his writing, the difficulties he had encountered in it that morning, or some theories which it had suggested.
Sometimes, directly dinner was over, he slipped out to the opera, and left his wife to do the honours alone. When they were not entertaining themselves, they rarely went out, unless it were on Fridays to Madame Necker’s. ‘Jealous of his wife,’ said acid Grimm, accounting for this unsociability. ‘Happy with her,’ is perhaps a truer solution.
But if their own entourage was thus satisfactory, the Court was still bitterly hostile. Though Helvétius, of course, knew very well that that hostility had been the advertisement to which his book owed everything, still, its injustice rankled.
Admiring England invited him to her shores; and on March 10, 1764, he landed there, accompanied by his two daughters, Elizabeth and Geneviève, who, being only ten and twelve years respectively, were certainly rather young for their father to be seeking husbands for them among ‘the immaculate members of our august and incorruptible senate,’ as Horace Walpole declared that he was.