XC
Alviza calls this an unpardonable want of refinement—to dare to make love by letter to a woman you adore and who looks at you tenderly, but declares that she can never love you.
XCI
It was a mistake of the greatest philosopher that France has had, not to have stayed in some Alpine solitude, in some remote abode, thence to launch his book on Paris without ever coming there himself[(58)]. Seeing Helvétius so simple and straightforward, unnatural, hot-house people like Suard, Marmontel or Diderot could never imagine they had a great philosopher before them. They were perfectly honest in their contempt for his profound reason. First of all, it was simple—a fault unpardonable in France; secondly, the author, not, of course, his book, was lowered in value by this weakness—the extreme importance he attached to getting what in France is called glory, to being, like Balzac, Voiture or Fontenelle, the fashion among his contemporaries.
Rousseau had too much feeling and too little logic, Buffon, in his Botanical Garden, was too hypocritical, and Voltaire too paltry to be able to judge the principle of Helvétius.
Helvétius was guilty of a little slip in calling this principle interest, instead of giving it a pretty name like pleasure;[1] but what are we to think of a nation's literature, which shows its sense by letting itself be led astray by a fault so slight?
The ordinary clever man, Prince Eugene of Savoy for example, finding himself in the position of Regulus, would have stayed quietly at Rome, and even laughed at the stupidity of the Carthaginian Senate. Regulus goes back to Carthage. Prince Eugene would have been prosecuting his own interest, and in exactly the same way Regulus was prosecuting his.
All through life a noble spirit is seeing possibilities of action, of which a common spirit can form no idea. The very second the possibility of that action becomes visible to the noble spirit, it is its interest thus to act.
If this noble spirit did not perform the action, which it has just perceived, it would despise itself—it would be unhappy. Man's duties are in the ratio of his moral range. The principle of Helvétius holds good, even in the wildest exaltations of love, even in suicide. It is contrary to his nature, it is an impossibility for a man not to do, always and at any moment you choose to take, that which is possible and which gives him most pleasure at that moment to do.