Page:Novels of Honoré de Balzac Volume 23.djvu/51

 used to call Mords-les, and protected by the encyclopedists, Doctor Minoret attached himself like a satellite to the great doctor Bordeu, Diderot’s friend. D’Alembert, Helvétius, Baron d’Holbach, and Grimm, before whom he was a mere lad, doubtless ended, like Bordeu, by interesting themselves in Minoret, who, about 1777, had a fairly large practice of deists, encyclopedists, sensualists, and materialists, whatever you like to call the rich philosophers of those times. Although he was in no way a quack, he invented the famous balsam of Lelièvre, so much praised by the Mercure de France, the advertisement of which was always at the end of this newspaper, the weekly organ of the encyclopedists. The apothecary Lelièvre, a clever man, saw a speculation in what Minoret had only looked upon as a preparation to be placed in the pharmacopoeia, and loyally he had shared his profits with the doctor, who was a pupil of Rouelle’s in chemistry, as he had been Bordeu’s in medicine. One might have been a materialist for less. In 1778, period when la Nouvelle Héloïse reigned and people sometimes married for love, the doctor made a love match with the daughter of a famous harpsichord player, Valentin Mirouët, a celebrated musician, weak and delicate, who was killed by the Revolution. Minoret was intimately acquainted with Robespierre, to whom he had formerly given a gold medal for an essay upon the following subject: What is the origin of the opinion which spreads over the whole family part of the shame attached to the ignominious