Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/425



T was a hundred years ago, in the salon of the Grand-Val, after dinner. Here was assembled that fastidious company of wits as well known to us through the letters of Diderot to Mademoiselle Voland as though we, too, had been guests under Holbach's roof. There was Diderot himself, the most German-like of Frenchmen, and Grimm, the most Frenchy of Germans ; that peevish Scot, Hoop, and the little Neapolitan abbé, Galiani, in whom playfulness and levity often concealed profound thinking. There, too, were those women whose redoubtable charms are immortalized in Rousseau's "Confessions," as those of Helen in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey."

The fortunate ones of this world had then a good time, especially in France. The trammels of superstition which for seventeen centuries had made slaves of the human race seemed to have been burst asunder. The sun of a cloudless day was illumining and warming the intellectual world; while on the other side of the Atlantic the dawn of popular freedom and human dignity was beginning to appear. Despotism in church and state was tottering before assaults which daily