healthy society. Turgot's early
passion for literature had made him seize an occasion of being
introduced to even so moderately renowned a professor of it as Madame de
Graffigny. He happened to be intimate with her niece, who afterwards
became the lively and witty wife of Helvetius, somewhat to the surprise
of Turgot's friends. For although he persuaded Mademoiselle de
Ligniville to present him to her aunt, and though he assiduously
attended Madame de Graffigny's literary gatherings, Turgot would
constantly quit the circle of men of letters for the sake of a game of
battledore with the comely and attractive niece. Hence the astonishment
of men that from such familiarity there grew no stronger passion, and
that whatever the causes of such reserve, the only issue was a tender
and lasting friendship.[23]

[Footnote 23: Morellet, i. 140.]

Madame de Graffigny had begged Turgot's opinion upon the manuscript of a
work composed, as so many others were, after the pattern of
Montesquieu's _Lettres Persanes_,--now nearly thirty years old,--and
bearing the accurately imitative title of _Lettres Peruviennes_. A
Peruvian comes to Europe, and sends to a friend or mistress in Peru a
series of remarks on civilisation. Goldsmith's delightful _Citizen of
the World_ is the best known type in our own literature of this
primitive form of social criticism. The effect upon common opinion of
criticism cast in such a mould, presenting familiar habits,
institutions, and observances, in a striking and unusual light, was to
give a kind of Socratic stimulus to people's ideas about education,
civilisation, conduct, and the other topics springing from a comparison
between the manners of one community and another. That one of the two,
whether Peru, or China, or Persia, was a community drawn mainly from the
imagination, did not render the contrast any the less effective in
stirring men's minds.

By the middle of the century the air was full of ideas upon these social
subjects. The temptation was irresistible to turn from the confusion of
squalor, oppression, license, distorted organisation, penetrative
disorder, to ideal states comprising a little range of simple
circumstances, and a small number of types of virtuous and
unsophisticated character. Much came of the relief thus sought and
found. It was the beginning of the subversive process, for it taught men
to look away from ideas of practical amelioration. The genius of
Rousseau gave these dreams