ilosophers, whom I wished in
heaven, though they do not wish themselves so. They are so
overbearing and underbred.... I sometimes go to Baron
d'Holbach's, but I have left off his dinners, as there was no
bearing the authors and philosophers and savants of which he
has a pigeon-house full. They soon turned my head with a
system of antediluvian deluges which they have invented to
prove the eternity of matter.... In short, nonsense for
nonsense, I liked the Jesuits better than the
philosophers."[246]

Hume, as everybody knows, found "the men of letters really very
agreeable; all of them men of the world, living in entire, or almost
entire harmony, among themselves, and quite irreproachable in their
morals." He places Diderot among those whose person and conversation he
liked best.

We have always heard much of the power of the Salon in the eighteenth
century, and it was no doubt a remarkable proof of the incorporation of
intellectual interests in manners, that so many groups of men and women
should have met habitually every week for the purpose of conversing
about the new books and new plays, the fresh principles and fresh ideas,
that were produced by the incessant vivacity of the time. The Salon of
the eighteenth century passed through various phases; its character
shifted with the intellectual mood of the day, but in all its phases it
was an institution in which women occupied a place that they have never
acquired in any society out of France. We are not here called upon to
speculate as to the reasons for this; it is only worth remarking that
Diderot was not commonly at his ease in the society of ladies, and that
though he was a visitor at Madame Geoffrin's and at Mademoiselle
Lespinasse's, yet he was not a constant attendant at any of the famous
circles of which women had made themselves the centre. The reader of
Madame d'Epinay's memoir is informed how hard she found it to tame
Diderot into sociability. "What a pity," she exclaims, "that men of
genius and of such eminent merit as M. Diderot should thus wrap
themselves up in their philosophy, and disdain the homage that people
would eagerly pay them in any society that they would honour with their
presence."[247] One of the soundest social observers of the time was
undoubtedly Duclos. His _Considerations on the Manners of the Century_,
which was published in 1751, abounds in admirable criticism. He makes
two remarks with w