La Blancherie was, no doubt, an excellent example of the eighteenth-century literary adventurer. His first book, a souvenir of college life and his travels in America, was an impossible account of youthful follies and their distressing results, and seems never to have aroused anybody’s interest save Manon’s, and that only during one year. His next venture was to announce himself as the General Agent for Scientific and Artistic Correspondence, and to open a salon in Paris, where he arranged expositions of pictures, scientific conferences, lectures and art _soirées_. In connection with his salon La Blancherie published from 1779 to 1787 the _Nouvelles de la république des lettres et des arts_, and a catalogue of French artists from Cousin to 1783. Both of these works, now extremely rare, are useful in detailed study of the French art of the eighteenth century, and were used by the De Goncourts in preparing their work on this subject. In 1788 La Blancherie’s salon was closed, and he went to London. By chance he inhabited Newton’s old house. He was inspired to exalt the name of the scientist. His practical plan for accomplishing this was to demand that the name of Newton should be given alternately with that of George to the Princes of England, that all great scientific discoveries should be celebrated in hymns which should be sung at divine services, and that in public documents after the words _the year of grace_ should be added _and of Newton_. In short, La Blancherie was in his literary life vain and pretentious, without other aim than to make a sensation. In his social relations he was a perfect type of _le petit maître_, whose philosophy Marivaux sums up: “A Paris, ma chère enfant, les cœurs on ne se les donne pas, on se les prête” (In Paris, my dear, we never give our hearts, we only lend them). Manon Phlipon’s idealization and subsequent dismissal of La Blancherie is an excellent example of how a sentimental girl’s imagination will carry her to the brink of folly, and of the cold-blooded manner in which, if she is disillusioned, she will discuss what she has done when under the influence of her infatuation. No doubt the decline of Manon’s interest in La Blancherie was due no little to the rise of her interest at this time in another type of man,—the middle-aged man of experience and culture whom necessity has forced to work in the world, but whom reflection and character have led to remain always aloof from it.