In the spring of 1761, there was published, at Amsterdam, a little volume, entitled _Liberté de la France contre le pouvoir arbitraire de l'excommunication, ouvrage dont est spécialement redevable aux sentiments génereux et supérieurs de Mlle. Clai_.... This book, which was the work of one Huerne de la Mothe, an advocate of the Parliament of Paris, had been inspired by Mlle. Clairon, and was preceded by a letter from the actress to the author, in which she announced to the public that she hesitated to exercise her profession any longer, owing to her fear of the excommunication to which it subjected her. The bigots, ecclesiastical and lay, who were very roughly handled in the book, were exasperated to the last degree; the Grand'Chambre issued a decree ordering the obnoxious work to be burned by the public executioner in the Place de Grève, and poor Huerne de la Mothe was struck off the roll of advocates. Mlle. Clairon, however, who felt herself to be the cause of his misfortune, did not allow him to suffer by his championship of her profession, and persuaded the Duc de Choiseul to nominate him to a lucrative post in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. * * * * * Mlle. Clairon had many enemies: enemies in her own profession, enemies in the fashionable world, and enemies in the Republic of Letters. Two of the most formidable among the last-named were La Harpe and Fréron, the critic, the sworn foe of the philosophers. La Harpe hated her, it is said, because she had contemptuously refused to act in his plays; Fréron, because of her friendship with the elders of the Holy Philosophical Church, and, more especially, with its Patriarch, Voltaire, under whose blistering ridicule he had long writhed. La Harpe contented himself by making epigrams about her in society; but Fréron went further, and dared to attack her in print. There had recently appeared at the Comédie a young, charming, accomplished, and, _mirabile dictu_, virtuous actress, named Mlle. d'Oligny, best remembered in theatrical history as the original representative of Rosine in Beaumarchais's _Barbier de Seville._[196] Fréron, who prided himself on being one of the first to discover the talent of this lady, could not resist the temptation of contrasting her blameless life with that of Mlle. Clairon, and proceeded to do so in a remarkably effective manner. In his _Année littéraire_, under date January 17, 1765, appeared an _éloge_ in verse of Mlle. d'Oligny, "who had never consented to listen to any proposition of fortune, at the expense of her innocence," followed by a paragraph written by Fréron himself, which, although she was not actually mentioned by name, no one could have the least doubt referred to Mlle. Clairon:--