Madame de Pompadour, who was acquainted with the master’s dispositions, would not have made advances to the philosophers had she not been possessed by the passion for flattery. But how was she to resist compliments so well turned as those of Voltaire? This man, who in speaking of the Christian religion cried: “Crush the wretch!” kneeled to a royal mistress while enlarging the boundaries of the most insipid flattery. The censer which he wanted to banish from the churches he seized in order to wave it respectfully before the alcove of a Pompadour! The Marquise had in her intimacy a man who never quitted her; this was Doctor Quesnay, her familiar, her guest, her confident, her physician, whom she had lodged just above her in an entresol of the château of Versailles. This little entresol, rendezvous of the boldest innovators, the most determined free-thinkers, the most ardent materialists, was the secret workshop of the future Revolution, the laboratory of disorder and destruction. There, talking, dining, declaiming, conspiring together, one met men such as D’Alembert, the chief of the Encyclopedists; Duclos, who said of the nobles who flattered him: “They are afraid of us as robbers are of street lamps with reflectors”; Helvetius, whose whole doctrine is summed up in this monstrous maxim, last word of egotism and immorality: “Man being merely a sensitive being should have but one object: the pleasure of the senses.” Marmontel relates that the Marquise de Pompadour, unable to induce this troop of philosophers to come down to her salon, came to their table instead and chatted with them. Doctor Quesnay, her physician, was one of those peasants of the Danube, or better, to adopt a happy expression of the De Goncourts, one of those courtiers of the Danube who cloak a refined cleverness under an aspect of rudeness, and who live by the monarchy even while playing to the republicans. Strange Brutuses, contraband Catos, whose beautiful maxims can deceive none but simpletons! Rude democrats in appearance, time-servers in reality, who are proud to dine with great people and whose so-called dignity provokes a smile! Quesnay, this physical confessor, knew both the strong and the weak sides of the Marquise. He knew so well how to take her that he could quietly install in his entresol, just above the favorite’s apartment, the first club, that which agitated for the first time the downfall of the Church and the monarchy.