Meanwhile, it had given Helvétius the best solace chagrins and declining life can have--a regular occupation. He was not old, and he was framed, says Guillois, to be a centenarian. But at that epoch men spent their health and strength with such fearful prodigality in their youth, that they rarely lived beyond what is now called middle age. Helvétius was not more than five-and-fifty when he became conscious of failing powers. Sport, which had been the delight of his life, lost its zest. The bankrupt condition of his country, her light-hearted descent to ruin, lay heavily now on a soul framed by nature to take the world serenely and to see the future fair. He was occupied, it is true, to the end in those works of benevolence and kindness which pay an almost certain interest in happiness to him who invests in them. Then, too, to the last, there was his wife, who might have loved a better man than he, but who--love, fortunately for most people, not being given entirely to worth--spent on him the fidelity and devotion of her life. On December 26, 1771, Helvétius died. He was buried in the Church of Saint-Roch, in Paris. Minette, a very rich widow, bought a house in Auteuil, where, visited by Turgot, Condorcet, Benjamin Franklin, Morellet, and the famous young doctor, Cabanis, she lived ‘to love those her husband had loved, and to do good to those he had benefited.’ Franklin, it is said, would fain have married her. And Turgot--who knows? Elizabeth and Geneviève, enormously rich heiresses, were married on the same day, a year after their father’s death, each to a Count. In 1772, ‘On Man’ was published, with the reception which has been recorded. That early poem, ‘Happiness,’ also now publicly appeared for the first time, with a prose preface by Saint-Lambert--the prose, said Galiani, being much better than the verse. To Helvétius’ works, or rather to his work, for ‘On the Mind’ is the only one that counts, is now generally meted the judgment which should have been meted to it when it appeared. Catch thistledown, imprison it, examine it beneath a microscope, and a hundred learned botanists will soon be confabulating and fighting over it. Put it in the free air and sunshine--and, lo! it is gone. ‘On the Mind’ was but thistledown, and the winds have blown it away. But the man who wrote it deserves recollection because, though he wrote it, he and Turgot alone among their compeers realised in practice that the best way to do good to mankind is to do good to individual man, here and to-day, and that the surest means to relieve the sorrows of the world is to help the one poor Lazarus lying, full of sores, at the gate. VIII _TURGOT: THE STATESMAN_ Among Voltaire’s friends Turgot and Condorcet at least were not merely great, but also good men. Even Condorcet, though himself of virtuous and noble life, had not that high standard of living, that sterner modern code of purity and uprightness, which were remarkably Turgot’s.