If the fact that Vauvenargues loved him bears high testimony to the character of Voltaire, the virtue of Vauvenargues, like the virtue of Addison, may well give ‘reputation to an age.’ Flippant and false, at once supremely clever and supremely silly, the eighteenth century, to whom Duty was a mockery and Wit was a god, is in some sort redeemed by the brave, silent life, and the high ideals he proved practical and not visionary by fulfilling himself, of this soldier aphorist. While of all the Brothers of Progress, Vauvenargues alone approached Truth as a suppliant, and thus gained, surely, the nearest vision of her face. V _D’HOLBACH: THE HOST_ In the most sociable city, in the most sociable age in the history of the world, there is one man who stands out as the host _par excellence_. In the Rue Royale at Paris and in his country house at Grandval, near Charenton, Baron d’Holbach entertained for more than thirty years the wit and the celebrity of all nations. His name runs like a thread through the English memoirs and letters of the mid-eighteenth century. There was not a Frenchman or a Frenchwoman of fame and fashion who had not dined at the Rue Royale on the immortal Thursdays and Sundays, or driven down from Paris to Grandval for a few days of a company and a conversation unequalled and, perhaps, unrivalled. But it is not only or chiefly as the Host of All the World that d’Holbach is remarkable. He was the ‘_maître d’hôtel_ of philosophy.’ Voltaire, banned and exiled, could only encourage [Illustration: PAUL-HENRI-THIRY. BARON D’HOLBACH. _From a Portrait in the Musée Condé, Chantilly._] his children from lonely Cirey or far Geneva. D’Holbach was here, in the midst of them. Comfortable, cultured, liberal, the freest of all free thinkers, and yet always in the smiling good favour of the authorities, not shy and retiring like d’Alembert, not wild and imprudent like Diderot, without a profession to distract him from his appointed _métier_, with a well-stocked mind, an enormous income, a fine library, a pretty wife, a first-rate cook, and an admirable cellar--why, here was the man intended by Fate to be the link to bind us together and to make for us a meeting-place, a common ground, where, in words to be first applied only to the Head of our Party, In very wantonness of childish mirth _We_ puffed Bastilles, and thrones, and shrines away, Insulted Heaven, and liberated earth. Was it for good or evil? Who shall say?