At d’Holbach’s table, with d’Holbach pushing, urging, with a quiet, invincible persistence, with Diderot waving the flag, leading, pleading, inciting, the ‘club holbachique’ dragged every dogma, every so-called fact of existence, every creed, into court before them; judged by the tribunal of their own reason, and cast away all that failed to satisfy it, as fagots for the burning. Grandval did not speculate, as did Voltaire and his guests at Ferney, on the attributes of God and the nature of the Soul. It began where he left off: asked not, What is God? but, Is there a God? not, What is the Soul? but, Have we a Soul? and in each case answered, No. Gagged for hundreds of years, Grandval used the newly seized freedom of thought and speech as a very little later the mob used its social and political liberty. The bloody extremes of the Terror, and the speculative extremes of d’Holbach’s table, were alike the result of long slavery and repression. That d’Holbach at least was strongly and honestly persuaded of the truth of his own unbelief, and was convinced that he did well to destroy in men those faiths which, looking back on history, he saw were responsible for the intolerable miseries of religious persecution, is not doubtful. D’Holbach was an honest man. It is true, indeed, that he was not one of the highest intellectual capacity. His seems to have been just the kind of clever mind--much more common among women than men--which is the dupe of its own cleverness, and easily led by it into absurdities which both wise people, and very simple ones, detect and avoid. Set the problem of deriving Everything from Nothing, it is not marvellous that the Grandval talkers descended sometimes to the wildest nonsense. Horace Walpole said acidly that they soon turned _his_ head with ‘a new system of antediluvian deluges which they have invented to prove the eternity of matter.... Nonsense for nonsense, I prefer the Jesuits.’ No wonder poor little Galiani (he _was_ an Abbé, though he very often forgot it) fled to the more circumspect gatherings of Madame Geoffrin, that the wise Turgot also turned away from Grandval, and d’Alembert drew back from an atheism so positive and arrogant. By the time the philosophers joined the women it was four, five, or even six o’clock. It _does_ take some hours to construct Man and the Universe out of Chaos, with nothing but blind Force to help us! Then came for the host himself, and some few of the other men of the party, a walk in the beautiful gardens. Most of the Baron’s guests, however, sat indoors with the women, Nature and exercise being both greatly out of fashion in the eighteenth century.