When the walkers returned the evening was drawing in, and there were lights and cards on the table. Some of the guests rested on long chairs. Some played picquet, some billiards, some tric-trac. Some visited their host’s picture gallery or his famous cabinet of natural history. He was himself always pleasant, courteous, cheerful. He loved to rally gently ‘the old mummy,’ as he called Father Hoop, and, perhaps, other Fathers, certain Jesuit priests, whom, in defiance of all his own principles, he generously made free of his house. Old Madame d’Aine entertained the whole company with her perfectly indecorous and perfectly good-natured wit. Madame d’Holbach, always ‘douce et honnête,’ ‘très aimable,’ and exquisitely dressed (the description is Madame d’Épinay’s), accepted her mother’s buffooneries with absolute complacency. Coarse as this society was in its speech--worse as it was in its easy condonation of vice than the worst social sets of our own day--in one respect at least it was immeasurably superior. Except for an occasional desultory game proposed by their hosts, the guests at Grandval were expected to bring, and did bring, their own entertainment with them in their own heads. To be bored would have been to confess oneself stupid. For the costly freaks of amusement, the elaborately idiotic devices of modern times to prevent the visitor having to fall back for an instant on his own resources or intelligence, Grandval had no need. If materialism was its creed, there was, as has been justly said, a great deal of ‘indirect spiritualism’ in its practice. Its lengthy dinners _were_ feasts of reason (in spite of those intellectual extravagances) as well as of costly meats and wines, and the ill-flavoured jests were only interludes in the midst of brilliant and fruitful talk on literature, history, politics, and the new world beginning for France. Supper came about nine--‘wit, gaiety, and champagne,’ Diderot described it. Then more conversation, until sometimes the party were still ardently philosophising with their bedroom candle-sticks in their hands. When d’Holbach had been entertaining, apparently without a break, for at least ten years, he took what seemed to his friends the foolhardy, not to say desperate, resolve of crossing the Channel. To bury himself in what Diderot called ‘the depths of England’ for two months is a very different thing, the Baron will find, from entertaining Englishmen (and those quite the most enlightened of their species) in Paris! He did find it so. If England delighted Voltaire, soothed wounded Helvétius, and pleased even critical Grimm, she thoroughly disgusted d’Holbach. He gave Diderot his vivid first impressions of her, and Diderot retailed them, red-hot, for Sophie Volland and for posterity.