He had begun by sitting and listening to criticisms, mostly adverse, on his ‘Christianity Unveiled’ and the pamphlets which followed it, which were all from his pen. Many people start a literary career under as thick a veil of anonymity. A few have died still under the disguise. But no book has ever attracted such howls of rage and imprecation, such a storm of universal loathing and opprobrium as did ‘The System of Nature,’ while its author sat in perfect peace and comfort, beloved by all his fellows, safe, unsuspected, and serene. D’Holbach, said Grimm long after, when d’Holbach was dead and the secret out, never ran any danger from his books, save the danger of being bored by them. Naigeon, La Grange, and Diderot were in his confidence. Diderot was more than in it. To most of the Baron’s works--certainly to ‘The System of Nature’--he lent some of the colour and fire of his genius. Poor Diderot was always suspect of anything rash and extreme. ‘The System of Nature’ was published quite early in August. On the 10th of that month, Denis slipped off to Langres and the baths of Bourbonne. The Baron went on having dinner parties. On the 18th, the book was condemned to be burnt. The Baron continued to dine in peace. Then, as men read it, and passed it secretly from one to the other, the murmurs of horror and hatred swelled to a roar--the roar of the great multitude, always deafening and terrible. Above it, d’Holbach heard, close, distinct, and scathing, the bitter condemnations of his own guests and friends. He went on dining to that accompaniment. From Ferney, Voltaire pronounced the work ‘a philippic against God’ and ‘a sin against nature;’ swore it had wrought irreparable harm to philosophy; passionately refuted it in his article on ‘God’ in the Philosophical Dictionary; while it wrung from him, in a letter to the Duc de Richelieu, that famous confession: ‘_I_ think it very good to sustain the doctrine of the existence of a punishing and rewarding God: society has need of this opinion.’ Galiani declared ‘this Mirabaud’ to be ‘the Abbé Terrai of metaphysics: he causes the bankruptcy of knowledge, of happiness, and of the human mind.’ La Harpe called it ‘this infamous book.’ Young Goethe said he fled from it as from a spectre. It caused Frederick the Great to break with the philosophic party. Grimm, indeed--but this was after d’Holbach’s death, when it was no longer dangerous to hold such opinions--praised the purity of its author’s intentions, and the passages of ‘imposing eloquence’ the book contained--though these, he added, Grimm-like, ‘were by Diderot.’