The Baron was as prudent in the time of his death as he had been in the conduct of his life. He died on January 21 of that _annus mirabilis_, 1789. Five years more, and he would have seen his own principles enthroned with the Goddess of Reason at Notre-Dame, and as, in part at least, the consequence of her reign, the streets of Paris running with blood. Directly after his death, the secret of his authorship became public property. It is permissible only to think of d’Holbach now as his guests and friends thought of him in life--not as the author of ‘The System of Nature’ at all, but as the liberal patron of letters, the best and kindliest of good, easy men. One may be permitted to hate as bitterly as Voltaire did the unreasonableness of his philosophy of pure reason; and yet to regard the philosopher with gratitude and appreciation, as the man who played in the great intellectual revival of his time one of the homeliest, yet one of the most necessary of parts. For d’Holbach provided the _rendez-vous_. VI _GRIMM: THE JOURNALIST_ The great Encyclopædia of Diderot and d’Alembert was to bring light to the people; the ‘Literary Correspondence’ of Melchior Grimm was to bring light to kings. The Encyclopædia was the conception of those who knew that they were preparing mighty changes, but who did not live to see them; the ‘Literary Correspondence’ was the work of a man whose shrewd eyes foresaw little, but who lived to see all. The Encyclopædia is dead, as a great man dies, having finished his work. The ‘Correspondence’--which could not cure those royal maladies, blindness, ignorance, and hardness of heart--still lives a gay little life as the most perfect contemporary record of any literary epoch in history. * * * * * In 1753, the sensibilities of sentimental Paris were most agreeably touched by the pathetic story of a young gentleman who, having had his suit rejected by a charming opera-dancer, Mademoiselle [Illustration: FRÉDÉRIC-MELCHIOR GRIMM. _From an Engraving, after Carmontelle, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris._] Fel, straightway took to his bed and to a trance in which he passed whole nights and days, ‘without speaking, hearing, or answering, as if he were dead.’ The Abbé Raynal and Jean Jacques Rousseau constituted themselves his nurses. They were both too romantic, and too much the children of their time, to try the common-sense expedient of leaving the rejected lover severely alone, or of throwing a bucket of cold water over him. But when Rousseau saw a smile on the doctor’s face as he left the patient’s room, his heart began to harden a little. And, sure enough, one fine morning up gets the invalid, dresses, resumes his ordinary course of life and never again mentions his malady to his nurses--even to thank them.