Voltaire, now retired to Cirey, science, and Madame du Châtelet, had made poetry the fashion. I too will be a poet! The young Farmer-General racked his sharp brains a little, and as a result sent Voltaire some long, dismal cantos on ‘Happiness.’ The master replied with the kindliest criticism, and offered advice so keen and excellent that if poets were made, not born, Helvétius’ verses might still live. But, after all, advice by post is always unsatisfactory. Helvétius’ Farmer-Generalship made periodical tours in the provinces an agreeable necessity. On a journey through Champagne, what more natural than to stop awhile at Cirey, where Voltaire was writing ‘Mahomet,’ and Madame du Châtelet was the most delightful of blue-stocking hostesses? Between Arouet of five-and-forty and Claude-Adrien of five-and-twenty a warm friendship was cemented. All Voltaire’s correspondence from 1738 until 1771 is studded with letters to Helvétius. The young man was his ‘very dear child,’ ‘my rival, my poet, my philosopher.’ If he took so large and liberal a view of Helvétius’ talents as to declare that, as a poet, he had as much imagination as Milton, only more smoothness and regularity (!), yet he was not afraid to wrap up the pill of many a shrewd home truth in the fine sugar-plums of compliments. But, after all, _is_ poetry the easiest way to glory? Claude-Adrien, returned to Paris, walking through the Tuileries gardens one day, saw the hideous Maupertuis, the geometrician, surrounded by all the charming and pretty women, adoring him, and immediately decided to abandon verse and be a geometrician instead. But before he had taken a couple of steps in this direction, the publication of the ‘Spirit of Laws’ in 1748 electrified Europe, and changed his mind. To be sure, when, three years earlier, Montesquieu had brought the book up to Paris and asked the young Farmer-General’s judgment on it, Helvétius had replied that it was altogether unworthy of the author of the ‘Persian Letters,’ and had strongly recommended him not to publish it. Well, that advice can be conveniently forgotten. Helvétius paid Montesquieu the sincerest of all flattery by resolving on the spot to be a philosopher himself. If, between these eventful years of three-and-twenty and six-and-thirty, Helvétius had been nothing but an astute, ambitious young man-about-town, seeking the likeliest way to fame and fortune, he would have been undistinguishable from hundreds of others around him, and not worth distinguishing. But, at his worst, there was something in him which was never in that selfish crowd which thronged the galleries of Versailles.