If it was not in his calmer nature to adore anyone, his love for her is on the testimony of the whole eighteenth century. His married happiness ‘bewildered and astonished’ it. ‘Those Helvétius,’ said a country neighbour discontentedly, ‘do not even pronounce the words, _my husband_, _my wife_, _my child_, as we others do.’ ‘Good husband, good father, good friend, good man,’ wrote unfavourable Grimm. The easy prosperity of Helvétius’ love for his wife, its freedom from storm and stress, left it, doubtless, a lighter thing than if it had been forged in the fire and beaten by the blows of affliction and reverse. It was thus with all his qualities. Kind, rather than lovable; charming, rather than great; equable, because nothing in his destiny came to move the deep waters, or because there were no deep waters to be moved: these were the key-notes to Helvétius’ character. The first child of the marriage, a daughter, was born in 1752, and the second, also a daughter, in 1754. Father and mother devoted themselves to the education of the little girls, though in their time polite society considered that parents had sufficiently obliged their children by bringing them into the world, and that further favours, such as a judicious training, were entirely superfluous. The household was completed by two superannuated secretaries, whom Helvétius kept, very characteristically, not because he wanted them, but because he feared no one else would want them either. One of them, Baudot, had known his master from a child, and spoke to him as if he were one still. ‘I have certainly not _all_ the faults Baudot finds in me,’ observed Helvétius tranquilly, ‘but I have some of them. Who would tell me of them if I did not keep him?’ Sometimes visitors came to Voré, but for so sociable an age, not very often. Though they were always made generously welcome, they must have known they were not necessary to that _ménage_. Still, they were useful, if only to prove to these married lovers how much happier they were alone--just as the four gay winter months they spent in Paris doubled the delights of peaceful Voré.