In their fine hotel in the Rue Sainte-Anne (Rue Helvétius, the municipality of 1792 rechristened it, and Rue Saint-Helvétius, the _cochers_ of Paris!) he and his wife received the flower of French society. Turgot introduced to them Morellet, who soon became a daily visitor, rode with them in the Bois, and stayed with them in the country. To their Tuesday dinners at two o’clock came Condorcet, d’Alembert, Diderot, d’Holbach, Galiani, Marmontel, Saint-Lambert, Raynal, Gibbon, and Hume--‘the States-General of the human mind,’ says Garat. Only time-serving Buffon, in order not to offend the Court, gave up visiting at the house. If Galiani found the religious, or irreligious, views of the _salon_ too free, Madame his hostess shared his opinion, and would often purposely disturb a too daring conversation by drawing aside one of the coterie to talk with her _à part_. Helvétius himself was still, as he had ever been, listener rather than talker; or talker chiefly when he laid before his friends, with a _naïveté_ and simplicity wholly at variance with the sophistry and artificiality of his writing, the difficulties he had encountered in it that morning, or some theories which it had suggested. Sometimes, directly dinner was over, he slipped out to the opera, and left his wife to do the honours alone. When they were not entertaining themselves, they rarely went out, unless it were on Fridays to Madame Necker’s. ‘Jealous of his wife,’ said acid Grimm, accounting for this unsociability. ‘Happy with her,’ is perhaps a truer solution. But if their own _entourage_ was thus satisfactory, the Court was still bitterly hostile. Though Helvétius, of course, knew very well that that hostility had been the advertisement to which his book owed everything, still, its injustice rankled. Admiring England invited him to her shores; and on March 10, 1764, he landed there, accompanied by his two daughters, Elizabeth and Geneviève, who, being only ten and twelve years respectively, were certainly rather young for their father to be seeking husbands for them among ‘the immaculate members of our august and incorruptible senate,’ as Horace Walpole declared that he was.