Helvétius wrote himself down self-seeker and materialist, and in every action of his life gave his utterance the lie. Helvétius was, as Voltaire had been, a courtier--not the teacher of kings, like Grimm, but their friend and servant. Helvétius alone was at once of that body, which of all bodies the philosophers most hated, the Farmers-General--the extortionate tax-gatherers of old France--and of a practical philanthropy Voltaire himself might have envied. He belonged to a family famous in the medical profession. His great-grandfather, a religious refugee from the Palatinate, had been a clever quack, practising in Holland. His grandfather introduced ipecacuanha to the doctors of Paris, and his father, having saved Louis XV.’s life in some childish complaint, was made physician to the Queen and Councillor of State. Still, the [Illustration: CLAUDE-ADRIEN HELVÉTIUS. _From an Engraving by St. Aubin, after the Portrait by Vanloo._] family fortunes were but mediocre. Little Claude-Adrien, who was born in 1715, was at first educated at home by a mother ‘full of sweetness and goodness.’ Her tenderness, perhaps, was an ill preparation for the harsher, wider world of the famous school of Saint Louis-le-Grand, whither Claude-Adrien was presently sent. It was Voltaire’s old school, and it was Voltaire’s old school-master, Père Porée, who helped the shy, sensitive, new boy with kindliness and encouragement, and first roused in him a love of letters. Grimm, who nearly always has his pen pointed with malice when he writes of Helvétius, records that poor Claude-Adrien always seemed stupid at school through being the victim of a chronic cold in the head: an unromantic affliction, which would make genius itself uninteresting. Young Helvétius was no genius, however. After leaving school he was sent to an uncle, who was a superintendent of taxes at Caen, to learn finance. There he wrote the usual boyish tragedy of promise--never to be performed--and the usual youthful verses, and was made a member of the Caen Literary Academy. The sensitive shyness soon disappeared. Young, healthy, and handsome, loving literature much and women more, an excellent dancer and fencer, clever, cool, agreeable, and much minded to get on in the world, young Helvétius comes up to Paris. At three-and-twenty, in 1738, being the son of his father, and having the necessary financial equipment, he was made Farmer-General, a post certain to bring in two or three thousand a year, and possibly, with the requisite extortion and unscrupulousness, a good deal more.