As tax-gatherer, it was his interest and profession to extract the uttermost farthing--and he did not do it. Nay, he pleaded in high places for the wretches it was his business to ruin. When in Bordeaux they rebelled against an iniquitous new tax on wine, he encouraged the rebellion. Though he was constantly at Court and in a position which entailed lavish personal expenditure, he pensioned Thomas, the poet, out of his own pocket; and by an annuity of a thousand écus opened the world of letters to Saurin, hereafter the dramatist. The Abbé Sabatier de Castres declared himself to have been the recipient of his delicate and generous charity. Marivaux, the novelist and playwright, who was personally very uncongenial to Helvétius, received from him a yearly sum of two thousand livres. It was in Helvétius’ house in Paris, as he afterwards told Hume, the historian, that he concealed, coming and going for ‘nearly two years,’ Prince Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, at a time ‘when the danger was greater in harbouring him in Paris than in London’ on account of the clause in the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle of the year 1748, which stipulated that France should shelter no member of the family in her domains. Helvétius, like many another generous dupe, fell a victim to the Stuart grace and charm: ‘I had all his correspondence pass through my hands; met with his partisans upon the Pont Neuf; and found at last I had incurred all this danger and trouble for the most unworthy of all mortals,’ for a poor coward who ‘was so frightened when he embarked on his expedition to Scotland’ that he had literally to be carried on board by his attendants. (It is fair to say that Helvétius made this statement only on the testimony of a third person whose name is not given.) The sole good quality, indeed, his host ended by finding in this faint hope of Britain, the guest for whom he had risked his safety and spent his money, was that he was ‘no bigot.’ As this meant he had ‘learnt a contempt of all religions from the philosophers in Paris,’ not everyone would consider even this an advantage. In 1740, Madame de Graffigny, famous as the gossiping visitor at Cirey with whom Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet quarrelled, had arrived in Paris, and there, in the Rue d’Enfer, near the Luxembourg, had set up her _salon_. To insure its success, Madame, who was five-and-forty, fat and unbeautiful, had with her a charming niece, Mademoiselle Anne Catherine de Ligniville, who was then one-and-twenty, fair, handsome, intelligent. A year or two before, her aunt had adopted and so rescued her from a convent, to which the fact of the unfortunate girl having nineteen living brothers and sisters had condemned her.