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If you recall the heads of Barbe-Marbois, Boissy d'Anglas, Morellet, Helvetius, or Frederick the Great, you will see the exact image of Doctor Minoret, whose green old age resembled that of those celebrated personages. All men of this stamp have high brows retreating at the summit, the sigh of a tendency to materialism.
And it is curious to see them in session. Toward the end of September, 1793, one of the veterans of liberal philosophy and political economy, belonging to the French Academy and ruined by the Revolution, the old Abbe Morellet, needs a certificate of civism, to enable him to obtain payment of the small pension of one thousand francs, which the Constituent Assembly had voted him in recompense for his writings; the Commune, desiring information about this, selects three of its body to inquire into it.
Franklin, who always liked him, gave him letters to the celebrated Malesherbes, Le Roy, the Abbe Morellet, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, introducing him "as an ingenious, honest man, author of 'Common Sense, a famous piece, published here with great effect on the minds of people at the beginning of the Revolution."
Though dying, she still had relations with Choiseul, and so Morellet was flung into the Bastile.
"She has made for fifty years the charm of her society," said the Abbe Morellet. "She has been constantly, habitually virtuous and benevolent." Her salon brought authors and artists into direct relation with distinguished patrons, especially foreigners, and thus contributed largely to the spread of French art and letters. It was counted among "the institutions of the eighteenth century."
"Ne jurez pas," said Ormond; "but at least in one respect I have not quite lost my senses; I know the value and feel the want of a safe, good guide in Paris: if I dared to ask such a favour, I should, since he has expressed some interest for me, beg to be permitted to cultivate the acquaintance of M. l'Abbe Morellet."
Saurin, the Abbé Raynal, and the luncheons of the Abbé Morellet on the first Sunday of the month; to the latter functions were invited all the celebrities of the other salons, as well as artists and musicians—it was there that the famous quarrel of the Gluck and Piccini parties originated.
"We talk of art, of poetry, of philosophy, and of love, of the greatness and vanity of our own enterprises... Of gods and kings, of space and time, of death and of life." "They say things to make a thunderbolt strike the house a hundred times, if it struck for that," said the Abbe Morellet.
Geoffrin for ten years "as her tenant," and the indispensable Abbé Morellet were the exceptions who might be present upon that day. From the very beginning she formed the habit of permitting conversation to go just so far, then cutting it off with her famous: Voil qui est bien!
He knew, however, that the ground taken up by his countrymen was too narrow. He wrote to the French economist, Morellet: "Nothing can be better expressed than your sentiments are on this point, where you prefer liberty of trading, cultivating, manufacturing, etc., even to civil liberty, this being affected but rarely, the other every hour."
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