trine and achieved their success.

III. Its Popularity.

Owing to style it becomes pleasing.--Two stimulants peculiar
to the 18th century, coarse humor and irony.

Thanks to this method one can be understood; but, to be read, something
more is necessary. I compare the eighteenth century to a company of
people around a table; it is not sufficient that the food before them be
well prepared, well served, within reach and easy to digest, but it
is important that it should be some choice dish or, better still,
some dainty. The intellect is Epicurean; let us supply it with savory,
delicate viands adapted to its taste; it will eat so much the more owing
to its appetite being sharpened by sensuality. Two special condiments
enter into the cuisine of this century, and, according to the hand that
makes use of them, they furnish all literary dishes with a coarse or
delicate seasoning. In an Epicurean society, to which a return to nature
and the rights of instinct are preached, voluptuous images and ideas
present themselves involuntarily; this is the appetizing, exciting
spice-box. Each guest at the table uses or abuses it; many empty its
entire contents on their plate. And I do not allude merely to the
literature read in secret, to the extraordinary books Madame d'Audlan,
governess to the French royal children, peruses, and which stray off
into the hands of the daughters of Louis XV,[4113] nor to other books,
still more extraordinary,[4114] in which philosophical arguments appear
as an interlude between filth and the illustrations, and which are kept
by the ladies of the court on their toilet-tables, under the title of
"Heures de Paris." I refer here to the great men, to the masters of the
public intellect. With the exception of Buffon, all put pimento into
their sauces, that is to say, loose talk or coarseness of expression. We
find this even in the" Esprit des Lois;" there is an enormous amount of
it, open and covered up, in the "Lettres Persanes." Diderot, in his two
great novels, puts it in by handfuls, as if during an orgy. The teeth
crunch on it like so many grains of pepper, on every page of Voltaire.
We find it, not only piquant, but strong and of burning intensity,
in the "Nouvelle Heloise," scores of times in "Emile," and, in the
"Confessions," from one end to the other. It was the taste of the day.
M. de Malesherbes, so upright and so grave, committed "La Pucelle" to
memory and recited it. We have from