bed his spirit, "directed for fifty years towards the
great objects of nature," the illustrious scholar had been permitted to
see his statue placed during his lifetime in the _Jardin du Roi_. On
sending to the Empress Catherine his bust which she had asked him for,
he wrote to his son who had charge of it: "I forgot to remark to you,
whilst talking of bust and effigy, that, by the king's order, they have
put at the bottom of my statue the following inscription: _Majestati
naturae par ingenium_ (Genius to match the majesty of nature). It is not
from pride that I send you this, but perhaps Her Majesty will have it put
at the bottom of the bust."

"How many great men do you reckon?" Buffon was asked one day. "Five,"
answered he at once: " Newton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, and myself."

This self-appreciation, fostered by the homage of his contemporaries,
which showed itself in Buffon undisguisedly with an air of ingenuous
satisfaction, had poisoned a life already extinguished ten years before
amidst the bitterest agonies. Taking up arms against a society in which
he had not found his proper place, Jean Jacques Rousseau had attacked the
present as well as the past, the Encyclopaedists as well as the old
social organization. It was from the first his distinctive trait to
voluntarily create a desert around him. The eighteenth century was in
its nature easily seduced; liberal, generous, and open to allurements, it
delighted in intellectual contentions, even the most dangerous and the
most daring; it welcomed with alacrity all those who thus contributed to
its pleasures. The charming drawing-rooms of Madame Geoffrin, of Madame
du Deffand, of Madlle. Lespinasse, belonged of right to philosophy.
"Being men of the world as well as of letters, the philosophers of the
eighteenth century had passed their lives in the pleasantest and most
brilliant regions of that society which was so much attacked by them.
It had welcomed them, made them famous; they had mingled in all the
pleasures of its elegant and agreeable existence; they shared in all its
tastes, its manners, all the refinements, all the susceptibilities of a
civilization at the same time old and rejuvenated, aristocratic and
literary; they were of that old regimen which was demolished by their
hands. The philosophical circle was everywhere, amongst the people of
the court, of the church, of the long robe, of finance; haughty here,
complaisant there, at one time ind