ent the rival _salon_ of
Mademoiselle Lespinasse, but either the law was relaxed in the case
of foreigners, or else Burke kept his own counsel. Here were for the
moment the headquarters of the party of innovation, and here he saw
some of the men who were busily forging the thunderbolts. His eye was
on the alert, now as always, for anything that might light up the
sovereign problems of human government. A book by a member of this
circle had appeared six months before, which was still the talk of the
town, and against which the Government had taken the usual impotent
measures of repression. This was the _Treatise on Tactics_, by a
certain M. de Guibert, a colonel of the Corsican legion. The important
part of the work was the introduction, in which the writer examined
with what was then thought extraordinary hardihood, the social and
political causes of the decline of the military art in France. Burke
read it with keen interest and energetic approval. He was present at
the reading of a tragedy by the same author, and gave some offence to
the rival coterie by preferring Guibert's tragedy to La Harpe's. To
us, however, of a later day, Guibert is known neither for his tragedy
nor his essay on tactics, nor for a memory so rapid that he could open
a book, throw one glance like a flash of lightning on to a page, and
then instantly repeat from it half a dozen lines word for word.
He lives in literature as the inspirer of that ardent passion of
Mademoiselle Lespinasse's letters, so unique in their consuming
intensity that, as has been said, they seem to burn the page on which
they are written. It was perhaps at Mademoiselle Lespinasse's that
Burke met Diderot. The eleven volumes of the illustrative plates
of the _Encyclopaeedia_ had been given to the public twelve months
before, and its editor was just released from the giant's toil of
twenty years. Voltaire was in imperial exile at Ferney. Rousseau was
copying music in a garret in the street which is now called after his
name, but he had long ago cut himself off from society; and Burke was
not likely to take much trouble to find out a man whom he had known in
England seven years before, and against whom he had conceived a
strong and lasting antipathy, as entertaining no principle either to
influence his heart or to guide his understanding save a deranged and
eccentric vanity.

It was the fashion for English visitors to go to Versailles. They saw
the dauphin and his brothers dine