Before returning from the author to his books, it is interesting to know how he and his circle appeared at this period to some who did not belong to them.  Gibbon, for instance, visited Paris in the spring of 1763.  “The moment,” he says, “was happily chosen.  At the close of a successful war the British name was respected on the continent; clarum et venerabile nomen gentibus.  Our opinions, our fashions, even our games were adopted in France, a ray of national glory illuminated each individual, and every Englishman was supposed to be born a patriot and philosopher.”  He mentions D’Alembert and Diderot as those among the men of letters whom he saw, who “held the foremost rank in merit, or at least in fame."[245]

Horace Walpole was often in Paris, and often saw the philosophic circle, but it did not please his supercilious humour.

“There was no soul in Paris but philosophers, whom I wished in heaven, though they do not wish themselves so.  They are so overbearing and underbred....  I sometimes go to Baron d’Holbach’s, but I have left off his dinners, as there was no bearing the authors and philosophers and savants of which he has a pigeon-house full.  They soon turned my head with a system of antediluvian deluges which they have invented to prove the eternity of matter....  In short, nonsense for nonsense, I liked the Jesuits better than the philosophers."[246]

Hume, as everybody knows, found “the men of letters really very agreeable; all of them men of the world, living in entire, or almost entire harmony, among themselves, and quite irreproachable in their morals.”  He places Diderot among those whose person and conversation he liked best.

We have always heard much of the power of the Salon in the eighteenth century, and it was no doubt a remarkable proof of the incorporation of intellectual interests in manners, that so many groups of men and women should have met habitually every week for the purpose of conversing about the new books and new plays, the fresh principles and fresh ideas, that were produced by the incessant vivacity of the time.  The Salon of the eighteenth century passed through various phases; its character shifted with the intellectual mood of the day, but in all its phases it was an institution in which women occupied a place that they have never acquired in any society out of France.  We are not here called upon to speculate as to the reasons for this; it is only worth remarking that Diderot was not commonly at his ease in the society of ladies, and that though he was a visitor at Madame Geoffrin’s and at Mademoiselle Lespinasse’s, yet he was not a constant attendant at any of the famous circles of which women had made themselves the centre.  The reader of Madame d’Epinay’s memoir is informed how hard she found it to tame Diderot into sociability.  “What a pity,” she exclaims, “that men of genius and of such eminent merit as M. Diderot should thus wrap themselves up in their