it, a cloak was thrown carelessly. Several shelves were filled with books ; these were almost entirely the works of the philosophers of the time — the philosophers of the material school, especially the Encyclopédistes, whom Robespierre afterwards so singularly attacked when the coward deemed it unsafe to leave his reign without a God.'"[O 1] A volume lay on a table — it was one of Voltaire, and the page was opened at his argumentative assertion of the existence of the Supreme Being.[O 2] The margin was covered with pencilled notes, in the stiff but tremulous hand of old age; all in attempt to refute or to ridicule the logic of the sage of Ferney: Voltaire did not go far enough for the annotator! The clock struck two, when the sound of steps was heard without. The stranger silently seated himself on the farther side of the bed, and its drapery screened him, as he sat, from the eyes of a man who now entered on tiptoe; it was the same person who had passed him on
- ↑ "Cette secte (les Encyclopédistes) propagea avec beaucoup de zèle l'opinion du matérialisme, qui prévalut parmi les grands et parmi les beaux esprits; on lui doit en partie cette espèce de philosophie pratique qui, reduisant l'Egoisme en systême, regarde la société humaine comme une guerre de ruse, le succès comme la règle du juste et de l'injuste, la probité comme une affaire de goût, ou de bienséance, le monde comme le patrimoine des fripons adroits."[I 1] — Discours de Robespierre, Mai 7, 1794.
- ↑ Histoire de Jenni.
- ↑ This sect (the Encyclopædists) propagate with much zeal the doctrine of materialism, which prevails among the great and the wits; we owe to it partly that kind of practical philosophy which, reducing Egotism to a system, looks upon society as a war of cunning — success the rule of right and wrong — honesty as an affair of taste or decency — and the world as the patrimony of clever scoundrels.
