1770. [15:18] He was never an official personage. His entire life was
spent in study, writing and conversation with his friends. He traveled
very little; the world came to him, to the _Cafe de l'Europe_, as
Abbe Galiani called Paris. From time to time Holbach went to
Contrexeville for his gout and once to England to visit David Garrick;
but he disliked England very thoroughly and was glad to get back to
Paris. The events of his life in so far as there were any, were his
relations with people. He knew intimately practically all the great
men of his century, except Montesquieu and Voltaire, who were off the
stage before his day. [15:19] Holbach's most intimate and life-long
friend among the great figures of the century was Diderot, of whom
Rousseau said, "A la distance de quelques siecles du moment ou il a
vecu, Diderot paraitra un homme prodigieux; on regardera de loin
cette tete universelle avec une admiration melee d'etonnement, comme
nous regardons aujourd'hui la tete des Platon et des Aristote." [15:20]
All his contemporaries agreed that nothing was so charged with divine
fire as the conversation of Diderot. Gautherin, in his fine bronze
of him on the Place Saint-Germain-des-Pres, seems to have caught the
spirit of his talk and has depicted him as he might have sat in the
midst of Holbach's society, of which he was the inspiration and the soul.
Holbach backed Diderot financially in his great literary and scientific
undertaking and provided articles for the Encyclopedia on chemistry
and natural science. Diderot had a high opinion of his erudition and
said of him, "Quelque systeme que forge mon imagination, je suis sur
que mon ami d'Holbach me trouve des faits et des autorites pour le
justifier." [16:21] Opinions differ in regard to the intellectual
influence of these men upon each other. Diderot was without doubt
the greater thinker, but Holbach stated his atheism with far greater
clarity and Diderot gave his sanction to it by embellishing Holbach's
books with a few eloquent pages of his own. Diderot said to Sir