Thanks to this method one can be understood; but, to be read, something more is necessary.  I compare the eighteenth century to a company of people around a table; it is not sufficient that the food before them be well prepared, well served, within reach and easy to digest, but it is important that it should be some choice dish or, better still, some dainty.  The intellect is Epicurean; let us supply it with savory, delicate viands adapted to its taste; it will eat so much the more owing to its appetite being sharpened by sensuality.  Two special condiments enter into the cuisine of this century, and, according to the hand that makes use of them, they furnish all literary dishes with a coarse or delicate seasoning.  In an Epicurean society, to which a return to nature and the rights of instinct are preached, voluptuous images and ideas present themselves involuntarily; this is the appetizing, exciting spice-box.  Each guest at the table uses or abuses it; many empty its entire contents on their plate.  And I do not allude merely to the literature read in secret, to the extraordinary books Madame d’Audlan, governess to the French royal children, peruses, and which stray off into the hands of the daughters of Louis XV,[13] nor to other books, still more extraordinary,[14] in which philosophical arguments appear as an interlude between filth and the illustrations, and which are kept by the ladies of the court on their toilet-tables, under the title of “Heures de Paris.”  I refer here to the great men, to the masters of the public intellect.  With the exception of Buffon, all put pimento into their sauces, that is to say, loose talk or coarseness of expression.  We find this even in the” Esprit des Lois;” there is an enormous amount of it, open and covered up, in the “Lettres Persanes.”  Diderot, in his two great novels, puts it in by handfuls, as if during an orgy.  The teeth crunch on it like so many grains of pepper, on every page of Voltaire.  We find it, not only piquant, but strong and of burning intensity, in the “Nouvelle Héloïse,” scores of times in " Emile,” and, in the “Confessions,” from one end to the other.  It was the taste of the day.  M. de Malesherbes, so upright and so grave, committed “La Pucelle” to memory and recited it.  We have from the pen of Saint-Just, the gloomiest of the “Mountain,” a poem as lascivious as that of Voltaire, while Madame Roland, the noblest of the Girondins, has left us confessions as venturesome and specific as those of Rousseau[15]. — On the other hand there is a second box, that containing the old Gallic salt, that is to say, humor and raillery.  Its mouth is wide open in the hands of a philosophy proclaiming the sovereignty of reason.  Whatever is contrary to Reason is to it absurd and therefore open to ridicule.  The moment the solemn hereditary mask covering up an abuse is brusquely and adroitly torn aside, we feel a curious spasm, the corners of our mouth stretching apart and our breast heaving violently, as at a kind