La Mettrie was fortunate enough, at this crucial moment, to find a protector in Frederick the Great, who invited him to Berlin. In Prussia he was appointed a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences, as well as "physician ordinary" and "reader" to the king. Profiting from the security of his position, he brought out, among other writings, L'homme plante (1748), Le système d'Epicure (1750), and Discours sur le bonheur (1750), each of which attested, in its own way, to the sort of scandalizing unorthodoxy of thought for which their author had already acquired a unique reputation. His numerous enemies, powerless to suppress either him or his ideas, contented themselves with a plethora of refutations that were too often irrelevant in substance or abusive in tone; in particular, they drew a portrait of La Mettrie himself as a monster of depravity. But apart from his theoretical advocacy and personal pursuit of a frankly hedonistic ideal and his delight in provoking or shocking those of a stiffly bourgeois or pious outlook, La Mettrie's character was actually far from deserving the ignominy heaped upon it.
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