all subjects of interest relating to science and taste.”  The most learned and distinguished foreigners daily visited, in turn, the house of the Baron d’Holbach, — Hume, Wilkes, Sterne, Beccaria, Veri, the Abbé Galiani, Garrick, Franklin, Priestley, Lord Shelburne, the Comte de Creutz, the Prince of Brunswick and the future Elector of Mayence.  With respect to society in general the Baron entertained Diderot, Rousseau, Helvétius, Duclos, Saurin, Raynal, Suard, Marmontel, Boulanger, the Chevalier de Chastellux, the traveler La Condamine, the physician Barthèz, and Rouelle, the chemist.  Twice a week, on Sundays and Thursdays, “without prejudice to other days,” they dine at his house, according to custom, at two o’clock; a significant custom which thus leaves to conversation and gaiety a man’s best powers and the best hours of the day.  Conversation, in those days, was not relegated to night and late hours; a man was not forced, as at the present day, to subordinate it to the exigencies of work and money, of the Assembly and the Exchange.  Talking is the main business.  “Entering at two o’clock,” says Morellet,[5] “we almost all remained until seven or eight o’clock in the evening. . . .  Here could be heard the most liberal, the most animated, the most instructive conversation that ever took place. . . .  There was no political or religious temerity which was not brought forward and discussed pro and con. . . .  Frequently some one of the company would begin to speak and state his theory in full, without interruption.  At other times it would be a combat of one against one, of which the rest remained silent spectators.  Here I heard Roux and Darcet expose their theory of the earth, Marmontel the admirable principles he collected together in his ’Elements de La Littérature,’ Raynal, telling us in livres, sous and deniers, the commerce of the Spaniards with Vera-Crux and of the English with their colonies.”  Diderot improvises on the arts and on moral and metaphysical subjects, with that incomparable fervor and wealth of expression, that flood of logic and of illustration, those happy hits of style and that mimetic power which belonged to him alone, and of which but two or three of his works preserve even the feeblest image.  In their midst Galiani, secretary of the Neapolitan Embassy, a clever dwarf; a genius, “a sort of Plato or Machiavelli with the spirit and action of a harlequin,” inexhaustible in stories, an admirable buffoon, and an accomplished skeptic, “having no faith in anything, on anything or about anything,"[6] not even in the new philosophy, braves the atheists of the drawing-room, beats down their dithyrambs with puns, and, with his perruque in his hand, sitting cross-legged on the chair on which he is perched, proves to them in a comic apologia that they raisonnent (reason) or résonnent (resound or echo) if not as cruches (blockheads) at least as cloches (bells);” in any event almost as poorly as theologians.  One of those present says, “It was the most diverting thing possible and worth the best of plays.”