like,” he says to him, “to have Madame painted in a swing put in motion by a bishop; you may place me in such a way that I may see the ankles of that handsome woman, and even more, if you want to enliven your picture."[19] The licentious song “Marotte” “spreads like wildfire; " “a fortnight after its publication,” says Collé, “I met no one without a copy; and it is the vaudeville, or rather, the clerical assembly, which gives it its popularity.”  The more irreligious a licentious book is the more it is prized; when it cannot be printed it is copied in manuscript.  Collé counts “perhaps two thousand manuscript copies of’ La Pucelle ’by Voltaire, scattered about Paris in one month.”  The magistrates themselves burn it only for form’s sake.  “It must not be supposed that the hangman is allowed to burn the books whose titles figure in the decree of the Court.  Messieurs would be loath to deprive their libraries of the copy of those works which fall to them by right, and make the registrar supply its place with a few poor records of chicanery of which there is no scanty provision."[20]

But, as the century advances, unbelief, less noisy, becomes more solid.  It invigorates itself at the fountain-head; the women themselves begin to be infatuated with the sciences.  In 1782,[21] one of Mme. de Genlis’s characters writes,

Five years ago I left them thinking only of their attire and the preparation of their suppers; I now find them all scientific and witty.”  We find in the study of a fashionable woman, alongside of a small altar dedicated to Benevolence or Friendship, a dictionary of natural history and treatises on physics and chemistry.  A woman no longer has herself painted as a goddess on a cloud but in a laboratory, seated amidst squares and telescopes[22].  The Marquise de Nesle, the Comtesse de Brancas, the Comtesse de Pons, the Marquise de Polignac, are with Rouelle when he undertakes to melt and volatilize the diamond.  Associations of twenty or twenty-five persons are formed in the drawing-rooms to attend lectures either on physics, applied chemistry, mineralogy or on botany.  Fashionable women at the public meetings of the Academy of Inscriptions applaud dissertations on the bull Apis, and reports on the Egyptian, Phoenician and Greek languages.  Finally, in 1786, they succeed in opening the doors of the College de France.  Nothing deters them.  Many of them use the lancet and even the scalpel; the Marquise de Voyer attends at dissections, and the young Comtesse de Coigny dissects with her own hands.  The current infidelity finds fresh support on this foundation, which is that of the prevailing philosophy.  Towards the end of the century[23] “we see young persons who have been in society six or seven years openly pluming themselves on their irreligion, thinking that impiety makes up for wit, and that to be an atheist is to be a philosopher.”  There are, undoubtedly, a good many deists, especially after Rousseau appeared,