PRE-REVOLUTIONARY SALON

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21726, 7 March 1936, Page 19

PRE-REVOLUTIONARY SALON

Baron D’Hoibach. By W. H. Wickwar. Allen and Unwin. (7/6 net.)

Mr Wickwar’s book is as dry as the Gobi. It is a pity, for he had excellent material. Baron D’Hoibach, rich, intelligent, and affable, was the Maecenas of a group of very remarkable men and women. He was the friend of Diderot, quarrelled with Rousseau,- and entertained Horace Walpole, Hume, and Garrick. His salon interlocked with those of Madame Geoffrin and Mademoiselle Lespinasse. All the remarkable men, of his time met in his house twice a week and talked as no group have talked before his time or since, on every abstract subject that is open to the curiosity of mankind. They did not, it is true, bring on the Revolution, but they furnished the revolutionists with theories and slogans, and no doubt at first guided its course. In his'first chapter Mr Wickwar gives us a conscientious survey of D’Holbach’s life after the manner of an obituary notice. The rest of his volume is devoted to a detailed analysis of the Baron’s prolific writings, and of the atheisms, deisms, theisms, and political nostrums of the pre-revolut-ionary 20 years, all of which are now as dead as; the dodo.