The International Weekly Miscellany - Volume I, No. 4 | Page 7

The same sort of society was afterward kept up in the
house of Holbach. A smaller society, which frequented the house of the
farmer-general Pelletier, consisted of unmarried people, who were
known as persons who indulged in malicious and licentious
conversation. Collé, the younger Crébillon and Bernard, who,
notwithstanding his helplessness, was called le gentil, played the chief
characters in this reunion, and the Gascon nature of Marmontel, which
was always forward and intrusive, helped him into this society also.
Baron Holbach, who was a native of the Palatinate, and the able
Helvetius who was wanton merely from vanity, brought together
expressly and intentionally at a later period, around their well-spread
table, all those who declared open war against religion and morality.
We must, however, return to these men in the following period.
Holbach for a whole quarter of a century had regular dinner-parties on
Sundays, which are celebrated in the history of atheism. All those were
invited, who were too bold and too out-spoken for Geoffrin; and even
D'Alembert also at a later period withdrew from their society.
Grimm, whose copious correspondence has also been published in the
nineteenth century, gives minutes and notices of all the memorable
sayings and doings that served to entertain and occupy the polite world
in Europe. Grimm also entertained and feasted these distinguished
gentlemen. He was not at that time consul for Gotha, or employed and
paid by that court or the Empress Catherine to collect Parisian
anecdotes, neither had he then been made a baron, but was merely civil

secretary of Count von Friese. Both J.J. Rousseau and Buffon belonged
at first to these societies; but the former, in great alarm, broke off all
intercourse with the people who then played the first parts in Paris, and
the other quietly retired.
[Footnote 1: Mon Henri quatre et ma Zaïre, Et mon Americaine Alzire,
Ne m'ont valu jamais un seul regard du roi; J'eus beaucoup d'ennemis
avec très-peu de gloire. Les honneurs et les biens pleuvent enfin sur
moi Pour une farce de la foire.--La Princesse de Navarro.]
* * * * *
THE ATHENÆUM UPON HAWTHORNE.[2]
The London Athenæum, of the 15th June, has the following remarks
upon the last work of NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE:
"This is a most powerful and painful story. Mr. Hawthorne must be
well known to our readers as a favorite of the Athenæum. We rate him
as among the most original and peculiar writers of American fiction.
There in his works a mixture of Puritan reserve and wild imagination,
of passion and description, of the allegorical and the real, which some
will fail to understand, and which others will positively reject,--but
which, to ourselves, is fascinating, and which entitles him to be placed
on a level with Brockden Brown and the author of 'Rip Van Winkle.'
'The Scarlet Letter' will increase his reputation with all who do not
shrink from the invention of the tale; but this, as we have said, is more
than ordinarily painful. When we have announced that the three
characters are a guilty wife, openly punished for her guilt,--her tempter,
whom she refuses to unmask, and who during the entire story carries a
fair front and an unblemished name among his congregation,--and her
husband, who, returning from a long absence at the moment of her
sentence, sits himself down betwixt the two in the midst of a small and
severe community to work out his slow vengeance on both under the
pretext of magnanimous forgiveness,--when we have explained that
'The Scarlet Letter' is the badge of Hester Prynne's shame, we ought to
add that we recollect no tale dealing with crime so sad and revenge so
subtly diabolical, that is at the same time so clear of fever and of

prurient excitement. The misery of the woman is as present in every
page as the heading which in the title of the romance symbolizes her
punishment. Her terrors concerning her strange elvish child present
retribution in a form which is new and natural:--her slow and painful
purification through repentance is crowned by no perfect happiness,
such as awaits the decline of those who have no dark and bitter past to
remember. Then, the gradual corrosion of heart of Dimmesdale, the
faithless priest, under the insidious care of the husband, (whose
relationship to Hester is a secret known only to themselves,) is
appalling; and his final confession and expiation are merely a relief, not
a reconciliation. We are by no means satisfied that passions and
tragedies like these are the legitimate subjects for fiction: we are
satisfied that novels such as 'Adam Blair,' and plays such as 'The
Stranger,' maybe justly charged with attracting more persons than they
warn by their excitement. But if Sin and Sorrow in their most fearful
forms are to be presented in