Note 35 — Chapter XVII · FRENCH FREETHOUGHT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Anecdotes of the time reveal the coincidence of tyranny and evasion, intolerance and defiance. Of Nicolas Boindin (1676–1751), procureur in the royal Bureau des Finances, who was received into the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres in 1706, it is told that he “would have been received in the French Academy if the public profession he made of being an atheist had not excluded him.”35 But the publicity was guarded. When he conversed with the young Marmontel36 and others at the Café Procope, they used a conversational code in which the soul was called Margot, religion Javotte, liberty Jeanneton, and the deity Monsieur de l’Être. Once a listener of furtive aspect asked Boindin who might be this Monsieur de l’Être who behaved so ill, and with whom they were so displeased? “Monsieur,” replied Boindin, “he is a police spy”—such being the avocation of the questioner.37 “The morals of Boindin,” says a biographical dictionary of the period, “were as pure as those of an atheist can be; his heart was generous; but to these virtues he joined presumption and the obstinacy which follows from it, a bizarre humour, and an unsociable character.”38 Other testimonies occur on the first two heads, not on the last. But he was fittingly refused “Christian” interment, and was buried by night, “sans pompe.”