He was present at the reading of a tragedy by the same author, and gave some offence to the rival coterie by preferring Guibert's tragedy to La Harpe's.

To us, however, of a later day, Guibert is known neither for his tragedy nor his essay on tactics, nor for a memory so rapid that he could open a book, throw one glance like a flash of lightning on to a page, and then instantly repeat from it half a dozen lines word for word.
He lives in literature as the inspirer of that ardent passion of Mademoiselle Lespinasse's letters, so unique in their consuming intensity that, as has been said, they seem to burn the page on which they are written.

It was perhaps at Mademoiselle Lespinasse's that Burke met Diderot.

The eleven volumes of the illustrative plates of the _Encyclopaeedia_ had been given to the public twelve months before, and its editor was just released from the giant's toil of twenty years.

Voltaire was in imperial exile at Ferney.