It was not at Grandval that he found life hard to bear, or would have accepted its close with joy.

And indeed if one could by miracle be transported back into the sixth decade of that dead century for a single day, perhaps one might choose that such a day should be passed among the energetic and vivid men who walked of an afternoon among the fields and woods of Grandval.
The unblushing grossness of speech which even the ladies of the party permitted themselves cannot be reproduced in the decorous print of our age.

It is nothing less than inconceivable to us how Diderot can have brought himself to write down, in letters addressed to a woman of good education and decent manners, some of the talk that went on at Grandval.
The coarsest schoolboy of these days would wince at such shameless freedoms.

But it would be wrong to forget the allowance that must be made for differences in point of fashion.

Diderot, for instance, in these very letters is wonderfully frank in his exposure of the details of his health.