 Montesquieu also examines taste as a function of the viewer’s mind, through the filter of the same milieu of worldly refinement. The examples to which he applies his aesthetic ideas are not exclusively artistic: he includes activities like flirting, gambling, and social dancing, alongside more conventional topics such as architecture, to describe how the mind perceives pleasure. He explains these ideas in his Essay on Taste, which appears in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie under the entry “Goût” (1757), an entry which also includes treatises on the same subject by Voltaire and d’Alembert. To describe what objects please our minds, Montesquieu lists six qualities: order, variety, symmetry, contrasts, the ability to provoke curiosity, and the ability to provoke surprise. Each of these qualities in excess have a bad effect, he claims, such as a Gothic cathedral that offers too much variety and confuses us. On the other hand, too much order and symmetry, for example in a long colonnade or in a beautiful woman’s face, can bore the onlooker. Like Lambert, Montesquieu states that he is more interested in pleasure than beauty; as an example, he claims to prefer a woman with irregular features who can surprise him to a perfectly beautiful woman. To the six qualities of pleasing objects above, he adds three ways in which our minds experience these objects: sensibility, delicacy, and the je ne sais quoi. These terms remind us of his allegiance to the Bouhours-Dubos-salon line of thought about taste as a quality inherent in certain refined, worldly people.