  Holbach’s character must have been remarkable to have maintained a salon in which the espousers of political and religious reform met so freely and so often with visitors who either cannot have been accustomed to such open dialogue or who were themselves parts of the establishment under attack. Indeed Rousseau, who himself came to feel unwelcome by the coterie, nevertheless memorializes Holbach in La nouvelle Heloïse, as the paradoxical figure, Wolmar, an atheist who nonetheless embodies all of the Christian virtues. In addition to his good character, Holbach’s generosity at table (his dinners and especially his wine were famously good) and in supporting many of his acquaintances may explain his success at being both a pillar and a critic of society. Perhaps, also, Holbach was not in the eyes of many of his contemporaries as clearly a radical as some other members of his coterie. He did publish some of the most notorious works of the French Enlightenment, including Le Christianisme dévoilé (Christianity Unveiled), Système de la nature (System of Nature) and Le Bon Sens (Common Sense). These books evoked long and heated responses from such notable figures as Voltaire, abbé Bergier, and Frederick the Great; System of Nature and Common Sense were condemned by the parliament of Paris and publicly burned. Holbach, however, was not in his own time as notorious as his books. He was careful always to publish anonymously, so that those who did not know him or who did not care to think of him in that way, might have remained at least partially ignorant of his religious and political views.