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Largillière painted me when I was about thirty — young, prosperous, with the look of a man who has not yet been imprisoned in the Bastille. I had already been imprisoned once and was shortly to be exiled to England, which turned out to be an education rather than a punishment.

I was in England for three years and read Newton and Locke. When I returned to France I wrote the Philosophical Letters — twenty-four letters describing English tolerance, English science, English commerce, as if describing a foreign country, which to the French mind it was. The book was burned. I had expected nothing less. A book that cannot be burned is not making its point vigorously enough.