"In order to determine the time at which the planets were formed and to calculate the cooling of the terrestrial globe, he engaged the services of four or five lovely, sweetly complexioned ladies; he had several globes of all sorts of materials and of all sorts of densities heated to red-hot, and these they held by turns in their delicate hands, reporting to him the degrees of the heat and the periods of cooling; and upon this fragile basis, he erected the most audacious of edifices"
Chevalier D'Aude, Vie privée du comte de Buffon, suivie d'un recueil de poésies, dont quelques pièces sont relatives à ce grand homme. Lausanne, 1788.
2 comments:
Ah, the great phrase-monger himself. I've often imagined an alternate universe where Rousseau, Voltaire and Buffon all take ecstasy together and change the course of the Enlightenment forever. Then again, maybe life in 18th cen. France was just like being on ecstasy all of the time...
Did they think it was a casting call?
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