Thanks to his talent as a writer, he was invited to join Paris's second great academy, the Académie française in 1753 and then in 1768 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. In his ("Discourse on Style"), pronounced before the Académie française, he said, "Writing well consists of thinking, feeling and expressing well, of clarity of mind, soul and taste ... The style is the man himself" (""). Unfortunately for him, Buffon's reputation as a literary stylist also gave ammunition to his detractors: The mathematician Jean le Rond D'Alembert, for example, called him "the great phrase-monger".