In his dialogue Rameau's Nephew, first published in 1798, Diderot can't quite believe that the younger Rameau is willing to badmouth the people he sponges on. Explaining himself, Rameau anticipates the modern apologists of snark.
HIM: . . . Mademoiselle is starting to become tiresome; the stories they're telling about her are not to be missed.
ME: You're not one of those people?
HIM: Why not?
ME: Because to put it mildly it's indecent to make fun of one's patrons.
HIM: But isn't it even worse to make patronage a justification for degrading one's protégé?
ME: But if the protégé wasn't in himself degraded, nothing would give the patron that power.
HIM: But if the patrons were not in themselves ridiculous, one wouldn't be able to tell such good stories about them. And is it my fault if they socialize with trash? Is it my fault if, having socialized with trash, they are betrayed and mocked? When one chooses to live with people like us, and one has a little common sense, there are I don't know how many blacknesses one ought to expect. When one takes us up, doesn't one know us for what we are, for venal, degraded, and treacherous souls? If one knows us, it's all right. There is a tacit pact that one will do us good, and that sooner or later, we will return evil for the good that has been done us. Doesn't the same pact link a man and his monkey, or his parrot? . . . If one brings a young provincial to the zoo at Versailles, and he takes it into his stupid head to put a hand through the bars of the tiger's or the panther's cage; if the young man leaves his arm in the maw of the wild animal; who's in the wrong? It's all written in the tacit pact. Too bad for anyone who doesn't know about it or has forgotten it.
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