YOUTH.
Denis Diderot was born at Langres in 1713, being thus a few months
younger than Rousseau (1712), nearly twenty years younger than Voltaire
(1694), nearly two years younger than Hume (1711), and eleven years
older than Kant (1724). His stock was ancient and of good repute. The
family had been engaged in the great local industry, the manufacture of
cutlery, for no less than two centuries in direct line. Diderot liked to
dwell on the historic prowess of his town, from the days of Julius
Cæsar and the old Lingones and Sabinus, down to the time of the Great
Monarch. With the taste of his generation for tracing moral qualities to
a climatic source, he explained a certain vivacity and mobility in the
people of his district by the great frequency and violence of its
atmospheric changes from hot to cold, from calm to storm, from rain to
sunshine. "Thus they learn from earliest infancy to turn to every wind.
The man of Langres has a head on his shoulders like the weathercock at
the top of the church spire. It is never fixed at one point; if it
returns to the point it has left, it is not to stop there. With an
amazing rapidity in their movements, their desires, their plans, their
fancies, their ideas, they are cumbrous in speech. For myself, I belong
to my country side." This was thoroughly true. He inherited all the
versatility of his compatriots, all their swift impetuosity, and
something of their want of dexterity in expression.
His father was one of the bravest, most upright, most patient, most
sensible of men. Diderot never ceased to regret that the old man's
portrait had not been taken with his apron on, his spectacles pushed up,
and a hand on the grinder's wheel. After his death, none of his
neighbours could speak of him to his son without tears in their eyes.
Diderot, wild and irregular as were his earlier days, had always a true
affection for his father. "One of the sweetest moments of my life," he
once said, "was more than thirty years ago, and I remember it as if it
were yesterday, when my father saw me coming home from school, my arms
laden with the prizes I had carried off, and my shoulders burdened with
the wreaths they had given me, which were too big for my brow and had
slipped over my head. As soon as he caught sight of me some way off, he
threw down his work, hurried to the door to meet me, and fell a-weeping.
It is a fine sight--a grave and sterling man melted to tears."[1] Of his
mother we know less. He had a sister, who seems to have possessed the
rough material of his own qualities. He describes her as "lively,
active, cheerful, decided, prompt to take offence, slow to come round
again, without much care for present or future, never willing to be
imposed on by people or circumstance; free in her ways, still more free
in her talk; she is a sort of Diogenes in petticoats.... She is the most
original and the most strongly-marked creature I know; she is goodness
itself, but with a peculiar physiognomy."[2] His only brother showed
some of the same native stuff, but of thinner and sourer quality. He
became an abbé and a saint, peevish, umbrageous, and as excessively
devout as his more famous brother was excessively the opposite. "He
would have been a good friend and a good brother," wrote Diderot, "if
religion had not bidden him trample under foot such poor weaknesses as
these. He is a good Christian, who proves to me every minute of the day
how much better it would be to be a good man. He shows that what they
call evangelical perfection is only the mischievous art of stifling
nature, which would most likely have spoken as lustily in him as in
me."[3]
Diderot, like so many others of the eighteenth-century reformers, was a
pupil of the Jesuits. An ardent, impetuous, over-genial temperament was
the cause of frequent irregularities in conduct. But his quick and
active understanding overcame all obstacles. His teachers, ever wisely
on the alert for superior capacity, hoped to enlist his talents in the
Order. Either they or he planned his escape from home, but his father
got to hear of it. "My grandfather," says Diderot's daughter, "kept the
profoundest silence, but as he went off to bed took with him the keys of
the yard door." When he heard his son going downstairs, he presented
himself before him, and asked whither he was bound at twelve o'clock at
night. "To Paris," replied the youth, "where I am to join the Jesuits."
"That will not be to-night; but your wishes shall be fulfilled. First
let us have our sleep." The next morning his father took two places in
the coach, and carried him to Paris to the Collége d'Harcourt. He made
all the arrangements, and wished his son good-bye. But the good man
loved the boy too dearly to leave him without being quite at ease how he
would fare; he had the patience to remain a whole fortnight, killing the
time and half dead of weariness in an inn, without ever seeing the one
object of his stay. At the end of the fortnight he went to the college,
and Diderot used many a time to say that such a mark of tenderness and
goodness would have made him go to the other end of the world if his
father had required it. "My friend," said his father, "I am come to see
if you are well, if you are satisfied with your superiors, with your
food, with your companions, and with yourself. If you are not well or
not happy, we will go back together to your mother. If you had rather
stay where you are, I am come to give you a word, to embrace you, and to
leave you my blessing." The boy declared he was perfectly happy; and the
principal pronounced him an excellent scholar, though already promising
to be a troublesome one.[4]
After a couple of years the young Diderot, like other sons of Adam, had
to think of earning his bread. The usual struggle followed between
youthful genius and old prudence. His father, who was a man of
substance, gave him his choice between medicine and law. Law he refused
because he did not choose to spend his days in doing other people's
business; and medicine, because he had no turn for killing. His father
resolutely declined to let him have more money on these terms, and
Diderot was thrown on his wits.
The man of letters shortly before the middle of the century was as much
an outcast and a beggar in Paris as he was in London. Voltaire, Gray,
and Richardson were perhaps the only three conspicuous writers of the
time, who had never known what it was to want a meal or to go without a
shirt. But then none of the three depended on his pen for his
livelihood. Every other man of that day whose writings have delighted
and instructed the world since, had begun his career, and more than one
of them continued and ended it, as a drudge and a vagabond. Fielding and
Collins, Goldsmith and Johnson, in England; Goldoni in Italy;
Vauvenargues, Marmontel, Rousseau, in France; Winckelmann and Lessing in
Germany, had all alike been doubtful of dinner, and trembled about a
night's lodging. They all knew the life of mean hazard, sorry shift,
and petty expedient again and again renewed. It is sorrowful to think
how many of the compositions of that time that do most to soothe and
elevate some of the best hours of our lives, were written by men with
aching hearts, in the midst of haggard perplexities. The man of letters,
as distinguished alike from the old-fashioned scholar and the systematic
thinker, now first became a distinctly marked type. Macaulay has
contrasted the misery of the Grub Street hack of Johnson's time, with
the honours accorded to men like Prior and Addison at an earlier date,
and the solid sums paid by booksellers to the authors of our own day.
But these brilliant passages hardly go lower than the surface of the
great change. Its significance lay quite apart from the prices paid for
books. The all-important fact about the men of letters in France was
that they constituted a new order, that their rise signified the
transfer of the spiritual power from ecclesiastical hands, and that,
while they were the organs of a new function, they associated it with a
new substitute for doctrine. These men were not only the pupils of the
Jesuits; they were also their immediate successors as the teachers, the
guides, and the directors of society. For two hundred years the
followers of Ignatius had taken the intellectual and moral control of
Catholic communities out of the failing hands of the Popes and the
secular clergy. Their own hour had now struck. The rationalistic
historian has seldom done justice to the services which this great
Order rendered to European civilisation. The immorality of many of their
maxims, their too frequent connivance at political wrong for the sake of
power, their inflexible malice against opponents, and the cupidity and
obstructiveness of the years of their decrepitude, have blinded us to
the many meritorious pages of the Jesuit chronicle. Even men like
Diderot and Voltaire, whose lives were for years made bitter by Jesuit
machinations, gave many signs that they recognised the aid which had
been rendered by their old masters to the cultivation and enlightenment
of Europe. It was from the Jesuit fathers that the men of letters whom
they trained, acquired that practical and social habit of mind which
made the world and its daily interests so real to them. It was perhaps
also his Jesuit preceptors whom the man of letters had to blame for a
certain want of rigour and exactitude on the side of morality.
What was this new order which thus struggled into existence, which so
speedily made itself felt, and at length so completely succeeded in
seizing the lapsed inheritance of the old spiritual organisation? Who is
this man of letters? A satirist may easily describe him in epigrams of
cheap irony; the pedant of the colleges may see in him a frivolous and
shallow profaner of the mysteries of learning; the intellectual coxcomb
who nurses his own dainty wits in critical sterility, despises him as
Sir Piercie Shafton would have despised Lord Lindsay of the Byres. This
notwithstanding, the man of letters has his work to do in the critical
period of social transition. He is to be distinguished from the great
systematic thinker, as well as from the great imaginative creator. He is
borne on the wings neither of a broad philosophic conception nor of a
lofty poetic conception. He is only the propagator of portions of such a
conception, and of the minor ideas which they suggest. Unlike the Jesuit
father whom he replaced, he has no organic doctrine, no historic
tradition, no effective discipline, and no definite, comprehensive,
far-reaching, concentrated aim. The characteristic of his activity is
dispersiveness. Its distinction is to popularise such detached ideas as
society is in a condition to assimilate; to interest men in these ideas
by dressing them up in varied forms of the literary art; to guide men
through them by judging, empirically and unconnectedly, each case of
conduct, of policy, or of new opinion as it arises. We have no wish to
exalt the office. On the contrary, I accept the maxim of that deep
observer who warned us that "the mania for isolation is the plague of
the human throng, and to be strong we must march together. You only
obtain anything by developing the spirit of discipline among men."[5]
But there are ages of criticism when discipline is impossible, and the
evils of isolation are less than the evils of rash and premature
organisation. Fontenelle was the first and in some respects the greatest
type of this important class. He was sceptical, learned, ingenious,
eloquent. He stretched hands (1657-1757) from the famous quarrel between
Ancients and Moderns down to the Encyclopædia, and from Bossuet and
Corneille down to Jean Jacques and Diderot. When he was born, the man of
letters did not exist. When he died, the man of letters was the most
conspicuous personage in France. But when Diderot first began to roam
about the streets of Paris, this enormous change was not yet complete.
For some ten years (1734-1744) Diderot's history is the old tale of
hardship and chance; of fine constancy and excellent faith, not wholly
free from an occasional stroke of rascality. For a time he earned a
little money by teaching. If the pupil happened to be quick and docile,
he grudged no labour, and was content with any fee or none. If the pupil
happened to be dull, Diderot never came again, and preferred going
supperless to bed. His employers paid him as they chose, in shirts, in a
chair or a table, in books, in money, and sometimes they never paid him
at all. The prodigious exuberance of his nature inspired him with a
sovereign indifference to material details. From the beginning he
belonged to those to whom it comes by nature to count life more than
meat, and the body than raiment. The outward things of existence were
to him really outward. They never vexed or absorbed his days and nights,
nor overcame his vigorous constitutional instinct for the true
proportions of external circumstance. He was of the humour of the old
philosopher who, when he heard that all his worldly goods had been lost
in a shipwreck, only made for answer, _Jubet me fortuna expeditius
philosophari_. Once he had the good hap to be appointed tutor to the
sons of a man of wealth. He performed his duties zealously, he was well
housed and well fed, and he gave the fullest satisfaction to his
employer. At the end of three months the mechanical toil had grown
unbearable to him. The father of his pupils offered him any terms if he
would remain. "Look at me, sir," replied the tutor; "my face is as
yellow as a lemon. I am making men of your children, but each day I am
becoming a child with them. I am a thousand times too rich and too
comfortable in your house; leave it I must. What I want is not to live
better, but to avoid dying." Again he plunged from comfort into the life
of the garret. If he met any old friend from Langres, he borrowed, and
the honest father repaid the loan. His mother's savings were brought to
him by a faithful creature who had long served in their house, and who
now more than once trudged all the way from home on this errand, and
added her own humble earnings to the little stock. Many a time the hours
went very slowly for the necessitous man. One Shrove Tuesday he rose in
the morning, and found his pockets empty even of so much as a
halfpenny. His friends had not invited him to join their squalid
Bohemian revels. Hunger and thoughts of old Shrovetide merriment and
feasting in the far-off home made work impossible. He hastened out of
doors and walked about all day visiting such public sights as were open
to the penniless. When he returned to his garret at night, his landlady
found him in a swoon, and with the compassion of a good soul she forced
him to share her supper. "That day," Diderot used to tell his children
in later years, "I promised myself that if ever happier times should
come, and ever I should have anything, I would never refuse help to any
living creature, nor ever condemn him to the misery of such a day as
that."[6] And the real interest of the story lies in the fact that no
oath was ever more faithfully kept. There is no greater test of the
essential richness of a man's nature than that this squalid adversity,
not of the sentimental introspective kind but hard and grinding, and not
even kept in countenance by respectability, fails to make him a savage
or a miser or a misanthrope.
Diderot had his bitter moments. He knew the gloom and despondency that
have their inevitable hour in every solitary and unordered life. But the
fits did not last. They left no sour sediment, and this is the sign of
health in temperament, provided it be not due to mere callousness. From
that horrible quality Diderot assuredly was the furthest removed of any
one of his time. Now and always he walked with a certain large
carelessness of spirit. He measured life with a roving and liberal eye.
Circumstance and conventions, the words under which men hide things, the
oracles of common acceptance, the infinitely diversified properties of
human character, the many complexities of our conduct and destiny--all
these he watched playing freely around him, and he felt no haste to
compress his experience into maxims and system. He was absolutely
uncramped by any of the formal mannerisms of the spirit. He was wholly
uncorrupted by the affectation of culture with which the great Goethe
infected part of the world a generation later. His own life was never
made the centre of the world. Self-development and self-idealisation as
ends in themselves would have struck Diderot as effeminate drolleries.
The daily and hourly interrogation of experience for the sake of
building up the fabric of his own character in this wise or that, would
have been incomprehensible and a little odious to him in theory, and
impossible as a matter of practice. In the midst of all the hardships of
his younger time, as afterwards in the midst of crushing Herculean
taskwork, he was saved from moral ruin by the inexhaustible geniality
and expansiveness of his affections. Nor did he narrow their play by
looking only to the external forms of human relation. To Diderot it came
easily to act on a principle which most of us only accept in words: he
looked not to what people said, nor even to what they did, but wholly
to what they were.
Those whom he had once found reason to love and esteem might do him many
an ill turn, without any fear of estranging him. Any one can measure
character by conduct. It is a harder thing to be willing, in cases that
touch our own interests, to interpret conduct by previous knowledge of
character. His father, for instance, might easily have spared money
enough to save him from the harassing privations of Bohemian life in
Paris. A less full-blooded and generous person than Diderot would have
resented the stoutness of the old man's persistency. Diderot on the
contrary felt and delighted to feel, that this conflict of wills was a
mere accident which left undisturbed the reality of old love. "The first
few years of my life in Paris," he once told an acquaintance, "had been
rather irregular; my behaviour was enough to irritate my father, without
there being any need to make it worse by exaggeration. Still calumny was
not wanting. People told him--well what did they not tell him? An
opportunity for going to see him presented itself. I did not give it two
thoughts. I set out full of confidence in his goodness. I thought that
he would see me, that I should throw myself into his arms, that we
should both of us shed tears, and that all would be forgotten. I thought
rightly."[7] We may be sure of a stoutness of native stuff in any stock
where so much tenacity united with such fine confidence on one side,
and such generous love on the other. It is a commonplace how much waste
would be avoided in human life if men would more freely allow their
vision to pierce in this way through the distorting veils of egoism, to
the reality of sentiment and motive and relationship.
Throughout his life Diderot was blessed with that divine gift of pity,
which one that has it could hardly be willing to barter for the
understanding of an Aristotle. Nor was it of the sentimental type proper
for fine ladies. One of his friends had an aversion for women with
child. "What monstrous sentiment!" Diderot wrote; "for my part, that
condition has always touched me. I cannot see a woman of the common
people so, without a tender commiseration."[8] And Diderot had delicacy
and respect in his pity. He tells a story in one of his letters of a
poor woman who had suffered some wrong from a priest; she had not money
enough to resort to law, until a friend of Diderot took her part. The
suit was gained; but when the moment came for execution, the priest had
vanished with all his goods. The woman came to thank her protector, and
to regret the loss he had suffered. "As she chatted, she pulled a shabby
snuff-box out of her pocket, and gathered up with the tip of her finger
what little snuff remained at the bottom: her benefactor says to her
'Ah, ah! you have no more snuff; give me your box, and I will fill it.'
He took the box and put into it a couple of louis, which he covered up
with snuff. Now there's an action thoroughly to my taste, and to yours
too! Give, but, if you can, spare to the poor the shame of holding out a
hand."[9] And the important thing, as we have said, is that Diderot was
as good as his sentiment. Unlike most of the fine talkers of that day,
to him these homely and considerate emotions were the most real part of
life. Nobody in the world was ever more eager to give succour to others,
nor more careless of his own ease.
One singular story of Diderot's heedlessness about himself has often
been told before, but we shall be none the worse in an egoistic world
for hearing it told again. There came to him one morning a young man,
bringing a manuscript in his hand. He begged Diderot to do him the
favour of reading it, and to make any remarks he might think useful on
the margin. Diderot found it to be a bitter satire upon his own person
and writings. On the young man's return, Diderot asked him his grounds
for making such an attack. "I am without bread," the satirist answered,
"and I hoped you might perhaps give me a few crowns not to print it."
Diderot at once forgot everything in pity for the starving scribbler. "I
will tell you a way of making more than that by it. The brother of the
Duke of Orleans is one of the pious, and he hates me. Dedicate your
satire to him, get it bound with his arms on the cover; take it to him
some fine morning, and you will certainly get assistance from him."
"But I don't know the prince, and the dedicatory epistle embarrasses
me." "Sit down," said Diderot, "and I will write one for you." The
dedication was written, the author carried it to the prince, and
received a handsome fee.[10]
Marmontel assures us that never was Diderot seen to such advantage as
when an author consulted him about a work. "You should have seen him,"
he says, "take hold of the subject, pierce to the bottom of it, and at a
single glance discover of what riches and of what beauty it was
susceptible. If he saw that the author missed the right track, instead
of listening to the reading, he at once worked up in his head all that
the author had left crude and imperfect. Was it a play, he threw new
scenes into it, new incidents, new strokes of character; and thinking
that he had actually heard all that he had dreamed, he extolled to the
skies the work that had just been read to him, and in which, when it saw
the light, we found hardly anything that he had quoted from it.... He
who was one of the most enlightened men of the century, was also one of
the most amiable; and in everything that touched moral goodness, when he
spoke of it freely, I cannot express the charm of his eloquence. His
whole soul was in his eyes and on his lips; never did a countenance
better depict the goodness of the heart."[11] Morellet is equally loud
in praise, not only of Diderot's conversation, its brilliance, its
vivacity, its fertility, its suggestiveness, its sincerity, but also
his facility and indulgence to all who sought him, and of the
sympathetic readiness with which he gave the very best of himself to
others.[12]
It is needless to say that such a temper was constantly abused.
Three-fourths of Diderot's life were reckoned by his family to have been
given up to people who had need of his purse, his knowledge, or his good
offices. His daughter compares his library to a shop crowded by a
succession of customers, but the customers took whatever wares they
sought, not by purchase, but by way of free gift. Luckily for Diderot,
he was thus generous by temperament, and not because he expected
gratitude. Any necessitous knave with the gift of tears and the mask of
sensibility could dupe and prey upon him. In one case he had taken a
great deal of trouble for one of these needy and importunate clients;
had given him money and advice, and had devoted much time to serve him.
At the end of their last interview Diderot escorts his departing friend
to the head of the staircase. The grateful client then asks him whether
he knows natural history. "Well, not much," Diderot replies; "I know an
aloe from a lettuce, and a pigeon from a humming-bird." "Do you know
about the _Formica leo?_ No? Well, it is a little insect that is
wonderfully industrious; it hollows out in the ground a hole shaped like
a funnel, it covers the surface with a light fine sand, it attracts
other insects, it takes them, it sucks them dry, and then it says to
them, 'M. Diderot, I have the honour to wish you good day.'"[13]
Yet insolence and ingratitude made no difference to Diderot. His ear
always remained as open to every tale of distress, his sensibility
always as quickly touched, his time, money, and service always as
profusely bestowed. I know not whether to say that this was made more,
or that it was made less, of a virtue by his excess of tolerance for
social castaways and reprobates. Our rough mode of branding a man as bad
revolted him. The common appetite for constituting ourselves public
prosecutors for the universe, was to him one of the worst of human
weaknesses. "You know," he used to say, "all the impetuosity of the
passions; you have weighed all circumstance in your everlasting balance;
you pass sentence on the goodness or the badness of creatures; you set
up rewards and penalties among matters which have no proportion nor
relation with one another. Are you sure that you have never committed
wrong acts, for which you pardoned yourselves because their object was
so slight, though at bottom they implied more wickedness than a crime
prompted by misery or fury? Even magistrates, supported by experience,
by the law, by conventions which force them sometimes to give judgment
against the testimony of their own conscience, still tremble as they
pronounce the doom of the accused. And since when has it been lawful for
the same person to be at once judge and informer?"[14]
Such reasoned leniency is the noblest of traits in a man. "I am more
affected," he said, in words of which better men that Diderot might
often be reminded, "by the charms of virtue than by the deformity of
vice. I turn mildly away from the bad, and I fly to embrace the good. If
there is in a work, in a character, in a painting, in a statue, a single
fine bit, then on that my eyes fasten; I see only that: that is all I
remember; the rest is as good as forgotten."[15]
This is the secret of a rare and admirable temperament. It carried
Diderot well through the trial and ordeal of the ragged apprenticeship
of letters. What to other men comes by culture, came to him by inborn
force and natural capaciousness. We do not know in what way Diderot
trained and nourished his understanding. The annotations to his
translation of Shaftesbury, as well as his earliest original pieces,
show that he had read Montaigne and Pascal, and not only read but
meditated on them with an independent mind. They show also that he had
been impressed by the Civitas Dei of Augustine, and had at least dipped
into Terence and Horace, Cicero and Tacitus. His subsequent writings
prove that, like the other men of letters of his day, he found in our
own literature the chief external stimulant to thought. Above all, he
was impressed by the magnificent ideas of the illustrious Bacon, and
these ideas were the direct source of the great undertaking of Diderot's
life. He is said to have read little and to have meditated much--the
right process for the few men of his potent stamp. The work which he had
to do for bread was of the kind that crushes anything short of the
strongest faculty. He composed sermons. A missionary once ordered
half-a-dozen of them for consumption in the Portuguese colonies, and
paid him fifty crowns apiece, which Diderot counted far from the worst
bargain of his life. All this was beggarly toil for a man of genius, but
Diderot never took the trouble to think of himself as a man of genius,
and was quite content with life as it came. If he found himself
absolutely without food and without pence, he began moodily to think of
abandoning his books and his pen, and of complying with the wishes of
his father. A line of Homer, an idea from the Principia, an interesting
problem in algebra or geometry, was enough to restore the eternally
invincible spell of knowledge. And no sooner was this commanding
interest touched, than the cloud of uncomfortable circumstance vanished
from before the sun, and calm and serenity filled his spirit.
Montesquieu used to declare that he had never known a chagrin which half
an hour of a book was not able to dispel. Diderot had the same fortunate
temper.
Yet Diderot was not essentially a man of books. He never fell into the
characteristic weakness of the follower of letters, by treating books as
ends in themselves, or placing literature before life. Character,
passion, circumstance, the real tragi-comedy, not its printed shadow
and image, engrossed him. He was in this respect more of the temper of
Rousseau, than he was like Voltaire or Fontenelle. "Abstraction made,"
he used to say, "of my existence and of the happiness of my fellows,
what does the rest of nature matter to me?" Yet, as we see, nobody that
ever lived was more interested in knowledge. His biographer and disciple
remarked the contrast in him between his ardent impetuous disposition
and enthusiasm, and his spirit of close unwearied observation. _Faire le
bien, connaître le vrai_, was his formula for the perfect life, and
defined the only distinction that he cared to recognise between one man
and another. And the only motive he ever admitted as reasonable for
seeking truth, was as a means of doing good. So strong was his sense of
practical life, in the midst of incessant theorising.
* * * * *
At the moment when he had most difficulty in procuring a little bread
each day for himself, Diderot conceived a violent passion for a
seamstress, Antoinnette Champion by name, who happened to live in his
neighbourhood. He instantly became importunate for marriage. The mother
long protested with prudent vigour against a young man of such
headstrong impetuosity, who did nothing and who had nothing, save the
art of making speeches that turned her daughter's head. At length the
young man's golden tongue won the mother as it had won the daughter. It
was agreed that his wishes should be crowned, if he could procure the
consent of his family. Diderot fared eagerly and with a sanguine heart
to Langres. His father supposed that he had seen the evil of his ways,
and was come at last to continue the honest tradition of their name.
When the son disclosed the object of his visit, he was treated as a
madman and threatened with malediction. Without a word of remonstrance
he started back one day for Paris. Madame Champion warned him that his
project must now be for ever at an end. Such unflinching resoluteness is
often the last preliminary before surrender. Diderot fell ill. The two
women could not bear to think of him lying sick in a room no better than
a dog-kennel, without broths and tisanes, lonely and sorrowful. They
hastened to nurse him, and when he got well, what he thought the great
object of his life was reached. He and his adored were married
(1743).[16] As has been said, "Choice in marriage is a great match of
cajolery between purpose and invisible hazard: deep criticism of a game
of pure chance is time wasted." In Diderot's case destiny was hostile.
His wife was over thirty. She was dutiful, sage, and pious. She had
plenty of that devotion which in small things women so seldom lack.
While her husband went to dine out, she remained at home to dine and
sup on dry bread, and was pleased to think that the next day she would
double the little ordinary for him. Coffee was too dear to be a
household luxury, so every day she handed him a few halfpence to have
his cup, and to watch the chess-players at the Café de la Régence. When
after a year or two she went to make her peace with her father-in-law at
Langres, she wound her way round the old man's heart by her affectionate
caresses, her respect, her ready industry in the household, her piety,
her simplicity. It is, however, unfortunately possible for even the best
women to manifest their goodness, their prudence, their devotion, in
forms that exasperate. Perhaps it was so here. Diderot at fifty was an
orderly and steadfast person, but at thirty the blood of vagabondage was
still hot within him. He needed in his companion a robust patience, to
match his own too robust activity. One may suppose that if Mirabeau had
married Hannah More, the union would have turned out ill, and Diderot's
marriage was unluckily of such a type. His wife's narrow pieties and
homely solicitudes fretted him. He had not learned to count the cost of
deranging the fragile sympathy of the hearth. While his wife was away on
her visit to his family, he formed a connection with a woman (Madame
Puisieux) who seems to have been as bad and selfish as his wife was the
opposite. She was the authoress of some literary pieces, which the world
willingly and speedily let die; but even very moderate pretensions to
_bel-esprit_ may have seemed wonderfully refreshing to a man wearied to
death by the illiterate stupidity of his daily companion.[17] This
lasted some three or four years down to 1749. As we shall see, he
discovered the infidelity of his mistress and broke with her. But by
this time his wife's virtues seem to have gone a little sour, as
disregarded prudence and thwarted piety are so apt to do. It was too
late now to knit up again the ravelled threads of domestic concord.
During a second absence of his wife in Champagne (1754), he formed a new
attachment to the daughter of a financier's widow (Mdlle. Voland). This
lasted to the end of the lady's days (1783 or 1784).
There is probably nothing very profitable to be said about all this
domestic disorder. We do not know enough of the circumstances to be sure
of allotting censure in exact and rightful measure. We have to remember
that such irregularities were in the manners of the time. To connect
them by way of effect with the new opinions in religion, would be as
impertinent as to trace the immoralities of Dubois or Lewis the
Fifteenth or the Cardinal de Rohan to the old opinions.