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THE
FRIENDS OF VOLTAIRE
[Illustration: JEAN-LEROND D’ALEMBERT.
_From an Engraving after Pujos._]
THE
FRIENDS OF VOLTAIRE
BY S. G. TALLENTYRE
AUTHOR OF “THE LIFE OF VOLTAIRE,” “THE WOMEN OF THE SALONS,” ETC.
“Il faut que les âmes pensantes se frottent l’une contre l’autre
pour faire jaillir de la lumiere.”
Voltaire: _Letter to the Duc d’Uzès, December 4, 1751_.
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.
1906
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. D’ALEMBERT: THE THINKER (1717-1783) 1
II. DIDEROT: THE TALKER (1713-1784) 32
III. GALIANI: THE WIT (1728-1787) 62
IV. VAUVENARGUES: THE APHORIST (1715-1747) 96
V. D’HOLBACH: THE HOST (1723-1789) 118
VI. GRIMM: THE JOURNALIST (1723-1807) 150
VII. HELVÉTIUS: THE CONTRADICTION (1715-1771) 176
VIII. TURGOT: THE STATESMAN (1727-1781) 206
IX. BEAUMARCHAIS: THE PLAYWRIGHT (1732-1799) 236
X. CONDORCET: THE ARISTOCRAT (1743-1794) 268
INDEX 299
PORTRAITS
D’ALEMBERT _Frontispiece_
_From an Engraving after Pujos._
DIDEROT _To face_ _p._ 32
_From an Engraving by Henriquez, after the Portrait by
Vanloo._
GALIANI " 62
_From a Print._
VAUVENARGUES " 96
_From a Print in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris._
D’HOLBACH " 118
_From a Portrait in the Musée Condé, Chantilly._
GRIMM " 150
_From an Engraving, after Carmontelle, in the Bibliothèque
Nationale, Paris._
HELVÉTIUS " 176
_From an Engraving by St. Aubin, after the Portrait by
Vanloo._
TURGOT " 206
_From an Engraving by Le Beau, after the Portrait by
Troy._
BEAUMARCHAIS " 236
_From an Engraving, after Michon, in the Bibliothèque
Nationale, Paris._
CONDORCET " 268
_From an Engraving by Lemort, after the Bust by St.
Aubin._
SOME SOURCES OF INFORMATION
D’Alembert. _Joseph Bertrand._
Œuvres et Correspondance inédites. _D’Alembert._
Correspondance avec d’Alembert. _Marquise du Deffand._
Diderot and the Encyclopædists. _John Morley._
Éloge de d’Alembert. _Condorcet._
Œuvres. _Diderot._
Diderot. _Reinach._
Diderot, l’Homme et l’Ecrivain. _Ducros._
Diderot. _Scherer._
Diderot et Catherine II. _Tourneux._
Ferdinando Galiani, Correspondance, Étude, etc. _Perrey et Maugras._
Lettres de l’Abbé Galiani. _Eugène Asse._
Mémoires et Correspondance. _Madame d’Épinay._
Jeunesse de Madame d’Épinay. _Perrey et Maugras._
Dernières Années de Madame d’Épinay. _Perrey et Maugras._
Mémoires. _Marmontel._
Mémoires. _Morellet._
Causeries du Lundi. _Sainte-Beuve._
Vauvenargues. _Paléologue._
Œuvres et Éloge de Vauvenargues. _D. L. Gilbert._
Melchior Grimm. _Scherer._
Rousseau. _John Morley._
Miscellanies. _John Morley._
Correspondance Littéraire. _Grimm et Diderot._
Turgot. _Léon Say._
Turgot. _W. B. Hodgson._
Œuvres. _Turgot._
Vie de Turgot. _Condorcet._
Correspondance inédite de Condorcet et Turgot. _C. Henry._
La Marquise de Condorcet. _Guillois._
Vie de Condorcet. _Robinet._
Beaumarchais et Son Temps. _Loménie._
Beaumarchais. _Hallays._
Théâtre de Beaumarchais.
La Fin de l’Ancien Régime. _Imbert de Saint-Amand._
French Revolution. _Carlyle._
Critical Essays. _Carlyle._
Correspondance. _Voltaire._
Portraits Littéraires du XVIIIe Siècle. _La Harpe._
Cours de Littérature. _La Harpe._
Mémoire sur Helvétius. _Damiron._
Le Salon de Madame Helvétius. _Guillois._
Histoire de la Philosophie Moderne. _Buhle._
Life of Hume. _Burton._
The Private Correspondence of Garrick with Celebrated Persons.
Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire de la Philosophie. _Damiron._
Letters. _Laurence Sterne._
THE FRIENDS OF VOLTAIRE
I
_D’ALEMBERT: THE THINKER_
Of that vast intellectual movement which prepared the way for the most
stupendous event in history, the French Revolution, Voltaire was the
creative spirit.
But there was a group of men, less famous but not less great, who also
heralded the coming of the new heaven and the new earth; who were in a
strict sense friends and fellow-workers of Voltaire, although one or two
of them were personally little known to him; whose aim was his aim, to
destroy from among the people ‘ignorance, the curse of God,’ and who
were, as he was, the prophets and the makers of a new dispensation.
That many of these light bringers were themselves full of darkness, is
true enough; but they brought the light not the less, and in their own
breasts burnt one cleansing flame, the passion for humanity.
For the rest, they were the typical men of the most enthralling age in
history--each with his human story as well as his public purpose, and
his part to play on the glittering stage of the social life of old
France, as well as in the great events which moulded her destiny and
affected the fate of Europe.
* * * * *
Foremost among them was d’Alembert.
Often talked about but little known, or vaguely remembered only as the
patient lover of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, Jean Lerond d’Alembert, the
successor of Newton, the author of the Preface of the Encyclopædia,
deserves an enduring fame.
On a November evening in the year 1717, one hundred and eighty-nine
years ago, a _gendarme_, going his round in Paris, discovered on the
steps of the church of Saint-Jean Lerond, once the baptistery of
Notre-Dame, a child of a few hours old. The story runs that the baby was
richly clad, and had on his small person marks which would lead to his
identification. But the fact remains that he was abandoned in
mid-winter, left without food or shelter to take his feeble chance of
life and of the cold charity of some such institution as the Enfants
Trouvés. It was no thanks to the mother who bore him that the
_gendarme_ who found him had compassion on his helpless infancy. The man
had the baby hurriedly christened after his first cradle, Jean Baptiste
Lerond, took him to a working woman whom he could trust, and who nursed
him--for six weeks say some authorities, for a few days say others--in
the little village of Crémery near Montdidier.
At the end of the time there returned to Paris a certain gallant General
Destouches, who had been abroad in the execution of his military duties.
He went to visit Madame de Tencin, and from her learnt of the birth and
the abandonment of their son.
No study of the eighteenth century can be complete without mention of
the extraordinary women who were born with that marvellous age, and
fortunately died with it. Cold, calculating, and corrupt, with the
devilish cleverness of a Machiavelli, with the natural instinct of love
used for gain and for trickery, and with the natural instinct of
maternity wholly absent, d’Alembert’s mother was the most perfect type
of this monstrous class. Small, keen, alert, with a little sharp face
like a bird’s, brilliantly eloquent, bold, subtle, tireless, a great
minister of intrigue, and insatiably ambitious--such was Madame de
Tencin. It was she who assisted at the meetings of statesmen, and gave
Marshal Richelieu a plan and a line of conduct. It was she who managed
the affairs of her brother Cardinal de Tencin, and, through him, tried
to effect peace between France and Frederick in the midst of the Seven
Years’ War. It was she who fought the hideous incompetence of Maurepas,
the Naval Minister; and it was she who summed herself up to Fontenelle
when she laid her hand on her heart, saying, ‘Here is nothing but
brain.’
From the moment of his birth she had only one wish with regard to her
child--to be rid of him. A long procession of lovers had left her wholly
incapable of shame. But the child would be a worry--and she did not mean
to be worried! If the father had better instincts--well, let him follow
them. He did. He employed Molin, Madame de Tencin’s doctor, to find out
the baby’s nurse, Anne Lemaire, and claim the little creature from her.
The great d’Alembert told Madame Suard many years after how Destouches
drove all round Paris with the baby (‘with a head no bigger than an
apple’) in his arms, trying to find for him a suitable foster-mother.
But little Jean Baptiste Lerond seemed to be dying, and no one would
take him. At last, however, Destouches discovered, living in the Rue
Michel-Lecomte, a poor glazier’s wife, whose motherly soul was touched
by the infant’s piteous plight, and who took him to her love and care,
and kept him there for fifty years.
History has concerned itself much less with Madame Rousseau than with
Madame de Tencin. Yet it was the glazier’s wife who was d’Alembert’s
real mother after all. If she was low-born and ignorant, she had yet the
happiest of all acquirements--she knew how to win love and to keep it.
The great d’Alembert, universally acclaimed as one of the first
intellects of Europe, had ever for this simple person, who defined a
philosopher as ‘a fool who torments himself during his life that people
may talk of him when he is dead,’ the tender reverence which true
greatness, and only true greatness perhaps, can bear towards homely
goodness. From her he learnt the blessing of peace and obscurity. From
his association with her he learnt his noble idea--difficult in any age,
but in that age of degrading luxury and self-indulgence well nigh
impossible--that it is sinful to enjoy superfluities while other men
want necessaries. His hidden life in the dark attic above her husband’s
shop made it possible for him to do that life’s work. For nearly half a
century he knew no other home. When he left her roof at last, in
obedience to the voice of the most masterful of all human passions, he
still retained for her the tenderest affection, and bestowed upon her
and her grandchildren the kindness of one of the kindest hearts that
ever beautified a great intelligence.
Little Jean Baptiste was put to a school in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine,
where he passed as Madame Rousseau’s son. General Destouches paid the
expenses of this schooling, took a keen pleasure in the child’s
brightness and precocity, and came often to see him. One day he
persuaded Madame de Tencin to accompany him. The seven-year-old Jean
Baptiste remembered that scene all his life. ‘Confess, Madame,’ says
Destouches, when they had listened to the boy’s clever answers to his
master’s questions, ‘that it was a pity to abandon such a child.’ Madame
rose at once. ‘Let us go. I see it is going to be very uncomfortable for
me here.’ She never came again.
Destouches died in 1726, when his son was nine years old. He left the
boy twelve hundred livres, and commended him to the care of his
relatives. Through them, at the age of twelve, Jean Baptiste received
the great favour of being admitted to the College of the Four Nations,
founded by Mazarin, and in 1729 the most exclusive school in France.
Fortunately for its new scholar it was something besides fashionable,
and did its best to satisfy his extraordinary thirst for knowledge. His
teachers were all priests and Jansenists, and nourished their apt
scholar on Jansenist literature, imbuing him with the fashionable
theories of Descartes. How soon was it that they began to hope and dream
that in the gentle student called Lerond, living on a narrow pittance
above a tradesman’s shop, they had found a new Pascal, a mighty enemy of
the Archfiend Jesuitism?
But beneath his timid and modest exterior there lay already an intellect
of marvellous strength and clearness, a relentless logic that tested and
weighed every principle instilled in him, every theory masquerading as a
fact. He quickly became equally hostile to both Jesuit and Jansenist. It
was at school that he learnt to hate with an undying hatred,
religion--the religion that in forty years launched, on account of the
Bull Unigenitus, forty thousand _lettres de cachet_, that made men
forget not only their Christianity but their humanity, and give
themselves over body and soul to the devouring fever called fanaticism.
At school also he conceived his passion for mathematics, that love of
exact truth which no Jansenist priest, however subtle, could make him
regard as a dangerous error.
When he was eighteen, in 1735, he took his degree of Bachelor of Arts
and changed his name. D’Alembert is thought to be an anagram on Baptiste
Lerond. Anagrams were fashionable, and one Arouet, who had elected to
be called Voltaire, had made such an alteration of good omen. D’Alembert
went on studying at the College, but throughout his studies mathematics
were wooing him from all other pursuits. The taste, however, was so
unlucrative, and the income from twelve hundred livres so small, that a
profession became a necessity. The young man conscientiously qualified
for a barrister. But ‘he loved only good causes’ and was naturally shy.
He never appeared at the Bar.
Then he bethought him of medicine. He would be a doctor! But again and
again the siren voice of his dominant taste called him back to her. His
friends--those omniscient friends always ready to put a spoke in the
wheel of genius--entreated him to be practical, to remember his poverty,
and to make haste to grow rich. He yielded to them so far that one day
he carried all his geometrical books to one of their houses, and went
back to the garret at Madame Rousseau’s to study medicine and nothing
else in the world. But the geometrical problems disturbed his sleep.
---- One master-passion in the breast,
Like Aaron’s serpent, swallowed all the rest.
Fate wanted d’Alembert, the great mathematician, not some prosperous,
unproductive mediocrity of a Paris apothecary. The crowning blessing of
life, to be born with a bias to some pursuit, was this man’s to the
full.
He yielded to Nature and to God. He brought back the books he had
abandoned, flung aside those for which he had neither taste nor
aptitude, and at twenty gave himself to the work for which he had been
created.
Some artist should put on canvas the picture of this student, sitting in
his ill-aired garret with its narrow prospect of ‘three ells of sky,’
poor, delicate, obscure--or rich, rather, in the purest of earthly
enjoyments, the pursuit of truth for its own sake. He could not afford
to buy many of the books he needed, so he borrowed them from public
libraries. He left the work of the day anticipating with joy the work of
the morrow. For the world he cared nothing, and of him it knew nothing.
Fame?--he did not want it. Wealth?--he could do without it. Poor as he
was, there was no time when he even thought of taking pupils, or using
the leisure he needed for study in making money by a professorship.
To give knowledge was his work and his aim; to make knowledge easier for
others he left to some lesser man. His style had seldom the grace and
clearness which can make, and which in many of his fellow-workers did
make, the abstrusest reasoning charm like romance. D’Alembert left
Diderot to put his thought into irresistible words, and Voltaire and
Turgot to translate it into immortal deeds.
When he was two-and-twenty, in 1739, d’Alembert began his connection
with the Academy of Sciences. In 1743 he published his ‘Treatise on
Dynamics.’ Now little read and long superseded, it placed him at one
bound, and at six-and-twenty years old, among the first geometricians of
Europe. Modest, frugal, retiring as he was and remained, he was no more
only the loving and patient disciple of science. He was its master and
teacher. In 1746 his ‘Treatise on the Theory of Winds’ gained him a
prize in the Academy of Berlin, and first brought him into relationship
with Frederick the Great.
Two years later, when her son was of daily growing renown, Madame de
Tencin died. The story that, when he had become famous and she would
fain have acknowledged him, he had repudiated her, saying he had no
mother but the glazier’s wife, d’Alembert, declares Madame Suard, always
denied. ‘I should never have refused her endearments--it would have been
too sweet to me to recover her.’ That answer is more in keeping with a
temperament but too gentle and forgiving, than the spirited repulse. It
was in keeping also with the life of Madame de Tencin that even death
should leave her indifferent to her child. She thought no more of him,
he said, in the one than in the other. Her money she left to her doctor.
If the studious poverty of the life in the glazier’s attic spared
d’Alembert acquaintances, it did not deprive him of friends.
Then living in Paris, some six-and-thirty years old, the author of the
‘Philosophical Thoughts,’ and the most fascinating scoundrel in France,
was Denis Diderot. With the quiet d’Alembert, of morals almost austere
and of hidden, frugal life, what could a Diderot have in common?
Something more than the attraction of opposites drew them together. The
vehement and all-embracing imagination of the one fired the calm reason
of the other. The hot head and the cool one were laid together, and the
result was the great Encyclopædia.
The first idea of the pair was modest enough--to translate into French
the English Encyclopædia of Chambers. But had not brother Voltaire said
that no man who could make an adequate translation ever wasted his time
in translating? They soon out-ran so timid an ambition. The thing must
not only be spontaneous work; it must wholly surpass all its patterns
and prototypes. It must be not _an_ Encyclopædia, but _the_
Encyclopædia. Every man of talent in France must bring a stone towards
the building of the great Temple. From Switzerland, old Voltaire shall
pour forth inspiration, encouragement, incentive. Rousseau shall lend it
the glow of his passion, and Grimm his journalistic versatility.
Helvétius shall contribute--d’Holbach, Turgot, Morellet, Marmontel,
Raynal, La Harpe, de Jaucourt, Duclos.
And the Preliminary Discourse shall be the work of d’Alembert.
An envious enemy once dismissed him scornfully as
---- Chancelier de Parnasse,
Qui se croit un grand homme et fit une préface.
Yet if he had written nothing but that Preface he would still have had
noble titles to fame. It contained, as he himself said, the quintessence
of twenty years’ study. If his style was usually cold and formal, it was
not so now. With warmest eloquence and boldest brush he painted the
picture of the progress of the human mind since the invention of
printing. From the lofty heights man’s intellect had scaled there stood
out yet mightier heights for him to dare! Advance! advance! If ever
preface said anything, the Preface to the great Encyclopædia says this.
Clothed with light and fire, that dearest son of d’Alembert’s genius
went forth to illuminate and to astound the world.
At first the Encyclopædia was not only heard gladly by the common
people, but was splendidly set forth with the approbation and _Privilège
du Roi_. Even the wise and thoughtful melancholy of d’Alembert’s
temperament may have been cheered by such good fortune, while the
sanguine Diderot naturally felt convinced it would last for ever.
Both worked unremittingly. His authorship of the Preface immediately
flung open to d’Alembert all the _salons_ in Paris, and for the first
time in his life he began to go into society. Then Frederick the Great
made him a rich and splendid offer, the Presidency of the Berlin
Academy. Consider that though the man was famous he was still very poor.
The little pension which was his all ‘is hardly enough to keep me if I
have the happiness or the misfortune to live to be old.’ From the
Government of his country he feared everything and hoped nothing. He was
only thirty-five years of age. A new world was opened to him. The
glazier’s attic he could exchange for a palace, and the homely kindness
of an illiterate foster-mother for the magnificent endearments of a
philosophic king. Was it only the painful example of friend Voltaire’s
angry wretchedness as Frederick’s guest that made him refuse an offer so
lavish and so dazzling? It was rather that he had the rare wisdom to
recognise happiness when he had it and did not mistake it for some
phantom will-o’-the-wisp whom distance clothed with light. ‘The peace I
enjoy is so perfect,’ he wrote, ‘I dare run no risk of disturbing it....
I do not doubt the King’s goodness ... only that the conditions
essential to happiness are not in his power.’
Any man who is offered in place of quiet content that most fleeting and
unsubstantial of all chimeras--fame and glory--should read d’Alembert’s
answer to Frederick the Great.
Frederick’s royal response to it was the offer of a pension of twelve
hundred livres.
In September 1754 the fourth volume of the Encyclopædia was hailed by
the world with a burst of enthusiasm and applause, and in the December
of that year d’Alembert received as a reward for his indefatigable
labours a chair in the French Academy. He had only accepted it on
condition that he spoke his mind freely on all points and made court to
no man. The speech with which he took his seat, though constantly
interrupted with clapping and cries of delight, was not good, said
Grimm. All d’Alembert’s addresses and _éloges_ spoken at the Academy
leave posterity, indeed, as cold as they left the astute German
journalist. The man was a mathematician, a creature of reason. The
passion that was to rule that reason and dominate his life was not the
gaudy and shallow passion of the orator.
In 1756 he went to stay with the great head of his party, Voltaire, at
the Délices, near Geneva. The Patriarch was sixty-two years old, but
with the activity and the enthusiasm of youth. At his house and at his
table d’Alembert met constantly and observed deeply the Calvinistic
pastors of Geneva. He returned to Paris with his head full of the most
famous article the Encyclopædia was to know. At the back of his mind was
a certain request of his host’s, that he should also make a few remarks
on the benefits that play-acting would confer on the Calvinistic
temperament.
No article in that ‘huge folio dictionary’ brewed so fierce a storm or
had consequences so memorable and far-reaching as d’Alembert’s article
‘Geneva.’ In his reserved and formal style he punctiliously complimented
the descendants of Calvin as preferring reason to faith, sound sense to
dogma, and as having a religion which, weighed and tested, was nothing
but a perfect Socinianism. Voltaire laughed long in his sleeve, and in
private executed moral capers of delight. The few words on the
advantages of play-acting, which he had begged might be added, had not
been forgotten.
The Genevan pastors took solemn and heartburning counsel together, and
on the head of the quiet worker in the attic in Paris there burst a
hurricane which might have beaten down coarser natures and frightened
stouter hearts. Calvinism fell upon him, whose sole crime had been to
show her the logical outcome of her doctrines, with the fierce fury of a
desperate cause. Retract! retract! or at least give the names of those
of our pastors who made you believe in the rationalism of our creed! As
for the remarks on plays, why, Jean Jacques Rousseau, our citizen and
your brother philosopher, shall answer those, and in the dazzling
rhetoric of the immortal ‘Letter on Plays’ give, with all the magic and
enchantment of his sophist’s genius, the case against the theatre.
Then, on March 8, 1759, the paternal government of France, joining hands
with Geneva, suppressed by royal edict that Encyclopædia of which a very
few years earlier it had solemnly approved. The accursed thing was burnt
by the hangman. The printers and publishers were sent to the galleys or
to death. The permit to continue publishing the work was rescinded. The
full flowing fountain of knowledge was dammed, and the self-denial of
d’Alembert’s patient life wasted. The gentle heart, which had never
harmed living creature, fell stricken beneath the torrent of filthy fury
which the gutter press poured upon him. His Majesty--his besotted
Majesty, King Louis the Fifteenth--finds in the Encyclopædia, forsooth,
‘maxims tending to destroy Royal authority and to establish
independence ... corruption of morals, irreligion, and unbelief.’
Sycophant and toadying Paris went with him. Furious and blaspheming,
passionate Diderot came out to meet the foe. Dancing with rage, old
Voltaire at Délices could only calm himself enough to hold a pen in his
shaking fingers and pour out incentives to his brothers in Paris to
fight till the death. To him injustice was ever the bugle-call to
battle. But not to d’Alembert. He shrank back into his shell, dumb and
wounded. ‘I do not know if the Encyclopædia will be continued,’ he
wrote, ‘but I am sure it will not be continued by me.’ Even the stirring
incitements of his chief could not alter his purpose. He had offered
sight to the blind, and they had chosen darkness; he would bring them
the light no more. That Diderot considered him traitor and apostate did
not move him. He would not quarrel with that affectionate, hot-headed
brother worker, but for himself that chapter of his life was finished,
and he turned the page.
In the very same year he gave to a thankless world his ‘Elements of
Philosophy;’ and he again refused Frederick the Great’s invitation to
exchange persecuting Paris for the Presidency of the Berlin Academy. But
there was no reason why he should not escape from his troubles for a
time and become Frederick’s visitor.
In 1762 he went to Berlin for two months, and found the great King a
clever, generous, and devoted friend. But though he continued to beg
d’Alembert to stay with him permanently, and was lavish of gifts and
promises, the wise and judicious visitor was wholly proof against the
royal blandishments. In the same year he refused a yet more dazzling
offer--to be tutor to Catherine the Great’s son. He had already in
Paris, not only ties, which might be broken, but _a_ tie, which he found
indissoluble.
In 1765, three years after Catherine’s offer had been made and declined,
d’Alembert, when he was forty-eight years old, was attacked by a severe
illness, which, said his accommodating doctor, required larger and
airier rooms than those in his good old nurse’s home. He was moved from
the familiar Rue Michel-Lecomte to the Boulevard du Temple. There
Mademoiselle de Lespinasse joined him and nursed him back to health.
In all the story of d’Alembert’s life, in that age of unbridled licence,
no woman’s name is connected with his save this one’s. Fifteen years
earlier he had made the acquaintance of Madame du Deffand. To the blind
old worldling, who loved Horace Walpole and wrote immortal letters, he
stood in the nature of a dear and promising son. For many years he was
always about her house. His wit and his charm, seasoned by a gentle
spice of irony and a delightful talent for telling stories and enjoying
them himself, naturally endeared him to the old woman whose one hell was
boredom. On his side, he came because he liked her, and stayed because
he loved Mademoiselle de Lespinasse. The history of that _ménage_ of the
brilliant, impulsive, undisciplined girl, with her plain face and her
matchless charm, and of the blind old woman she tended, deceived, and
outwitted, has been told in fiction as well as in history. How when
Madame du Deffand was asleep, her poor companion held for herself
reunions of the bright, particular stars of her mistress’s firmament,
and how the old woman, rising a little too early one day, came into the
room and with her sightless eyes saw all, is one of the familiar
anecdotes of literature.
Long before this dramatic _dénouement_, d’Alembert and Julie de
Lespinasse had been something more than friends. But now Mademoiselle
saw herself cast adrift on the world. She flung to it her reputation,
and yielded, not so much to the entreaties of d’Alembert’s love, as to
the more pitiful pleading his solitude and sickness made to the warm
maternity in her woman’s heart. She nursed him back to convalescence,
and then lived beneath the same roof with him in the Rue Belle Chasse.
Picture the man with his wide, wise intelligence and his diffident and
gentle nature, and the woman with her brilliant intuition and her quick,
glowing impulse. To his exact logic she could add feeling, passion,
sympathy; his frigid and awkward style she could endow with life and
fire. Many of his manuscripts are covered with her handwriting. Some,
she certainly inspired. She had read widely and felt keenly, and her
lover had weighed, pondered, considered. For him, who had for himself no
ambition, she could dare and hope all. The perpetual Secretaryship of
the Academy shall be turned from a dream to a fact! In that age of
women’s influence no woman had in her frail hands more to give and to
withhold than this poor companion, whose marvellous power over men and
destinies lay not in her head, but in her heart. The true complement of
a d’Alembert, daring where he was timid, fervent where he was cold, a
woman’s feeling to quicken his man’s reason--here should have been
indeed the marriage of true minds.
Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,
Your heart anticipate my heart.
You must be just before, in fine,
See and make me see, for your part,
New depths of the divine!
Yet d’Alembert’s is the most piteous love-story in history. If
Mademoiselle had yielded to his sadness and his loneliness, she had
never loved him. Only a year after she had joined him, d’Alembert,
alluding to some rumours which had been afloat concerning their
marriage, wrote bitterly, ‘What should _I_ do with a wife and children?’
But there was only one real obstacle to their union. Across
Mademoiselle’s undisciplined heart there lay already the shadows of
another passion.
From the first the household in the Rue Belle Chasse had been absolutely
dominated by the woman. ‘In love, who loves least, rules.’ D’Alembert
was in bondage while she was free. To keep her, he submitted to humours
full of bitterness and sharpness--the caprices of that indifferent
affection which gives nothing and exacts all. In her hands, he was as a
child; his philosophies went to the winds; his very reason was
prostrate. How soon was it he began to guess he had a rival in her
heart?
It was not till after her death that he found out for certain that less
than two years after she came to him she had given herself, body and
soul, to the young Marquis de Mora. But what he did not know, he must
have greatly suspected. It was he who wrote her letters and ran her
errands. Grimm recorded in the ‘Literary Correspondence’ the prodigious
ascendency she had acquired over all his thoughts and actions. ‘No
luckless Savoyard of Paris ... does so many wearisome commissions as the
first geometrician of Europe, the chief of the Encyclopædic sect, the
dictator of our Academies, does for Mademoiselle.’ He would post her
fervent outpourings to the man who had supplanted him, and call for the
replies at the post-office that she might receive them an hour or two
earlier. What wonder that over such a character, a nature like
Mademoiselle’s rode roughshod, that she hurt and bruised him a hundred
times a day, and wounded while she despised him? No woman ever truly
loves a man who does not exact from her not only complete fidelity to
himself, but fidelity to all that is best and highest in her own nature.
D’Alembert had indeed in full measure the virtue of his defects. If it
was a crime to be tender to her sins, it was nobility to be gentle to
her sufferings. He bore and forbore with her endlessly. Always patient
and good-humoured, thinking greatly of her and little of himself,
abundant in compassion for her ruined nerves and the querulous
feverishness of her ill health--here surely were some of the noble
traits of a good love. He read to her, watched by her, tended her, and
in the matchless society they gathered round them was abundantly
content to be nothing, that she might be all.
Their life together in the Rue Belle Chasse had not in the least shocked
their easy-going world. Many persons comfortably maintained that their
association was the merest friendship--heedless of that amply proven
fact that where people avoid evil, they avoid also the appearance of
evil. The eighteenth century, indeed, even if it saw any difference
between vice and virtue, which is doubtful, did not in the least mind if
its favourites were vicious or virtuous, provided they were not dull.
D’Alembert and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse did not fall under that ban.
The hermit life the man had led was over for ever. In her modest room in
that dingy street, Mademoiselle held every night the most famous _salon_
in Paris.
Most of the _salons_ may be exhaustively described as having been
nourished on a little _eau sucré_ and a great deal of wit. But to this
one wit alone was light, food, and air. Mademoiselle did not require to
give dinners like Madame Necker, or suppers like Madame du Deffand;
neither for the beauty which, later, was to make men forgive the mental
limitations of Madame Récamier, had she need or use. Tall, pale, and
slender, with her infinite, unconscious tact, her mental grace, and her
divine sympathy, her passage through the social life of her age has
left the subtle perfume of some delicate flower. To be her friend was to
feel complete, understood, satisfied. To her, as to a sister of
consolation, came Condorcet, marquis, mathematician, philosopher;
Saint-Pierre, the pupil of Rousseau and the creator of ‘Paul and
Virginia;’ La Harpe, whom she was to help to the Academy; Hénault, whom
she had charmed from Madame du Deffand; Turgot, Chastellux, Marmontel.
And quietly effacing himself, with that true greatness which is never
afraid to be made of little account, was Mademoiselle’s lover and the
noblest intellect of them all, d’Alembert.
There is no more delightful trait in his character than this exquisite
talent for modesty. With his spare form always dressed from head to foot
in clothes of one colour, the aim of d’Alembert was both physically and
mentally, as it were, to escape notice. True, when he talked, the
listener must needs marvel at the breadth, the variety, the
exhaustless interests of the mind, and its perfect simplicity and
straightforwardness. But he did not want to talk much. He liked better
to listen. He preferred in society, as he preferred in life, to think
while other men said and did.
No social pleasures could either supersede the work of his life, or make
compensation for the sorrows of his soul. He had already thrown in his
lot with Mademoiselle when he published the most daring of all his
books, ‘The History of the Destruction of the Jesuits.’ Her treachery
had shattered his life for five years, when he asked Frederick the Great
for a sum of money which would enable him to travel and heal his broken
health and heart. In 1770, with young Condorcet for his companion, he
left Paris for Italy, stopped at Ferney, and spent his whole leave of
absence with Voltaire.
It was an oasis in the desert of the feverish existence to which he had
condemned himself. In mighty speculation, in splendid visions of the
future of the race, in passionate argument on the immortality of the
soul and the being and nature of God, he forgot his personal sorrows.
The mind dominated and the heart was still. What nights the three must
have spent together--Voltaire with his octogenarian’s intellect as keen
and bright as a boy’s, the young Marquis, sharp-set to learn, and
d’Alembert with his ‘just mind and inexhaustible imagination’--when they
could get rid of that babbling inconsequence, Voltaire’s niece, Madame
Denis, and sit hour after hour discussing, planning, dreaming! The quiet
d’Alembert went, as quiet people often do, far beyond his impulsive and
outspoken companions in speculative daring. Though there is not an
anti-Christian line in any of his published writings except his
correspondence, yet the scepticism of this gentle mathematician far
exceeded that of him who is accounted the Prince of Unbelievers, and
where his host was a hotly convinced Deist, d’Alembert only thought the
probabilities in favour of Theism, and was far more Voltairian than
Voltaire. It was the old Pontiff of the Church of Anti-Christ who
stopped a conversation at his table wherein d’Alembert had spoken of the
very existence of God as a moot point, by sending the servants out of
the room, and then turning to his guests with--‘And now, gentlemen,
continue your attack upon God. But as I do not want to be murdered or
robbed to-night by my servants, they had better not hear you.’
The visit lasted in all two months. D’Alembert abandoned the Italian
journey, offered King Frederick his change, and returned to Paris.
In 1772 he was made Perpetual Secretary of the French Academy. He, whose
needs, said Grimm, were always the measure of his ambitions, had scaled
heights, not beyond his deserts, but beyond his wishes. He was also a
member of the scientific Academies of Prussia, Russia, Portugal, Naples,
Turin, Norway, Padua, and of the literary academies of Sweden and
Bologna. But if ‘the end of all ambition is to be happy at home,’
d’Alembert had failed. When the Perpetual Secretaryship was still a new
and dazzling possession, the Perpetual Secretary found at home the woman
to whom he was captive soul and body, in the throes of another passion.
False to de Mora, as she had been false to him, she was then writing to
de Guibert those love-letters which have given her a place beside Sappho
and Eloïsa and have added a classic to literature. It was d’Alembert’s
part to listen to self-reproaches whose justice he might well guess, to
look into the depths of a tenderness in which he had no share. Once he
gave her his portrait with these lines beneath it:
Et dites quelquefois en voyant cette image
De tous ceux que j’aimai, qui m’aima comme lui?
She herself said that of all the feelings she had inspired, his alone
had not brought her wretchedness.
In 1775 de Guibert was married. The marriage was Mademoiselle’s
death-blow. The fever of the soul became a disease of the body.
Sometimes bitterly repentant and sometimes only captious and difficult;
now, her true self full of tenderness and charm: and now, reckless,
selfish, despairing--d’Alembert’s patience and goodness were
inexhaustible. True to his character, he stood aside that to the last
her friends might visit her, that to the last she might help and feel
for them.
But though the spirit still triumphed at moments over the body, the end
was near. When her misery was dulled by opium, d’Alembert was always
watching, unheeded, at her bedside. It was the attitude of his life.
When she became conscious, he was there still. Before she died, she
asked his pardon; but de Guibert’s was the last name upon her lips. She
died on May 23, 1776, not yet forty-five years old.
D’Alembert’s grief seems to have taken by surprise many short-sighted
friends who had supposed that quiet exterior to hide a cold, or an
unawakened, heart. He was utterly crushed and broken. His life had lost
at once its inspiration and its meaning. For the sake of Mademoiselle he
had grown old without family and without hope. His friends, in that age
of noble friendships, did their best to comfort him. But his wounds were
deeper than they knew. With a super-refinement of selfishness or
cruelty, Mademoiselle had left him her Correspondence. She had not
preserved in it one single line of the many letters he had himself
written to her, while it contained full and certain proofs of her double
infidelity.
He who has lost only those of whose faith and truth he is sure, has not
yet reached the depth of human desolation.
After a while, d’Alembert tried to return to his first affection--that
cold but faithful mistress, his mathematical studies. At the Academy he
pronounced the _éloge_ of Louis de Sacy, who had been the lover of the
Marquise de Lambert. For the first time he looked into his heart and
wrote, and thus for the first time he touched the hearts of others; the
cold style took fire, and beneath the clumsy periods welled tears.
But the writer was consumed to the soul with grief and weariness. This
was not the man who could use sorrow as a spur to new endeavour and to
nobler work. Before the persecutions which had assailed the Encyclopædia
he had bowed his head and taken covert, and the death of his mistress
broke not only his heart, but his spirit and his life. From Madame
Marmontel and from Thomas, he derived, it is said, some sort of comfort:
Condorcet was as a son; but with Mademoiselle’s death the light of her
society had gone out. The friends who remained were but pale stars in a
dark sky. D’Alembert was growing old. He suffered from a cruel disease
and could not face the horrors of the operation which might have
relieved it. ‘Those are fortunate who have courage,’ said he; ‘for
myself, I have none.’ It was life, not death, he dreaded. What use then
to suffer only to prolong suffering?
The mental enlightenment he had given the world, the wider knowledge
which he had lived to impart, consoled this dying thinker scarcely at
all. He was to his last hour what he had been when Mademoiselle took
ill-fated compassion on his dependence and loneliness--a child,
affectionate, solitary, tractable, with the great mind always weighed
down by the supersensitiveness of a child’s heart and with a child’s
clinging need of care and tenderness. He died on October 29, 1783.
The man whose only reason for dreading poverty had been lest he should
be forced to reduce his charities, left, as might have been expected, a
very small fortune. Condorcet was his residuary legatee, and made his
_éloge_ in both the Academies.
Diderot himself was dying when he heard of his old friend’s death. ‘A
great light has gone out,’ said he. Euler, d’Alembert’s brother, and
sometimes his rival, geometrician, survived him only a few months. And
Voltaire, the quick and life-giving spirit of the vast movement of which
d’Alembert was the Logic, the Reason, the Thought, had already died to
earth, though he lived to everlasting fame.
D’Alembert owes his greatest reputation to geometry. But, as Grimm
said, in that department only geometricians can exactly render him his
due: ‘He added to the discoveries of the Eulers ... and the Newtons.’ To
the general public his great title to glory lies in the mighty help he
gave to that great monument of Voltairian philosophy, the Encyclopædia.
The Preface was ‘a work for which he had no model.’ By it, he introduced
to the world that book which Diderot produced, and which, except the
Bible and the Koran, may be justly said to have been the most
influential book in history; which gave France, and, through France,
Europe, that new light and knowledge which brought with them a nobler
civilisation and a recognition of the universal rights of man.
In himself, d’Alembert was always rather a great intelligence than a
great character. To the magnificence of the one he owed all that has
made him immortal, and to the weakness of the other the sorrows and the
failures of his life. For it is by character and not by intellect the
world is won.
II
_DIDEROT: THE TALKER_
Some hundred and eighty odd years ago, in a little town in France, a
wild boy slipped out of his room at midnight, and crept downstairs in
his stocking-feet with the wicked intent of running away to Paris. This
time-honoured escapade was defeated by the appearance of Master Denis’s
resolute father with the household keys in his hand. ‘Where are you
going?’ says he. ‘To Paris, to join the Jesuits.’ ‘Certainly; I will
take you there myself to-morrow.’ And Denis retires tamely and
ignominiously to bed.
The next morning the good old father (a master-cutler in the town of
Langres) escorted his scapegrace to the capital, as he had desired,
entered him at Harcourt College, stayed himself for a fortnight at a
neighbouring inn to see that the boy adhered to his intentions; and then
went home. The adventure was redeemed from the commonplace in that this
scapegrace would fain have run away, not _from_ school, but _to_ it;
and
[Illustration: DENIS DIDEROT.
_From an Engraving by Henriquez, after the Portrait by Vanloo._]
that he was acting under an influence much more powerful than the cheap,
adventurous fiction which generally prompts such schemes. When he was
twelve years old the Jesuits had tonsured Denis’s hot head, and no doubt
designed all it contained for their service.
At the college Denis spent his time in learning a great deal for
himself, and doing, with brilliant ease and the most complete
good-nature, a great deal of work of his school-fellows. He was himself
astoundingly clever and astoundingly careless. He learnt mathematics,
which could not make him exact, Latin, and English. With that charming
readiness to do the stupid boys’ lessons for them (_blanchir les
chiffons des autres_, the talent came to be called when he grew older),
with his inimitable love of life, his jolly, happy-go-lucky disposition,
his open hand and heart, and his merry face, this should surely have
been the most popular schoolboy that ever lived.
One of his friends was Bernis--to be poet, Cardinal, and _protégé_ of
Madame de Pompadour--and the pair would dine together at six sous a head
at a neighbouring restaurant.
The schooldays were all too short. The practical master-cutler at
Langres soon intimated to Denis that it was time to choose a profession.
But Denis declines to be a doctor, because he has no turn for murder;
or a lawyer, because he has no taste for doing other people’s business.
In brief, he does not want to be anything. He wants to learn, to study,
to look round him. But a shrewd old tradesman is not going to give, even
if he could afford to give, any son of his the money to do that. Denis
had at home a younger brother, who was to be a priest (‘that cursed
saint,’ the graceless Denis called him hereafter), a sister, good and
sensible like her father, and a mother, who was tender and foolish over
her truant boy, after the fashion of mothers all the world over. Here
were three mouths to feed. Denis loved his father with all the impetuous
affection of his temperament. He was delighted when, some years later,
he went back to Langres and a fellow-townsman grasped him by the arm
saying: ‘M. Diderot, you are a good man, but if you think you will ever
be as good a man as your father, you are much mistaken.’ But Diderot had
never the sort of affection that consists in doing one’s utmost for the
object of the affection. He preferred to be a care and a trouble to his
family and to live by his wits, harum-scarum, merry, and poor. He chose
that life, and abided by the choice for ten years.
Three times in that period the old servant of the family tramped all the
way from Langres to Paris with little stores of money hidden in her
dress for this dear, naughty scapegrace of a Master Denis; but except
for this, he lived on his wits in the most literal sense of the term. He
made catalogues and translations; he wrote sermons and thought himself
well paid at fifty écus the homily; he became a tutor--until the pupil’s
stupidity bored him, when he threw up the situation and went hungry to
bed. He once indeed so far commanded himself as to remain in this
capacity for three months. Then he sought his employer; he could endure
it no more. ‘I am making men of your children, perhaps; but they are
fast making a child of me. I am only too well off and comfortable in
your house, but I must leave it.’ And he left.
One Shrove Tuesday he fainted from hunger in his wretched lodgings, and
was restored and fed by his landlady. He took a vow that day, and kept
it, that, if he had anything to give, he would never refuse a man in
need. By the next morning he was as light-hearted as usual again. A
bright idea, even the recollection of a few apt lines from Horace, would
always restore his cheerfulness. He enjoyed indeed all the blessings of
a sanguine nature, and fell into all its faults. The facts that his
father was paying his debts, that often he had to sponge on his friends
for a dinner, or trick a tradesman for an advantage he could not buy,
neither troubled him nor made him work. It is no doubt to his credit
that he never stooped, as he might easily have done, to be the literary
parasite of some great man, to prostitute his talents to praise and fawn
on some ignoble patron. But though that gay, profligate existence has
been often made to sound romantic on paper, it was squalid and shabby
enough in reality, with that shabbiness which is of the soul.