in love. He was lodging with a poor woman and her daughter who kept
themselves by doing fine needlework. Anne Toinette Champion (Nanette,
Diderot called her) was not only exquisitely fresh and pretty, but she
was good, simple, and honest. To gain access to her Diderot stooped to
one of the tricks to which his life had made him used. He pretended that
he was going to enter a Jesuit seminary, and employed Nanette to make
him the necessary outfit. His mouth of gold did the rest. No one,
perhaps, who did not live with Diderot and hear him talk ‘as never man
talked,’ who did not know him in the flesh and fall under the personal
influence of his magnetic and all-compelling charm, will ever fully
understand it. ‘Utterly unclean, scandalous, shameless’ as many honest
and upright people knew him to be, he fascinated them all. Something
indeed of that fascination still lingers about him, as the scent of a
flower may cling to a coarse, stained parchment. Read the facts of his
life, as briefly and coldly stated in some biographical dictionary, and
most men will easily dismiss him as a great genius and a great
scoundrel. Read the thousand anecdotes that have gathered about his
name, of the love his contemporaries bore him, of his generosity, his
glowing affections, his passionate pity for sorrow, and his hot zeal for
humanity, and it is easy to understand not only the mighty part Diderot
played in the great movement which prepared men for freedom and the
French Revolution, but also his insistent claims on their love and
forgiveness.
A little seamstress could not, in the nature of things, resist him long.
The hopeful lover went to Langres to obtain his father’s consent to his
marriage, which was of course refused. At the date of his wedding,
November 6, 1743, Denis had published scarcely anything, had no certain
sources of income, and very few uncertain ones. He was, moreover, at
first so jealous of his dearest Nanette that he made her give up her
trade of needlework, as it brought her too much into contact with the
outer world. The pair lived on her mother’s savings; and then Denis
translated a history of Greece from the English, and kept the wolf from
the door a little longer.
Poverty fell, as ever, more hardly on the wife than on the husband. The
ever popular Diderot was often asked out to dine with his friends, and
always went; while at home Nanette feasted on dry bread, to be sure that
this fine lover of hers should be able to have his cup of coffee and his
game of chess at the _café_ of the Regency as usual. Of course Denis
took advantage of her talent for self-sacrifice. His writings contain
much sentimental pity, expressed in the most beautiful language, for the
condition and the physical disadvantages of women; and he spoke of
himself most comfortably as a good husband and father, and honestly
believed that he was both. But he began to neglect his wife directly his
first passion for her was spent. She was not perfect, it is true. Of a
certain rigidity in her goodness, and a certain bourgeois narrowness in
her view of life, she may be justly accused. But it remains undeniable
that she was thrifty and unselfish at home, while her husband was
profligate and self-indulgent abroad, that she saved and worked for her
children, while he wrote fine pages on paternal devotion, and that he
never gave her the consideration and forbearance he demanded _from_ her
as a matter of course. Before her first child was born the poor girl
had lost her mother, and had no one in all the world to depend on but
that most untrustworthy creature on earth, a genius of bad character.
In the year 1745 Denis sent her to Langres for a long visit to his
parents, to effect if possible a reconciliation with them.
The man who called himself ‘the apologist of strong passions,’ who
thought marriage ‘a senseless vow,’ and ‘was always very near to the
position that there is no such thing as an absolute rule of right and
wrong,’ would not be likely to be faithful. He was not faithful. There
soon loomed on the scene a Madame Puisieux (the wife of a barrister),
aged about five-and-twenty, charming, accomplished, dissolute. Diderot
plunged headlong into love with her, as he plunged headlong into
everything. To be sure, she was abominably extravagant and always
wanting money. To gratify her demands Diderot wrote, most
characteristically, an ‘Essay on Merit and Virtue,’ and brought Merit
and Virtue the sum he received in payment. But Madame’s love of fine
clothes was insatiable. Between a Good Friday and Easter Day her lover
composed for her the ‘Philosophical Thoughts,’ which first made him
famous, which were paid the compliment of burning, and for which his
mistress received fifty louis.
The history of the inspiration of masterpieces would afford a
peculiarly interesting insight into human nature. It may be set down to
the credit of Madame Puisieux (history knows of nothing else to her
credit) that her rapacity at least forced this incorrigible
ne’er-do-weel upon his destiny, and first turned Diderot, the most
delightful scamp in the capital, into Diderot the hard-working
philosopher and man of genius.
Nanette came home presently, having earned the love and admiration of
the little family at Langres, and put up with Madame Puisieux as best
she could. Other children were born to her, and died; only one, little
Angélique, survived. Of the quantity of Diderot’s love for this child
there is no doubt; it is only the quality that is questionable.
Self-indulgent to himself, he was weakly indulgent to her. She was apt
at learning, so, when they both felt inclined, he taught her music and
history. Later, when she was ill, he wrote letters about her full of
ardent affection; but he left her mother to nurse her and went off gaily
to amuse himself with his friends, and then took great credit for having
given ‘orders which marked attention and interest’ in her, before he
went out and dined with Grimm under the trees in the Tuileries.
Of course Angélique loved the lively good-natured father much the better
of the two. Of her mother the daughter herself said afterwards, with a
sad truth, that she would have had a happier life if she could have
cared less for her husband.
However, Denis was working now, and working meant, or should mean, ease
and competence.
The ‘Philosophical Thoughts’ had made men turn and look at him. True,
their audacious freedom was not pleasing to the government; but what did
a Diderot care for that? His ideas rolled off his pen as the words
rolled off his tongue. ‘I do not compose, I am no author,’ he wrote
once. ‘I read, or I converse. I ask questions, or I give answers.’ The
lines should be placed as a motto over each of his works. That they are
literally true accounts for all his defects as a writer, and for all his
charm.
In 1749 he happened to be talking about a certain famous operation for
cataract, and afterwards wrote down his reflections on it. To a man born
blind, atheism, said Diderot, is surely a natural religion. He sent his
‘Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See’ to the great chief of
the party of which his ‘Philosophical Thoughts’ had proclaimed himself a
member. Voltaire replied that, for his part, if he were blind, he should
have recognised a great Intelligence who provided so many substitutes
for sight; and the friendship between Arouet and Denis was started with
a will.
On July 24, 1749, Diderot found himself a prisoner in the fortress of
Vincennes. He was not wholly surprised. No literary man was astonished
at being imprisoned in those days. Diderot was perfectly aware that
since the publication of the ‘Philosophical Thoughts’ he had been
suspect of the police; he was also aware that his ‘Letter on the Blind’
contained a sneer on the subject of a fine lady, the _chère amie_ of
d’Argenson, the War Minister. For company he had ‘Paradise Lost’ and his
own buoyant temperament. He made a pen out of a toothpick, and ink out
of the slate scraped from the side of his window, mixed with wine; and
with characteristic good-nature wrote down this simple recipe for
writing materials on the wall of his cell for the benefit of future
sufferers.
Better than all, he was the friend of Voltaire, and Voltaire’s Madame du
Châtelet was a near relative of the governor of Vincennes. After
twenty-one days of wire-pulling, Socrates Diderot, as Madame du Châtelet
called him, was removed, as the fruit of her efforts, from the fortress
to the castle of Vincennes, put on parole, allowed the society of his
wife and children, with pen, ink, and books to his heart’s content. One
day Madame Puisieux came to see him--in attire too magnificent to be
entirely for the benefit of a poor dog of a prisoner like myself, thinks
Denis. That night he climbed over the high wall of the _enceinte_ of the
castle, and finding her, as he had expected, amusing herself with
another admirer at a _fête_, renounced her as easily and hotly as he had
fallen in love with her. He had one far more famous visitor in
Vincennes, Jean Jacques Rousseau. As they walked together in the wood of
Vincennes, Denis, with his overrunning fecundity of idea, suggested to
Jean Jacques, it is said, the matter for that essay, sometimes called
the ‘Essay against Civilisation,’ which first made him famous.
When his imprisonment had lasted three months Diderot, at the angry
urging of the booksellers of Paris, was released.
In 1745 one of those booksellers, Le Breton, had suggested to him ‘the
scheme of a book that should be all books.’ Enterprising England had
been first in the field. To Francis Bacon belongs the honour of having
originated the idea of an Encyclopædia. Chambers, an Englishman, first
worked out that idea. It was a French translation of Chambers that Le
Breton took to Diderot, and it was Diderot who breathed upon it the
breath of life.
That this knavish bookseller’s choice should have fallen out of all men
upon him, might have inclined even so whole-hearted a sceptic as Denis
himself to believe in an Intelligence behind the world. He was hungry
and poor, and _must_ have work that would bring him bread. There were
indeed thousands of persons in that position; but out of those thousands
there was only one with the hot, sanguine courage to undertake so risky
a scheme, with the ‘fiery patience’ to work it in the face of
overwhelming odds, and with the exuberant genius to make it the mighty
masterpiece it became.
Diderot saw its possibilities at once. In another second, as it were, he
saw all he could himself do, and all he could not do. He could write
about most things. He could study the trades and industries of France,
if it took him thirty years of labour, of which the mere thought would
daunt most men; by giving their history he could glorify for ever those
peaceful arts which make a nation truly great and happy. He could write
on Gallantry, on Genius, on Libraries, on Anagrams. For his fertile
spirit scarcely any subject was too great or too small. Against
intolerance he could bring to bear ‘the concentrated energy of a
profound conviction.’ Religion itself he could attack in so far as it
interfered with men’s liberty; and miracle he must attack, because, in
the words of Voltaire, ‘Men will not cease to be persecutors till they
have ceased to be absurd.’ If he had, just to appease the authorities,
and to give the book a chance of a hearing, to truckle here and there to
prejudice and superstition, well, Diderot could lie as heartily and as
cheerfully as he did all things.
But the inexact schoolboy of Harcourt College was no mathematician, and
knew his limitations. With the freemasonry of genius he saw in a single
flashing glance that d’Alembert was the man to share with him the
parentage of this wonderful child. He stormed the calm savant in his
attic above the glazier’s shop, overwhelmed, prayed, pressed, bewitched
him, and with ‘his soul in his eyes and his lips’ woke in d’Alembert’s
quiet breast an enthusiasm which was at least some reflex of his own.
For three years the two worked night and day at the preliminaries of
their scheme. In 1750 Diderot poured out, with the warmth and glow of a
woman in love, the Prospectus and Plan of his work. The overwhelmingness
of his enthusiasm had forced a privilege for it from the authorities.
Also in 1750 appeared d’Alembert’s Preface, and the first volume was
launched on the world.
From this time until 1765 the history of Diderot and of the Encyclopædia
is the same thing. For fifteen years he worked at it unremittingly
through storm and sunshine. The idea possessed and dominated him. In a
garret on the fifth floor in his lodging in the Rue Taranne, wrapped in
an old dressing-gown, with wild hair, bare neck, and bent back, the
message he must deliver through the Encyclopædia bubbled into his heart
and went straight from his heart to his pen.
‘This thing will surely produce a great revolution in the human mind,’
he said of it in passionate exultation: ‘We shall have served humanity.’
For this Diderot, who disbelieved so loudly and truculently in God,
believed hopefully in the improvement of human kind, and had for the
race so vast and so generous a pity that he sacrificed to it the coarse
pleasures his coarse nature loved, his time, his peace, his worldly
advancement, his safety, and his friend.
In 1752 a Royal Edict of matchless imbecility suppressed the first two
volumes of the book, at the same time begging its promoters to continue
to bring out others! Every year a volume appeared until 1757. The
success of the thing was prodigious, and with reason, for it said what,
so far, men had only dared to think. It gave the history, quite
innocently, of the taxes--of _gabelle_, of _taille_, of _corvée_--and
they stood ‘damned to everlasting fame;’ it showed the infamous abuses
of the game-laws; it manifested the miracles of science. As by a magnet
the genius of Diderot had drawn to him, as contributors, all the genius
of France; while always at his side, co-editing, restraining his
imprudence, yet working as he worked himself, was d’Alembert.
And then, in 1759, came the great suspension. D’Alembert had written his
famous article ‘Geneva,’ and that mad emotionalist, Jean Jacques
Rousseau, in the most famous treachery in the history of literature,
turned on the philosophic party in his Letter to d’Alembert ‘On Plays.’
The authorities of France united with insulted Calvinism and with
Rousseau, and declared the Encyclopædia accursed and forbidden. That
would have been bad enough; but there was yet one thing worse. Beaten
down by storm and insult, d’Alembert fell back from the fray and left
Diderot to fight the battle alone.
He started up in a second, raging and cursing, and went out with his
life in his hand. Seizing his pen, he slashed, hewed, hacked, with that
reckless weapon on every side. Vincennes and the Bastille loomed
ominously; he was never sure one day, says his daughter, of being
allowed to continue the next; but he went on. The authorities might
burn, but they could not destroy; they might prohibit, but they could
not daunt a Diderot.
In 1764, despite galleys and bonfires, kings, ministers, and _lettres de
cachet_, the last ten volumes were ready to appear in a single issue and
to crown his life’s labour, when fate struck him a last crushing blow.
When the manuscript of the articles had been burnt he discovered that
the false Le Breton, fearing for his own safety, had cut out all such
passages as he thought might endanger it; and had thus mutilated and
ruined the ten volumes past recall.
Diderot burst, literally, into tears of rage. Despair and frenzy seized
him. Was this to be the end? Not while he had breath in his body! He
attacked Le Breton with an unclean fury not often matched, and in 1765
the volumes appeared, as whole as his talent and energy could make them.
It was Diderot who said that if he must choose between Racine, bad
husband, father, and friend, but sublime poet; and Racine, good husband,
father, and friend, but dull ordinary man, he would choose the first.
‘Of the wicked Racine, what remains? Nothing. Of Racine, the man of
genius? The work is eternal.’ When one considers his Herculean labours
for the Encyclopædia, one is almost tempted to judge him as he judged
Racine.
All the time, too, he was busy in many other ways. There has surely
never been such a good-natured man of letters. The study door in the
attic was open not only to all his friends, but to all the Grub Street
vagrants and parasites of Paris. Diderot purified his friend d’Holbach’s
German-French and profusely helped his dearest Grimm in the ‘Literary
Correspondence;’ he corrected proofs for Helvétius, Raynal, and Galiani,
gave lessons in metaphysics to a German princess, and was, for himself,
not only an encyclopædist, but a novelist, an art-critic, and a
playwright. He also wrote dedicatory epistles for needy musicians,
‘reconciled brothers, settled lawsuits, solicited pensions.’ He planned
a comedy for an unsuccessful dramatic author, and, in roars of laughter,
indited an advertisement of a hair-wash to oblige an illiterate
hairdresser. The story has been told often, but still bears telling
afresh, of the young man who came to him with a personal satire against
Diderot himself. ‘I thought,’ says the satirist, ‘you would give me a
few crowns to suppress it.’ ‘I can do better for you than that,’ says
Diderot, not in the least annoyed. ‘Dedicate it to the brother of the
Duke of Orleans, who hates me; take it to him and he will give you
assistance.’ ‘But I do not know the Prince.’ ‘Sit down, and I will write
the dedication for you.’ He did, and so ably, that the satirist obtained
a handsome sum.
Another day he composed for the benefit of a woman, who had been
deserted by the Duc de la Vrillière, a most touching appeal to the
Duke’s feelings. ‘While I lived in the light of your love, I did not ask
your pity. But of all your passion there only remains to me your
portrait--and that I must sell to-morrow for bread.’ The Duke sent her
fifty louis.
It is hardly necessary to say that Diderot’s friends availed themselves
as freely of his purse as of his brains. In return for his mighty
expenditure of time, talent, and energy for the Encyclopædia he never
received more than the princely sum of one hundred and thirty pounds a
year. As he was the sort of person who always took a carriage if he
wanted one, who had a pretty taste in miniatures and _objets d’art_
which he found it positively imperative to gratify, as he loved high
play and always lost--as, in brief, he could never deny himself or
anybody else anything--it was physically impossible he should ever be
solvent.
One graceless hanger-on turned back as he was leaving him one day. ‘M.
Diderot, do you know any natural history?’ ‘Well,’ says Diderot, ‘enough
to tell a pigeon from a humming-bird.’ ‘Have you ever heard of the
_Formica leo_? It is a very busy little creature; it burrows a hole in
the earth like a funnel, covers the surface with a fine sand, attracts
a number of stupid insects to it, takes them, sucks them dry, and says,
“M. Diderot, I have the honour to wish you a very good morning.”’ It may
be said of Diderot that he could love, but not respect; and that is the
inevitable attitude one takes towards himself.
In 1755, during his work at the Encyclopædia and for those innumerable
idle persons who had much better have worked for themselves, poor
Nanette went on a second fatal visit to Langres and gave her husband the
opportunity of falling in love with Mademoiselle Volland, and starting a
memorable correspondence.
Sophie Volland was a rather elderly young lady, with spectacles, and a
good deal of real cleverness and erudition. Whether Diderot, who was now
a man of forty-two, was ever literally in love with her, or whether he
was ‘less than lover but more than friend,’ remains uncertain. His
letters to her are warmly interesting, frank, natural, spontaneous, with
many passages of exquisite beauty and thoughtfulness. There is but one
fault--that fatal fault without which Diderot would not have been
Diderot at all but some loftier man--his irrepressible indecency.
He had much to tell Mademoiselle. The words seem to trip over each other
in his anxiety to show her all he had done and felt. He was now famous.
The Encyclopædia had thrown open to him, cutler’s son though he was, the
doors of the _salons_; a great quarrel he had with Eousseau in 1757--the
dingy details of which there is neither interest nor profit in
recalling--made him the talk of the _cafés_.
But this loud, explosive Denis was scarcely a social light. He said
himself that he only liked company in which he could say anything. And
what Diderot meant by _anything_ was considered indecorous even in that
freest of all free-spoken ages. Good old Madame Geoffrin lost her
patience with him, not only for his licence, but for talking so movingly
about duty and neglecting all his own. _She_ was not going to ignore his
Mademoiselle Volland. She treated him ‘like a beast,’ he said, and
advised his wife to do the same. As for Madame Necker--‘qui raffole de
moi,’ said the complacent Denis himself--she too ‘judged great men by
their conduct and not by their talents,’ which was very awkward indeed
for a Diderot.
There was a third house where he visited much more often and got on much
better; but that was not because Madame d’Épinay was its mistress, but
because Grimm was its presiding genius. His friendship with the cool
German had a sentimentality and a demonstrativeness which Englishmen
find hard to forgive, but which were sincere enough not the less. Grimm
took complete control of his impulsive, generous colleague. Because
Grimm bade him, Denis began in 1759 writing his ‘Salons,’ or criticisms
on pictures, and became ‘the first critic in France who made criticism
eloquent;’ while, when Grimm was away, almost all the work of the
‘Literary Correspondence’ fell on Diderot’s too good-natured shoulders.
When his dearest friend was not there, Diderot’s steps turned much less
often towards Madame d’Épinay’s house.
In 1759 he first spent an autumn at the only place at which he was
perfectly at home, and where he soon became a regular visitor.
Baron d’Holbach was first of all ‘an atheist, and not ashamed;’ but he
was also very rich, very liberal, very hospitable, with a charming
country house at Grandval, near Charenton, where he entertained the
free-thinkers of all nations, and where his table was equally celebrated
for its cook and its conversation. The former was so good that Denis was
always over-eating himself; and the latter was, in a moral sense, so bad
that he enjoyed it to the utmost.
The Grandval household was fettered by none of the tiresome rules which
are apt to make visiting, when one has passed the easily adaptable
season of youth, a hazardous experiment. The hostess ‘fulfilled no
duties and exacted none.’ The visitors were as free as in their own
homes. Diderot would get up at six, take a cup of tea, fling open the
windows to admit the air and sunshine, and then fall to work. At two
came dinner. The house was always full of people who met now for the
first time. In that free style, glowing with life and colour, Diderot
recorded to Mademoiselle Volland the Rabelaisian conversation which made
these dinners so long, and, to him, so delightful. He reported to her
verbatim the amazing liberty of speech which distinguished them, just as
he reported to her in minutest detail the indigestions for which the too
excellent cook was responsible.