THE FRIENDS OF VOLTAIRE

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

PORTRAITS

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 XVIII^e 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

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.

In the year 1743, when Diderot was thirty years old, he must needs fall 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.

The unbridled talk of d’Holbach’s mother-in-law continually set the table in a roar. Diderot himself was at his best—full of bonhomie and joie-de-vivre—laughing one minute and crying the next, warm in generous pity for sorrow, quick to be irritated or appeased, pouring out torrents of splendid ideas and then of grossest ribaldry, his mouth speaking always from the fulness of his heart, utterly indiscreet, brilliant, ingenuous, delightful; an orator ‘drunk with the exuberance of his own verbosity,’ who could argue that black was white, and then that white was black again, and whose seduction and danger lay in the fact that he always fully believed both impossibilities himself. No subject that was started found him cool or neutral. ‘He is too hot an oven,’ said Voltaire; ‘everything gets burnt in him.’

When the dinner was over he would thrust his arm through his host’s and walk in the garden with him. He at least did his best to imbue the dogmatic atheism of d’Holbach with luxuriance and warmth. At seven they came back to the house, and supper was followed by picquet and by talk till they went to bed.

Among many other visitors whom Diderot met while he was what he called ‘veuf’ at Grandval were at least four Englishmen—Sterne, Wilkes, Garrick, and Hume.

Diderot has been well called the most English of the Frenchmen of the eighteenth century. He began his literary career by making translations from our language. In a passion of admiration he had fallen at the feet of the ‘divine Richardson,’ and imitated ‘Pamela’ in a very bad novel of his own, ‘The Nun;’ in another, ‘Jacques, the Fatalist,’ he tried to accustom France to romance in the style of Sterne. He had taught his fellow-citizens, he said, to read and to esteem Bacon. He was familiar with the works of Pope, Chaucer, Tillotson, and Locke; and he has left a noble and famous criticism upon Shakespeare: ‘He is like the St. Christopher of Notre-Dame, an unshapen Colossus, rudely carven, but beneath whose legs we can all walk without our brows touching him.’

To Garrick, Diderot paid exaggerated homage, and went into raptures over the wonderful play of his face. He admired Wilkes’s morals as well as his mind, and in 1768 wrote him a flattering letter. As for Hume, he liked the delightful Diderot better than any other philosopher he met in France. It is Diderot who tells the story of Hume saying at d’Holbach’s table, ‘I do not believe there is such a thing as an atheist; I have never seen one,’ and of d’Holbach’s replying, ‘Then you have been a little unfortunate; you are sitting now with seventeen.’ Sterne, whose ‘Tristram Shandy’ was delighting France in general and Diderot in particular when its author was at Grandval, on his return home sent Denis English books.

In 1761 Diderot produced a play. ‘The Father of the Family’ is, it must be confessed, a sad bore with his lachrymose moralities; but he is exhilarating compared to ‘The Natural Son,’ Diderot’s second play, which was acted in 1771. The universal Denis was no playwright.

In 1772 he published the ten volumes of plates which he had laboriously prepared to supplement the text of the Encyclopædia; and in May 1773, when he was sixty years old, he visited Catherine the Great.

He had had relations with her for some years. One fine day, in 1765, it had suddenly occurred to him that his dearest Angélique, over whom he had poured such streams of paternal sentiment, would have positively no dot. Her fond, improvident father had, of course, never attempted to save anything for her, and, if he knew his own disposition, must have known too he never would save anything. The only thing he had of value in the world, besides his head, was his library. Catherine the Great was a magnificent patron of letters; and Diderot was her especial protégé. He would sell his books to her! She delightedly accepted the offer. She gave him for them a sum equal to about seven hundred pounds, and appointed him her librarian at a salary of a thousand livres a year, fifty years’ payment being made in advance.

For the first time in his history Diderot found himself rich. When a patron so munificent asked him to visit her, how could he decline? All the Encyclopædists were her warm admirers; she herself used to say modestly that Voltaire had made her the fashion. Denis hated long journeys and loved Paris, but go he must. He left France on May 10, 1773. He stopped at The Hague—where he characteristically admired the beauty of the women, and the turbot—and at last arrived at St. Petersburg.

For a monarch who complained that she might have been the head of Medusa—everyone turned to stone when she entered the room—Diderot must have been a singularly refreshing guest. It was one of the most charming traits in his character that he respected persons no more than a child does, or a dog. All etiquette fled before his breezy, impulsive personality. The very clothes he arrived in were so shabby, her Majesty had to present him immediately with a court suit. He was with her every afternoon. He said what he liked, and as much as he liked, which was a very great deal. In the heat and excitement of his arguments he would hammer the Imperial knees black and blue, till the Empress had to put a table in front of her for safety. If he ever did recollect her august position, ‘Allons!’ she would cry; ‘between men everything is permissible.’ He evolved the most magnificent, impossible schemes for the government of her empire—which would have upset it in a week if she had tried them, said she. During his stay, his dearest Grimm was also a guest. In March 1774, Denis left; and by the time he reached Paris again, was persuaded that he had enjoyed himself very much indeed.

Four years later, in 1778, he first saw in the flesh the great elder brother of his order, the master-worker in the temple slowly lifting its gorgeous towers towards the light—Voltaire. They had not always agreed on paper: their goal had been the same, but not the road to it. ‘But we are not so far apart,’ says old Voltaire; ‘we only want a conversation to understand each other.’ Accordingly, when he came on his last triumph to the capital, Diderot went to see him in the Villettes’ house on what is now the Quai Voltaire. Few details of their interviews have been preserved; but it is said that they discussed Shakespeare, and that when Diderot left, Voltaire said of him: ‘He is clever, but he lacks one very necessary talent—that of dialogue.’ On his part, Diderot compared Voltaire to a haunted castle falling into ruins—‘but one can easily see it is still inhabited by a magician.’

Voltaire died. Diderot was himself growing old; he had acquired, he thought in Russia, the seeds of a lung disease. Angélique married a M. de Vandeul, on the strength of the dot provided by the sale of the library. Madame Diderot, poor soul, had become not a little worried and embittered. It is the careless who make the care-worn, and Diderot was almost to the last the engaging, light-hearted scamp whose troubles are always flung on to some patient scapegoat.

In 1783, or 1784, the death of Mademoiselle Volland gave him a real grief. Twenty years before he had written to her with an exquisite eloquence of the calm and gentle approach of the great rest, Death: ‘One longs for the end of life as, after hard toil, one longs for the end of the day.’ He proved in himself the truth of his own words. He had not even a hope of the immortality of the soul; but he had worked hard, the evening was come, and he was weary. He was still working—writing the ‘Life of Seneca.’ He was still his all too lovable, spontaneous self, talking with that marvellous inspiration of which the best of his books can convey little idea.

A fortnight before he died he moved into a new home, given him by Catherine the Great, in the Rue Richelieu, opposite the birthplace of Molière and almost next door to the house where Voltaire had lived with Madame du Châtelet, and after her death. The curé of Saint-Sulpice came to see him, and suggested that a retractation of his sceptical opinions would produce good effect. ‘I dare say it would,’ said Denis, ‘but it would be a most impudent lie.’ In his last conversation Madame de Vandeul records that she heard him say: ‘The first step towards philosophy is unbelief.’

The end came very suddenly. On the last day of July 1784, he was supping with his wife and daughter, and at dessert took an apricot. Nanette gently remonstrated. ‘Mais que diable de mal veux-tu que cela me fasse?’ he cried. They were his last words and perfectly characteristic. He died as he sat, a few minutes later.

If to be great means to be good, then Denis Diderot was a little man. But if to be great means to do great things in the teeth of great obstacles, then none can refuse him a place in the temple of the Immortals.

His fiction, taken from rottenness, has returned to it, and is justly dead. His plays were damned on their appearance. His moving criticisms on art and the drama, his satirical dialogue, ‘Rameau’s Nephew’—nearly all the printed talk of this most matchless of all talkers—are rarely read. His letters to Mademoiselle Volland will last so long as the proper study of mankind is man. But it is as the father of the Encyclopædia that Denis Diderot merits eternal recognition. Guilty as he was in almost every relation of life towards the individual, for mankind, in the teeth of danger and of infidelity, at the ill-paid sacrifice of the best years of his exuberant life, he produced that book which first levelled a free path to knowledge and enfranchised the soul of his generation.

III
GALIANI: THE WIT.

‘How can you say I do not know Galiani?’ wrote Voltaire to Madame d’Épinay. ‘I have read him; therefore I have seen him.’

Of that Brotherhood of Progress, united by a love, sometimes for each other and always for mankind, if Voltaire was the leader, and d’Alembert the thinker, Galiani was certainly the wit. In his own day he was celebrated as the man who made Paris laugh—and ponder—by his famous ‘Dialogues on Corn;’ and in our day he is remembered as the gay little buffoon of the eighteenth century and the author of a most amusing correspondence. Voltaire went on to declare the Abbé must be as much like his Dialogues as two jets of fire are like each other; and Diderot swore that if he had written a word of the book, he must have written it exactly as it was.

Light, sparkling, irresponsible, like the brilliant babble of some precocious child, not in the

THE ABBÉ FERDINAND GALIANI.

From a Print.

least hampered by respect for the convenances, as quick and flashing as sunshine on diamonds, as bubbling and spontaneous as a dancing little mountain torrent, perfectly free from the bitterness, the malignity, and the sarcasm which make Voltaire’s jests so terrible—the talk and the writing of Galiani are alike unique. The ‘dear little Abbé’ of the women, with his dwarf’s figure and his great head, his crafty Italian brain to conceive a brilliant scheme and his easy flow of wit to present it to his world, stands out alone against the horizon of the eighteenth century.

Ferdinand Galiani first saw the light at Chieti, in Abruzzo, on December 2, 1728. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, in two senses at least. His father was Royal Auditor in one of the provinces of the Neapolitan Government; and his uncle was Monseigneur Celestin Galiani, first chaplain to the King of Naples, and a most wealthy, learned, and enlightened churchman.

Little Ferdinand was eight when he was sent to be educated, with his elder brother, Bernard, under this uncle’s supervision at Naples. For a time the two children were taught at the convent of the Celestins, as Monseigneur was in Rome, negotiating a peace on behalf of the King of the Two Sicilies. When he returned, he took the boys back to his own palace and gave them the best and the most delightful of all forms of learning, the society of clever people. The visitors soon recognised that the way to the uncle’s heart was through the precocious brain of the little nephew—that to teach Ferdinand was to delight Monseigneur. Whatever brother Bernard may have been, Ferdinand was surely the aptest and sharpest of infant prodigies. He heard discussed around him antiquarianism, history, literature, commerce; and not one seed of information fell on barren ground. Many years after Grimm declared that there was only one man in Paris who really knew Latin, and he was the Abbé Galiani.

He was still a mere boy when he represented Bernard at a meeting of the Academy of Naples and read an article on the Immaculate Conception. The worthy Academicians, naturally shocked at such a little creature attempting a subject so serious, forbade him to read it. ‘Very well,’ thinks young Ferdinand, ‘I can wait.’ The executioner of Naples died soon after. The Academy was famous for its éloges funèbres. And behold, there appears, in wicked and most unmistakable travesty of the Academical funeral orations, the éloge of the executioner! The Academy was very indignant, the world very much amused, and Galiani had made his bow to the public in the rôle he was never to relinquish. He confessed all to the First Minister, Tanucci. Tanucci introduced him to the King and Queen of Naples, who were delighted, and then appeased the Academy by condemning the delinquent to ten days’ spiritual exercises in a neighbouring convent.

At sixteen the boy was already an ardent Political Economist. As England was the country where that science was brought to perfection, he learnt English, translated Locke’s ‘Essay on Money,’ and set to work to write one himself. All the time he was studying diligently the ancient navigation, peoples, and commerce of the Mediterranean, throwing off a satire here, a mocking set of verses there, and cultivating that pretty talent for epigram and story-telling.

When ‘Money’ was finished, he read it to Monseigneur, without mentioning its authorship. ‘Why do not you give your mind to serious works such as that?’ said the King’s chaplain, and praised the thing extravagantly. When Galiani told his secret, Monseigneur was so delighted that he at once set to work at Court to procure this promising nephew something really worth having. At two-and-twenty years old, having never studied theology and having taken minor orders only, and with the sole object of obtaining these emoluments, Galiani found himself the possessor of the benefice of Centola and the abbey of Saint-Laurent, while a dispensation from Rome gave him the title of Monseigneur and the honour of the mitre. Soon after, the admiring Court of Naples also presented him with the rich abbey of Saint Catherine of Celano.

The wonder is, not that Galiani writhed with laughter (like the little Punchinello his friends dubbed him) when he alluded to the religion of his fathers, but that to the end of his days he saw in that religion, beneath its shameless venality and its hideous moral corruptions, some saving truth to bless and comfort man’s soul. When all Paris laughed at the credulity of Madame Geoffrin, whose death was said to have been brought about from over-devotion to her religious duties, it was Galiani who wrote that he considered that unbelief was ‘the greatest effort the mind of man could make against his natural instincts and wishes.... As the soul grows old, belief reappears.’ Unlike nearly all his philosophic friends, if his own illusions were few, he was careful to leave undisturbed those of happier people.

In respect to the emoluments he received from Rome, and on which he fattened all his life, it may be justly said that he took them as a man takes a fortune out of a business he knows to be rotten, congratulating himself on his own perspicacity, and believing that beneath the rottenness there still lies the making of a true and honest enterprise.

The Neapolitan Government having adopted all the ideas suggested in ‘Money,’ the fortunate young gentleman who had written it started off in excellent spirits, in November 1751, for Rome, Florence, and Venice. The Pope, and all the grandees, savants, and littérateurs in Italy petted and made much of the agreeable little prodigy.

In June 1753 his uncle, Celestin, died, leaving Ferdinand his fortune. Galiani still remained in Naples, the spirit and the delight of the brilliant society that Monseigneur had gathered about him. But there was never any time in his life when it was enough for this wit to be wit only. He said of himself that he had all the vices, and his friends declared he had all the tastes. The friends were right. He soon began to make a collection of the stones thrown up by Vesuvius, classified them, wrote a beautiful dissertation on them, and sent them to the Pope with the inscription, Holy Father, command that these stones be made bread. Benedict the Fourteenth was a comfortable person who loved a joke and thought it worth its reward. He replied by giving the little Abbé yet another benefice, Amalfi, worth three hundred ducats. Then, of course, the Geological Academy of Herculaneum must do something more for such a lively geologist than merely make him a member of its body: it presented him with a pension.

In 1758 this spoilt child of fortune had the honour of composing Pope Benedict’s funeral oration. Then he was made Chancellor to the King, and, in 1759, Secretary to the Embassy in Paris.

It was the turning-point of his life, and the greatest event of his history. But for that appointment, he might have been nothing, after all, but some brilliant little local light, with his sparkling Southern talents only employed for the advantage of Italy and certainly never heard of beyond her borders. To it he owed all his fame and the gayest and most successful epoch in his existence. To it the world owes its picture of the man himself, the ‘Dialogues on Corn,’ and the Correspondence with Madame d’Épinay.

Galiani was at first pleased to go. But he was thirty years old, and had never yet been out of his own country. She had done generously by him, and he was extremely rich. On the other hand, the secretaryship involved further large emoluments, and Galiani was not one of those rare, wise people who know how easy it is to be rich enough; he had not learned from the possession of money how very little it can buy. Paris was then not only the capital of France, but the social capital of the world. She was at the height of her ancient glory. Revolutions had not shattered her splendid buildings or the delicate fabric of the most easy, polished, accomplished society under heaven. She was the finishing school of Europe. Her language was the language of many Courts, of Frederick of Prussia, and of the letters of Catherine the Great. From her printing presses she poured forth, almost daily, masterpieces of literature, or pamphlets which were to change dynasties and shake kingdoms. On her throne sat Louis the Fifteenth, as rotten as the society of which he was the head, but, like that society, with a rottenness covered by a magnificence which awed investigation into silence. Choiseul was the minister in name, and Madame de Pompadour in reality; and over the salons, then in the height of their power and distinction, presided women ‘who in the decline of their beauty revealed the dawn of their intelligence.’

Such a world should have pleased Galiani, or any happy Southerner who loved to bask in the warmth of prosperity and shrug his shoulders at the possibility of future disaster. But at first it did not. He was cold and homesick. His health, he wrote, would certainly not survive the unequal climate. Foreign customs, bad air, detestable water, everything here is noxious to my Italian temperament! Then Choiseul received the petted wit of the Neapolitan parties coldly, nonchalantly, indifferently. And Versailles—Versailles was yet more objectionable. When Galiani was presented there in June 1760, with his four-and-a-half-foot figure overladen with the ridiculous gala dress of the period, the men burst into open laughter and the women sneered behind their fans. Why should that cruel age, which had no compassion on the helplessness of little children, on poverty, on misfortune, on weakness, and which, when it did not mock at moral suffering, fled from it as from a disease one might catch—why should such an age pity the sensibilities of a deformed little foreigner, an absurd dwarf of an abbé, whom no one in Paris (which is to say the world) had ever heard of before?

Galiani was more than a match for the laughers. ‘Sire,’ he said to the King, ‘you now see only a sample of the secretary; the secretary will arrive later.’ The King was delighted; but the secretary retired with that cruel laughter ringing in his heart. For a whole year he pleaded passionately for his recall. He wrote bitterly of the French as ‘a mobile and superficial race full at once of passion and lightness.... My clothes, my character, my way of thinking, and all my natural defects will always make me insupportable to this people and to myself.’

From being the most popular and successful man in Naples, he was in Paris the insignificant secretary at whom, as he passed by, men mocked with the tongue in the cheek. They did not indeed mock for ever. His own sharp tongue was bound to win him respect and reputation. First it was a jest uttered here; and then a story, with his own inimitable gesticulation, told there. This little secretary is going to be amusing! Further, he was always accompanied by his âme damnée, the most intelligent of monkeys, who was only something less entertaining than his master. The master, moreover, could play on the clavecin, and sing to it, wonderfully. Even for the Parisians of that day his conversation was free, naïf, unhampered. The man has ideas, as we all have, on the liberty of the Press and the Masses, on the Deluge that is coming after us; only he can put those ideas so that the expression reads like a romance or sounds like a jest!

Then he was introduced to Baron Gleichen, and to Grimm, the first journalist in Europe. Grimm made him known to Madame d’Épinay; and his acquaintance with her, with Madame Necker, with Madame Geoffrin, and with Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, implied an introduction to the society of all witty Paris, and of all travelling England. He became the friend of d’Alembert, who had just published his ‘Elements of Philosophy,’ of Diderot, of d’Holbach, of Helvétius, of Morellet, and of Marmontel. He met that magnificent icicle, Saint Lambert, still writing his ‘Seasons’ and stealing Madame d’Houdetot from Rousseau. He knew Suard, Thomas, Raynal, and that picturesque and ill-fated young Spaniard, the Marquis de Mora.

In a word, by 1760, Galiani was launched—the gayest little skiff that ever danced into a summer sea. The Parisian climate improved in the twinkling of an eye; the bad water became drinkable; the light and fickle people turned into one ‘loving and worthy to be loved.’ Some fool of a wit, who had declared that the Abbé would never succeed at Court because he thought too loud and spoke too low, must needs eat his words. However low he spoke now, the audience always heard. They expected a bon mot or a naïveté, every time he opened his mouth, and he did not disappoint them. Instead of a poor little dwarf from that God-forsaken Naples, the secretary became ‘the prettiest little Harlequin Italy has produced,’ ‘the incomparable Abbé,’ ‘the head of Machiavelli,’ ‘Machiavellino,’ ‘ce drôle de Napolitain,’ ‘Plato, with the verve and gestures of Harlequin.’ In a word, he was the mode. The women raved about him—he understood them so well!—and fought among each other for his presence at their parties. If Choiseul remained cold, his Duchess—‘the gentlest, amiablest, civil little creature that ever came out of a fairy egg,’ said Horace Walpole—was as fond of her Abbé as were her society sisters. Galiani was asked everywhere and went everywhere. He had found his true element at last. How tame and provincial the Neapolitan parties looked now! How dull and restricted were ambitions that limited one to Italy! Paris was the theatre of Europe—with a crowded audience of all nations watching, half laughing and half afraid, the next move in her breathless tragi-comedy. There was hardly ever a more effective actor on her boards than this buffoon, this keen-set little wit, this jester, with here and there, now and then, as if by accident, some poignant meaning, some thrilling prophecy beating beneath his jests, and startling his hearers to a brief and sudden gravity.

In spite of the facts that Galiani was busy learning French, making a Commentary on Horace, and working at the duties of his secretaryship with an entirely superfluous energy, his social life in Paris began early in the morning. It was his custom to stop in bed till the middle of the day and thus receive his friends; tenir son lit de justice, he called it. Sometimes he would wrap himself up, and sit on the bed with his little legs crossed like a tailor. He talked a great deal—a great deal too much, said some people; he had no ‘flashes of silence.’ When his friend began speaking he waited impatiently to leap into the conversation himself; and when the friend attempted to make himself heard, ‘Let me finish,’ says the Abbé, ‘you will have plenty of time to answer me back;’ but he took good care that that time never came. ‘Paris,’ he used to say regretfully in later years, ‘is the only place where they listened to me;’ and one of his biographers declares pathetically that he died of ‘paroles rentrées et non écoutées.’

No wonder he was so full of life in the French capital. The talk of the morning was always followed by more talk in the evening. On Thursdays, it was Madame Geoffrin’s turn to receive. This ‘nurse of philosophy,’ this calm, placid, old hostess with her quiet, orthodox principles, and her prudent, regular life, could no more help loving this little libertine of a wit than could her lighter sisters. He was ‘her abbé, her little abbé, her petite chose.’ As for him, he loved her without after-thought, and with the whole-hearted impetuosity of his nature. He declared that she inspired him with wit, that her arm-chairs were the tripods of Apollo and he was the Sibyl. Her very primness egged him on to more reckless stories, to wilder buffooneries; but he went away laughing at her and loving her and respecting her, and did all to the end of his life.

There was another woman whom he also respected, but whom he did not love. With her one intense, overmastering passion centred on her husband, Madame Necker was for ever the Calvinist pastor’s daughter, ‘rigid, frigid, and good.’ One female friend spoke of her acrimoniously as ‘soaked in starch,’ and Galiani himself complained, without by any means intending a compliment, of her ‘cold demeanour of decency.’ How such a ribald, rollicking person as himself ever gained admittance to a Puritan household would be a wonder in our day; but in that day if, as Galiani himself wrote, one was only to know virtuous people, the number of one’s friends would be alarmingly reduced. And—and—Madame Necker’s salon was not for herself or her acquaintance; it was for her husband. Across the dinner-table on those Fridays the lively and daring Italian would defend with his rapid, reckless tongue the causes which his heavy host could only maintain with his pen. Leaning after dinner against the chimney corner, with his sparkling eyes lighting up his keen pale face, with his dwarf’s figure dressed always with an infinite neatness and nicety, Galiani would fight single-handed that battle against the Economists, his own and Necker’s special antipathies, and fight it, too, against such men as Thomas, Raynal, and Morellet. No wonder Madame Necker overlooked her visitor’s peccadilloes. The little Abbé had such a resistless torrent of logic! If the other side had reason in its favour, no one had a chance of advancing that reason. Directly anyone else began to talk, Galiani slipped away, and, there being no Opposition, Parliament rose.

After the orthodoxy of Madame Geoffrin and the decency of Madame Necker, the gatherings of Baron d’Holbach at Grandval might have been supposed to have afforded Galiani an agreeable contrast. Not content with disbelieving himself, the Baron’s scepticism was of that eager and proselytising kind which must for ever be destroying the faith of others. He delivered himself of it with a daring irreverence that made even the Italian Abbé shudder, though, heaven knows! he talked freely enough himself, and had listened to free enough talk from others. He was here, as he had been at the Neckers’, almost alone in the Opposition. It delighted him to lean over the table and assure these persons who were for pushing throne and Church, King and priest, down the abyss as fast as might be, that he loved despotism, ‘bien cru, bien vert, bien âpre.’ It was Galiani who alone perceived that these wild theories, conceived in salons, must, when translated into deeds, first of all destroy those who conceived them, and that a change in the Constitution, which might be a very beautiful thing when done, was a very vile thing in the doing. ‘It worries two or three generations,’ he said, ‘and only obliges posterity. Posterity is merely a possibility, and we are realities. And why should realities put themselves out for possibilities?’

One day at d’Holbach’s, the conversation on the Deity became so outrageous, that, with every man’s hand against him, Galiani rose. ‘Messieurs les Philosophes,’ says he, ‘you go too fast. If I were the Pope, I should hand you over to the Inquisition; if the King, to the Bastille. But as I have the good luck to be neither, I shall come to dinner next Thursday, and you shall listen to me as patiently as I have listened to you.’

Thursday came. After dinner and coffee, the Abbé takes an armchair, crosses his legs, removes his wig (the night being sultry), and, with those lively gesticulations which he can no more help than he can help breathing, tells a story.

‘Please suppose, gentlemen, that one of you, who is the most convinced that this world is the result of chance, happens to be playing at dice, not in a gambling hell but in one of the best houses in Paris. His adversary, casting one, two, three, four—many times—always throws number six. After the game has gone on a little while, my friend Diderot, we will say, who is losing his money, will certainly call out, “The dice are cogged! This is some swindlers’ den!” What, philosopher, what? Because ten or twelve throws of dice come out of the box so that you lose half a dozen francs, you are firmly convinced that this is the result of a clever design, an artificial combination, a complicated roguery; and yet, seeing in the universe a mighty number of combinations a thousand times more difficult, more complicated, and more useful, you do not suspect that Nature’s dice are also cogged, and that above there is a great Arranger?’

It was a most happy illustration, if not a convincing argument. But the age which was swayed by the eloquence of Rousseau always preferred an example to a reason: while the class who laughed later at ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ might certainly be counted on to enjoy a joke against itself.

There was a fourth salon where Galiani was much more at home than at Grandval, or under the prim wings of Madame Necker or the motherly feathers of Madame Geoffrin. At Madame d’Épinay’s alone, he was perfectly natural, his rollicking, buffooning, all-daring self, able, as only a Southerner is able, to make himself entirely ridiculous without being at all contemptible.

Madame d’Épinay was that clever wife of a ruined Farmer General, who had been petted by Rousseau, and played with by Voltaire. Madame d’Houdetot was her sister-in-law; Diderot was her constant associate; Grimm was her lover; and Galiani became, and remained for twenty years, her most sincere and admiring friend.

A Platonic friendship is perhaps only possible when one or other of the Platonists is in love with a third person. Grimm, with his well-regulated head and heart, was not only perfectly able to keep a fickle woman true to him, but himself to retain an honest regard for the Abbé and to use his opinions and his wit for the ‘Literary Correspondence.’

Madame d’Épinay’s salon was of all salons the most thoroughly characteristic of the time and the people. No one had any duty but to amuse himself. From early in the morning, a few charming and accomplished women, who always relegated their children to servants, their stupid husbands to oblivion, and their households to chance, talked delightfully over their embroidery (with which the fashion demanded they should toy) to men, of whom among many astounding characteristics, not the least astounding is their prodigious idleness coupled with their prodigious literary production.

Galiani himself was the greatest attraction Madame d’Épinay’s circle could claim. When he came in on a dripping country afternoon at La Chevrette, or in some murky winter twilight in Paris, there came with him, said Diderot, light, brightness, gaiety, folly, mirth—everything which makes one forget the cares of life. Mademoiselle d’Ette, who was at once her hostess’s worst and dearest friend, looked up from her embroidery frame with her stealthy eyes aglow to welcome an acquisition so delightful. Madame d’Épinay was, as ever, gay, caressing, insouciante. Diderot was in ecstasies (he was always in an ecstasy about something) at the little Italian’s arrival. He was a perfect treasure on a wet day! If the toy-shops made Galianis, everybody would buy one!

The Abbé takes his seat, cross-legged as usual, and from that head which was ‘a library of anecdotes,’ reels out a dozen stories, acting them all with an inimitable liveliness, while his hearers laugh till they cry.

A few of those stories sound dull in print, or have lost point with their youth; many more disgust modern taste by their elegant indecency. But the man who dubbed Paris, ‘the Café de l’Europe,’ d’Holbach, ‘the maître d’hôtel of philosophy,’ and the vaunted liberty of the Apostles of the Social Contract, ‘the right of interfering in other people’s business,’ still proves his title of wit. It was Galiani too who defined the death of Maria Theresa as ‘an ink-bottle spilt over the map of Europe;’ and Sophie Arnould’s exquisite lost voice as ‘the most beautiful asthma’ he ever heard. It was Galiani who said that suffering was the cart-horse, and ennui the horse in the rich man’s stable. It was Galiani who declared that the Jesuits lengthened the Creed and shortened the Decalogue that they might succeed better in the world, and Galiani who affirmed that the priests had changed the name of the Sacrament from Pénitence to Confession, because they thought it sufficient to avow their sins without correcting them. Finally, it was Galiani who proved that he knew intimately one side of the life around him, when he declared that the women of the eighteenth century loved with their minds, not with their hearts.

Always inimitably good-humoured, never bored, never weary, ready to play on the clavecin or sing in the most charming voice in the world if the audience should tire of his conversation, seeing the ridiculous side of any subject in a flash, prompt with an anecdote to fit the most unforeseen occasion—‘the little creature born at the foot of Vesuvius,’ clown, harlequin, Punchinello—whatever men called him—was, and is, without counterpart in social history. There will be and have been—there certainly were in the eighteenth century—many agreeable young gentlemen who not only often dined out, but who entirely lived and fattened on a pretty taste in stories and bons mots, and a constant readiness to make fools of themselves for the benefit of an idle audience afraid of being bored; but there was rarely, if ever, a buffoon of such vast and solid erudition, of mental capacities so great and so varied, and of mental achievements so momentous, as the Abbé Galiani.

While the salons were petting and spoiling him, while he seemed to be doing nothing but talk from morning till night and from night until morning, while he was regarded as such a complete and irresistible joke that people laughed at his very name, he had yet worked so hard as Secretary to the Embassy and Chargé d’Affaires that he raised the whole diplomatic corps to a worthier position, and advanced the interests of Naples with a steadiness and persistency usually allotted to a very different character. His Majesty Louis the Fifteenth presented him with a box set in diamonds. Choiseul’s light indifference changed into a cool consideration. All the time the man was writing, observing, thinking. Was he a politician pour rire? He seemed to be everything pour rire. But after all, who knows? The men who had laughed the most heartily at his absurdities, turned and looked at him again with a wonder in their eyes.

In 1765 he obtained a year’s leave of absence and went home to take the baths of Ischia. In 1766, on the invitation of the Marquis Caraccioli, Italian Ambassador, he went to stay in London.

It must be recorded regretfully that the Abbé did not find Britain or the British at all to his taste. David Hume said indignantly that though he only remained two months in our country, talked himself the whole time, and would not allow an Englishman to put in a word, yet when he came away he dogmatised on the character of the nation all the rest of his life as if he had never studied anything else. That he did not share the Anglomania of Voltaire is certainly true. Some years later, to one of his correspondents, he defined the English rather happily as ‘the best educated nation in the world, and consequently the greatest, the most troublesome, and the most melancholy.’ But some at least of his letters abuse England very freely. It was, no doubt, as difficult for the Britons to understand a Galiani as for a Galiani to understand them; and not at all wonderful that he carried away from our shores an impression of an Englishman as a solid, emotionless person, who resented buffoonery as an insult, never uttered a joke or saw one, and had all the qualities which make a nation mighty and an individual disagreeable.

The Abbé was a somewhat graver man himself when he came back to Paris. He was now thirty-eight years old, a little less free of tongue, a thought less sceptical in religion. His letters of the time contain grave observations on the Seven Years’ War, and on the condition of the Paris Parliament. But he was still about the salons, still Parisian to the finger-tips, and he still loved Paris from his soul.

And in 1769, like a clap of thunder, came the foudroyant news of his recall to Naples.

Recalled! The hostesses of Paris looked at each other in dismay. Recalled! It is surely the end of all things if some political exigency, some party question, is allowed to interfere with our amusements like this! Is it Choiseul, who has protected the Economists, while Galiani hated them, who has done this thing? The exact reason for it was then matter of speculation, and is so still. It was enough, more than enough, that it was a fact that this dear, merry, little Abbé must pack up his trunks and go out of light into darkness, out of the sunshine of social favour in which he had basked and purred and gambolled, into the gloom of the provincial obscurity from which he had come.

If Paris was struck with dismay, Galiani himself was overwhelmed by the greatest calamity of his life. He declared that he had never wept at anything, not even the death of his relations, so much as at leaving Paris. ‘They have torn me from Paris,’ he cried, ‘and they have torn out my heart.’ He swore that the only good thing that wearisome Mr. Sterne, the English author, ‘ever uttered was when he said to me, “It is better to die in Paris than to live in Naples.”’ He wrung his hands, and bemoaned out loud, according to his temperament. He followed his departure by letters to Madame d’Épinay and to d’Alembert which are really pathetic. He was also leaving behind him in Paris a woman to whom he was tied by an attachment, not Platonic. He was torn, in brief, from everything—friends and mistress, career, work, play—life itself. No wonder despair seized his soul. He went, and in parting flung into the camp of the Economists, whom he believed to be the enemy responsible for his overthrow, a bomb whose explosion rang through Europe.

In 1770 there appeared in Paris the ‘Dialogues on the Corn Trade.’ The taxation of, or free trade in, grain had long been a vexed question, not only in the minds of politicians but in the minds of all intelligent Frenchmen. Free Food! cried the Economist, rich in the support of Turgot and of Choiseul. Tax it! replied their opponents, mighty with the strength of Terrai, the graceless Controller-General, and the growing influence of Necker.

Through the wit and the parties, in the midst of ardent secretarial duties and of continual literary studies, somehow, at some time—though how and at what time it would be difficult to say—Galiani had brought to bear on the question his Italian shrewdness and brilliancy, all the learning and observation taught him by his uncle, and the judgment and the wisdom taught him by Heaven. No man would have believed that such a merry, light, social person could have pondered so deeply; no one had believed it. The book was in the form of a dialogue between a Marquis and a Chevalier, It was as gay and rollicking as the little Abbe’s own talk. In fact, it was his own talk; but it was something much more. It was much more even than a pamphlet on a passing question, on a matter of local momentary importance, ‘Read between the lines and in the margin,’ it was an able work on the science of government, what Grimm called justly ‘the production of a sound and enlightened philosopher, and of a statesman.’ In it the author exposed his theory that a man of State must know not only his business but the human heart—‘You must study men before you can rule them.’ This knowledge he denied to Turgot; and he warned France, in solemn prophecy to be fulfilled too soon, to beware in her rulers, not the rogues and the knaves—they soon show themselves in their true colours—but l’honnête homme trompé. ‘He wishes all men well, so all men trust him; but he is deceived as to the means of doing well.’

The work was received with the wildest enthusiasm. In far Ferney, the spirited old Patriarch of Literature jumped for joy, almost literally, at a wit and a style so inimitable. No man ever reasoned so agreeably before.... ‘No man has ever made famine so amusing.... If the work does not diminish the price of bread, it will give pleasure to the whole nation.... Plato and Molière have combined to write it....’ Excellent! excellent! And in the same year, 1770, the master himself wrote for his ‘Questions on the Encyclopædia’ the article on Grain wherein Galiani was not forgotten.

Diderot, who, with Grimm and Madame d’Épinay, had helped to correct the proofs of the ‘Dialogues,’ declared impetuously to Mademoiselle Volland that he had gone down on his knees to implore Galiani to publish them. Grimm said that if he were Controller-General he should attach the Abbé to France, if it cost the King forty thousand livres per annum, ‘without any other stipulation but that he should amuse himself and come twice a week to chat with me over the affairs of my Government.’ Even Fréron, Élie Fréron, the brilliant Parisian journalist, who hated Voltaire and consequently all Voltaire’s colleagues and disciples, could not help praising the thing in his ‘Literary Year.’ Frederick the Great wrote the author a flattering letter.

The book’s foes advertised it even better than its friends. At first, the leaders in the Economist camp looked at each other in dismay. Granted that they had justice and reason on their side, what could justice and reason do in the Paris of 1770 against that bubbling, sparkling wit? The capital must, first of all, be amused. What use, then, to advance the always doubtful argument that a writer cannot be at once gay and trustworthy, that if he is really worth hearing he can never be heard without a yawn?

The Abbé Morellet, as large as Galiani was small, and as ponderous in style as the Abbé was light, was employed to answer him. The good man wrote his refutation with such haste and ardour that the skin of his little finger was completely worn off from much rubbing against the side of his desk. And, after all, no one read him. He may, or may not, be right; he is certainly dull!

Then Turgot took up a mightier pen and wielded a mightier influence. Noble and disinterested, a better and a greater man than Galiani, the Statesman of that company of which the Abbé was but the Wit, Turgot sought, as did Galiani, the good and the progress of humanity; but he sought it by a different road, and by the labour of his whole life. He recognised the cleverness of the book; a bad cause, said he, could not be maintained with more grace and cleverness. But my little brother the Abbé is wrong, not the less. In the ‘Dialogues’ there peeped out, thought Turgot, something of the comfortable indifference of those who are content to leave the world as it is because it goes so smoothly with them, something of the laziness and the selfishness that come naturally to a little writer himself so comfortably beneficed and mitred. Galiani lacked, in fact, Turgot’s ‘instincts of the heart which teach the head.’

Right or wrong—l’honnête homme trompé perhaps—Turgot had put his soul into the great cause of humanity, and Galiani had only put his mind. What wonder that they saw the same world with different eyes, and would have worked out the salvation of falling France, by methods not only opposite but opposed?

Galiani went back to Naples. For many months, for years, his letters are full of his book, that effort which, even if misdirected, proved that he was no drone in the hive, that he too had that one great virtue common to all the philosophers and redeeming half their sins—he had heard the trumpet-call of responsibility towards his fellows, and had answered it.

After Paris, Naples was not merely dull, it was extinction. The poor little Abbé bemoaned his fate to Madame d’Épinay in the most touching of all jesting letters. True, there was society here, and Galiani was its lion. But what society! There was Lady Orford, Robert Walpole’s daughter-in-law, who had a country house close to Galiani’s at Santo Sorio, at the foot of Vesuvius, and there was Sir William Hamilton, now British envoy and, to be, the husband of Lady Hamilton. Presently there came, too, the Marquis of Lansdowne, who was amiable, which, said Galiani, ‘is a very rare thing for an Englishman, and Secretary of State, which is a very common thing.’

But the Abbé hated the English; and he was bored to death. The Court of Naples gave him more lucrative posts—and though he described himself as avide without being avare, which meant that he was greedy of money and yet lavish in spending it—money, even when it does not beget ennui, certainly never destroys it. He turned to his museum full of medals and bronzes, pictures and weapons—and that bored him too. Paris, Paris! He hankered after it for ever. ‘What is the good of inoculation here,’ he grumbled, after expressing delight in that discovery, ‘when living itself is not worth while?’ ‘What a life!’ he wrote dismally to d’Holbach in 1770. ‘Nothing amusing here ... no edicts ... no suspensions of payment ... no quarrels about any thing—not even about religion. Dear Paris, how I regret you!’

In 1771 died there that Madame Daubinière to whom he had been attached by no Platonic tie, and whom he had not hesitated to recommend to the good offices of Madame d’Épinay; and in the same year the death of Helvétius, the rich and amiable ex-Farmer-General, ‘left a blank in the line of our battalion.’ ‘Let us love each other the better, we who remain,’ says Galiani. ‘Close the lines. Advance! Fire!’ He was always declaring he had no heart; but it was there, under the lava of worldliness and mockery, as Pompeii and Herculaneum lay hid beneath the lava of his own Vesuvius. He was soon busy procuring a post at Court for his unsuccessful brother Bernard—Bernard, who had a large family, little money, and the dull bookworm talents that bring no more. Then Bernard died, and up starts the Abbé in a new rôle. There are three stupid nieces to be married, to say nothing of the widow! The indefatigable uncle found the girls eligible husbands, although one of them, as he wrote frankly, was as ugly as a hunchback. Then he discovered some one to marry his sister-in-law. ‘If this goes on,’ he wrote to Madame d’Épinay, ‘people will clap when I go into my box at the theatre.’

Presently the King of Naples gave him yet two more posts—entailing not only emoluments but work—and he resumed his literary labours, wrote a pamphlet on the ‘Instincts and Habitual Tastes of Man,’ a comic opera, to Paisiello’s music, called ‘The Imaginary Socrates,’ and another most amusing pamphlet, written in a single night, to distract the Neapolitans from their fright on the eruption of Vesuvius in 1779.

In 1781 he visited Rome, and was courted by all the great people; and when he came home Naples gave him another rich abbey and another most lucrative civil appointment. He was still a comparatively young man. Fortune had overturned her horn at his feet. ‘The torment of all things accomplished, the plague of nought to desire,’ might well have been Galiani’s. But he had the rare power of finding happiness where it most often hides—in small and common things. The monkey which had amused his leisure he had replaced by a couple of cats, and it afforded him infinite amusement to watch their gambols and their habits, and write long dissertations on the natural history of the animal to Madame d’Épinay in Paris.

His friendship with her had lasted without break or blot for nearly five-and-twenty years. If happiness meant only exemption from suffering, then well for Galiani that no woman ever held his heart more nearly than this light, bright, irresponsible little person. But that side of existence which brings the deepest sorrow brings too the highest joy, and who is spared the first, misses the second. Madame Daubinière had touched neither his soul nor his life; Madame d’Épinay only aroused a capacity for a friendship which, as he loved no one, had certainly assumed some of the absorption of a passion. When she died in 1783, he stood in the presence of a great and a most genuine sorrow. She had represented the Paris he would see no more; to answer her letters had been a large occupation in his life—and she was dead! He turned to his work as his last hope, to the one means that was left of making life endurable. In 1785 he was attacked by apoplexy, and two years later he travelled for his health. But it was not improved. ‘The dead are so bored,’ he said in his old jesting manner; ‘they have asked me to come and cheer them a little.’

In the October of 1787 the King and Queen of Naples commanded him to meet them at Portici. He went, but he was long past receiving pleasure from such honours. The Sovereigns were struck with his altered appearance, and begged him to consult a doctor. Queen Caroline wrote him a letter imploring him to renounce his scepticism and make ready for heaven. He answered with dignity and respect; but no physician for either the soul or the body could aid him now. He kept his gaiety to the last. As he had loved in life to be surrounded by friends, they were about his deathbed. He declared to them that he felt no sorrow in dying, save that he would fain have lived to publish his book on Horace. The night before his death Gatti, his friend and doctor, told him he had refused an invitation to the opera from the Ambassador of France to be near his friend. ‘Ah,’ says Galiani, ‘you still look on me as Harlequin? Well, perhaps I shall prove more amusing than the opera.’ And he did. Two hours before his death General Acton, the Prime Minister, called to see him. ‘Tell his Excellency I cannot receive him. My carriage is at the door. Warn him to prepare his own.’

He died on October 30, 1787, aged nearly fifty-nine.

Dagonet, King’s Fool at Arthur’s Court, could not avert his master’s ruin, but, noblest of all Fools, he tried. Galiani, with his laughing bells jingling in those ‘Dialogues,’ spoke his message in jests and could not help starving France, nor even postpone by an hour the raid on the bakers’ shops in the Faubourg St. Antoine. But he, too, did his best.

IV
VAUVENARGUES: THE APHORIST

The proverb is indigenous to Spain, verse to Italy, and the aphorism to France. In that form of speech in which, in Vauvenargues’ own words, La Rochefoucauld had ‘turned men from virtue by persuading them that it is never genuine,’ Vauvenargues vindicated human goodness, showed man that the best way to reform the world is to reform himself, and taught him how to use the freedom Voltaire gave him.

In his delicate thoughtfulness, in his conviction that man’s happiness depends upon his character and not upon his circumstances, in his mistrust of the cold god, Reason, and his belief in the soundness of the intuitions of the heart, Vauvenargues stands alone among his compeers. He stands alone, too, among them in his personal nearness to Voltaire’s affections. The noblest testimony to Vauvenargues’ character is that it compelled the reverence of him who reverenced

LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE VAUVENARGUES.

From a Print in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

nothing; and the finest compliment ever paid to Voltaire was to be loved by a Vauvenargues.

Born on August 6, 1715, at Aix in Provence—in a mean house which still stands and is to-day a grocer’s shop—Luc de Vauvenargues came of a poor family of provincial noblesse and was from the first what he remained to the last, delicate in constitution and with limited prospects of worldly success.

His very imperfect education he received at the College of Aix, where his small Latin and less Greek were frequently interrupted by ill health. But he had a possession which is in itself an education—a good father.

Joseph de Clapiers had been created Marquis de Vauvenargues in 1722, when Luc was seven years old, for having been the only magistrate in Aix who did not run away from the place and his duty when a pestilence devastated the countryside in 1720.

For companions, Luc had two younger brothers and a cousin of his own age, a coarse, clever, selfish, undisciplined boy, named Victor Riquetti Mirabeau, who was to become the ‘crabbed old Friend of Men’ and the great father of a greater son. The boys had little in common but genius, and were attracted to each other by their very unlikeness. At sixteen, Luc was reading with passionate transport that ‘splendid painting of virtue’ ‘Plutarch’s Lives’ (in a translation) and then the letters of Brutus to Caesar, ‘so filled with dignity, loftiness, passion, and courage,’ said he, ‘that I never could read them calmly.’ Victor had already plunged into that blusterous, incontinent life which was to bring ruin to his own family and quite spoil the effect of his loud-voiced schemes for the good of mankind.

When both were seventeen the pair parted for a while. Luc must choose one of the only two professions open to his caste—the Church or the Army. The Church would not do, because, boy though he was, he was already philosopher and thinker—ay, in the noblest sense of the word—free-thinker too. Then it must be the Army! Picture this new subaltern of the King’s Own Regiment, in the loveliest pale grey uniform, faced with Royal blue, with the most splendid braidings, and the very buttonholes sewn with gold silk, with his tall, boyish figure, his handsome face, his ‘proud and pensive grace’—for all the world like the soldier-hero of a woman’s novel. But he was already something very different from that. The handsome face bespoke a noble nature, ambitious for all great things, strong and ready to begin the world, to play his part therein if it be the part of a man of Deeds alone—or if the Deeds be but foundation for the Thoughts.

His first campaign was in Italy in 1733 with Marshal Villars, who was on his last. Italy! the land of dreams! The boy was filled with splendid visions of following Hannibal across the mountains—with young sanguine hopes of gloriously doing his duty and meeting immediate, glorious rewards. For three years he knew the intoxication—and the horrors—of a victorious campaign. And then of a sudden he found himself condemned at one-and-twenty to the vicious idleness, the low pleasures, and the deadening routine of a garrison life. The rich officers were of course drawn by that magnet, the Court, to keep up their military studies and prepare for the next war by dancing attendance on women and flattering the Minister and the King at Versailles. The poor ones remained on duty—with not enough of it to keep them out of mischief, and with, for the most part, debased tastes, because their intellectual limitations precluded them from higher.

The contamination of that useless existence even a Vauvenargues did not wholly escape. For a brief while he was as other men are. But the pleasures of a garrison town could not long hold such a nature as his. Already—he was but twenty-two—he had that love of solitude which, says a great German philosopher, is welcomed or avoided as a man’s personal value is great or small. Already—at an age when other men scarcely realise they have a soul—this man was dominated by the idea of its value and dignity; and deep within him was the passion and resolution to exercise to the full its powers and possibilities.

With his companions he was wholly simple, natural, and friendly—without the faintest taint of that conscious superiority which makes many good people at once useless as a moral influence and objectionable as companions. ‘Father,’ his brother officers used to call him. Marmontel said ‘he held all our souls in his hands.’ He soon resumed, by correspondence, his friendship with Victor Mirabeau; and in their discussions on love—the view he takes of this passion is always a sure test of a man’s character—each letter-writer showed the yawning gulf that divided him from the other.

If Vauvenargues ever met the woman worthy to hold his heart, to be, in the finest and highest understanding of those words, his companion and completion, is not known. He writes of love as if he had felt it. But to some pure souls—as to a Milton and a St. John the Divine—are revealed in visions the Eden and the New Jerusalem wherein they never walked. Vauvenargues’ letters to Mirabeau treat of the subject with such an exquisite dignity and refinement—with such noble silences—that there is at least no doubt that if he never found the woman who would have realised his ideals, he was spared the bitterness of loving one who broke them.

Cousin Victor easily perceived that this thoughtful young soldier was fitted for something widely different from the life of a garrison town. Come up to Paris, then! Take up letters as a career! Win the smiles of the Court, and a pension from the Privy Purse! But Vauvenargues not only preferred literature to the sham called literary fame, but he loved his own profession.

Thinker as nature had made him, thinker, moralist, aphorist as he has come down the ages, he was first of all a man of action, and so sound in thought because he was so strong in deeds. All his maxims were ‘hewn from life.’ When the death of the Emperor Charles VI. in 1740 shook the kingdoms of Europe as a child shakes its marbles in a bag, Luc de Vauvenargues shouldered his knapsack and went out to Bohemia under the command of Belle-Isle. Ready to dare and to do, brave, young, high-spirited, knowing no career more glorious than arms, he looked round him and drew from keen experience his views of the world.

The philosopher in a study, weighing the pros and cons of motives he knows by hearsay, of deeds of which he has read, of passions he has never felt, may be a very fine thinker, but will hardly be chosen as a sound guide to practice.

The explorer who has faced the torrent and the mountain, the burning sun of the desert, hunger and cold and thirst, who has himself fought with beasts at Ephesus, will have a knowledge of the country he has discovered, which no books and lectures, no geographical or topographical knowledge can ever give to the cleverest student at home. The worth and the use of Vauvenargues’ axioms on life lie largely in the fact that he had been there himself.

The very brief triumph of the capture of Prague in 1742 was succeeded by the horrors of the great mid-winter march from Prague to Egra. The King’s Own suffered terribly. Death, defeat, famine, Vauvenargues knew not as names but as realities. In the spring of 1742 he had lost a young comrade, de Seytres, and wrote an éloge of him. Its immature and stilted style gives little idea of the warm feeling it clothed. Morley speaks of Vauvenargues’ ‘patient sweetness and equanimity’ as a friend; and records how hardship made him ‘not sour,’ but wise and tender. All through that fearful march, in this strange soldier’s knapsack were the manuscripts of ‘Discourses on Fame and Pleasure,’ ‘Counsels to a Young Man,’ and a ‘Meditation on Faith.’ Of many of his maxims on patience and the brave endurance of suffering, he must have found at this time cruel personal need.

The handsome young officer who had left France in the prime of his hopes and his manhood, returned to it with his health utterly ruined, both his legs frost-bitten, and his lungs seriously affected.

Still, he gathered together the strength he had left him and the pluck that never failed him, rejoined his regiment in Germany in 1743, fought nobly for his fallen cause at Dettingen, and returned to the garrison of Arras at the end of the year, an invalid for life.

It was now obvious he could no longer pursue his calling. Though he wrote with a keen and bitter truth that courage had come to be regarded as a popular delusion, patriotism as a prejudice, and that ‘one sees in the army only disgust, ennui, neglect, murmuring; luxury and effeminacy have produced the same effrontery as peace; and those who should, from their position, arrest the progress of the evil, encourage it by their example,’ yet still he would, if he could, have been soldier to the end. For a time he thought of diplomacy. ‘Great positions soon teach great minds,’ was one of his axioms. He would have been well fitted. But merit was not of the slightest help to advancement. To fawn on the King and the Mistress, to prostitute one’s life and one’s talents to a Court—here was the way to promotion. Vauvenargues wrote to the King and corresponded with Amelot the Minister, who answered most amiably and affably—and did nothing at all. ‘Permit me, sir,’ wrote Vauvenargues to him at last, with the directness taught in camps, ‘to assure you that it is a moral impossibility for a gentleman, with nothing but zeal to commend him, ever to reach the King.’ Amelot, stung a little, promised the next vacant post, and this time promised sincerely.

Vauvenargues retired to Provence and to quiet, to learn his new business. There he was attacked by confluent small-pox, which left him nearly blind and wholly disfigured: a misfortune he felt painfully as ‘one of those accidents which prevent the soul from showing itself.’ But worse than any disfigurement, the partial blindness made, of course, a diplomatic career an impossibility for ever.

Before the campaign of 1743, Vauvenargues had introduced himself to Arouet de Voltaire, by a letter in which the obscure soldier-critic compared Corneille disadvantageously with Racine. Nothing is so delightful in Voltaire’s own genius as his generous recognition of other men’s. Nothing is more to his honour than his high admiration for the moral gifts of a Vauvenargues who was young enough to be his son, who was poor, forlorn, a nobody, and whose fine qualities of lofty highmindedness, delicacy, patience and serenity found, alas! no counterpart in Voltaire’s own nature. It is so much the more to his credit that he could admire what he could never imitate, and appreciate what was wholly foreign to his temperament. He rejoiced in the thoughtful ability of that letter. ‘It is the part of such a man as you,’ he replied, ‘to have preferences but no exclusions.’

The campaign of 1743 had interrupted their relationship. But they resumed it now, and, behold! it had turned into friendship.

Voltaire was at this time fifty years old, famous as the author of the ‘English Letters,’ the ‘Henriade,’ a few brilliant plays, and also as Court wit and versifier. But he was already in mental attitude what he had not yet become in mental output and in active deed. He could recognise in this Vauvenargues not only a friend and a literary critic, but a thinker and a philosopher. Vauvenargues sent him by degrees most of his writings, and Voltaire’s criticisms thereon, as sincere as they were enthusiastic, were in themselves a powerful persuasion to the man of deeds to become man of words; while the Master’s whole-hearted devotion to his own profession—the best and the noblest of all, though it bring no bread but the bread of affliction and of tears—was a further strong inducement to Vauvenargues to join the great brotherhood too. This soldier-thinker can tell men what to do when we have made them free to do what they will! He is, he has confessed it, as ‘follement amoureux de la liberté’ as I myself! To the individual soul he can give the help and the courage I have tried to give to the race, and to the riddle of the painful earth he can bring a wiser, tenderer, and braver solution than mine!

Vauvenargues was not, in fact, an intellect a Voltaire would lose. The young soldier decided to adopt literature as a profession, and began the world afresh.

Everything, save only Voltaire’s encouragement, was against such a decision. The old Marquis de Vauvenargues—from a very natural but very mistaken and unrobust tenderness—would have kept his son at home to lead a safe, idle, invalid life in Provence, with a stroll on the terrace of the Vauvenargues’ country-house for exercise, a thick-headed provincial neighbour for mental recreation, and his own aches and pains for an interest. His other relations (on the principle of Myrtle in ‘The Conscious Lovers’—‘We never had one of our Family before that descended from Persons that Did anything’) objected to letters for one of Us as a low walk, leading directly to the Bastille. It was true that the moment was an inglorious one for literature. The Encyclopædia was unconceived. Voltaire himself was not yet the mighty influence he was to become. Writing did pay badly, and the young Marquis was deadly poor. Greatest objection of all was his own strong leaning to a life of action, and he himself first wrote of literature as being as ‘repugnant’ to him as to his family. ‘But necessity knows no law.’

That momentary bitterness passed. ‘Despair is the worst of faults,’ said he. It was his part—allotted to him by misfortune, by fate, by God—no longer to act himself, but to teach other men how to act. He thrust aside the objections of his relatives. ‘It is better to derogate from one’s caste than from one’s genius.’ He silenced his own disappointment. ‘A great soul loves to fight against ill fortune ... and the battle pleases him, independently of the victory.’

In May, 1745, he came up to Paris, and in a very humble lodging, where the Rue Larrey and the School of Medicine are now situated, began the world afresh.

Anyone who supposes his discontent to come from his circumstances and not from himself, should consider the life of Vauvenargues, and the one book with which he has enriched humanity.

Disappointed, disfigured, a failure; useless for the career he had loved, incapable of the career he had tried; cast off by his own people; solitary in a great city; often in pain of body, and because the work he had chosen was not the work Nature had originally chosen for him, often in pain of mind too—if ever man had an excuse for cursing God and fate, it was surely Luc de Vauvenargues.

La Rochefoucauld, rich and prosperous, with friends, position, and honour, had denied human virtue, and assailed it with cold malignities which still strike despair into the soul; and Voltaire himself, the most successful man of letters in history, turned upon life with gibes, and sneered at faith and happiness as alike chimæras.

But Vauvenargues looked out on the world which had given him nothing, with serene and patient eyes, and in a single book, as direct, strong, and simple as his own nature, evolved one of the most wise and comforting, one of the most sane, serene, and practical schemes of life, given to our race.

The great questions, Why am I? Whither go I? Whence came I? he asked himself as a thoughtful man must, but being a doer long before he was a thinker, he wasted little time in vainly seeking to answer them. Among his papers are a Prayer as well as the ‘Meditation.’ For simple faith he had ever reverence and envy—for all solemn questions a deep respect; and though he had no formulated religion, was yet deeply religious. But with him to be religious meant to Do Well. Live this life aright, and the next will take care of itself. ‘The thought of death deceives us, it makes us forget to live: one must live as if one would never die.’ To waste time and energy in idle discussion and speculation on another world when there is so much to do to set this one straight, found no countenance from this man of Deeds. Do, not dream, was his motto for ever.

There is not a page in his book—there is scarcely a line—which does not bear witness to his strong faith in men’s honour and goodness, to his passionate conviction that out of worst evil one can get good, that the cruellest misfortunes ennoble and purify if one will let them, and our griefs may be for ever our gains. The hand that wrote was fevered with disease. No rich man, this, announcing glibly how comfortable it is to be poor. In the most vicious of all ages—and in not the least vicious of that age’s environments—Vauvenargues had preserved his high ideals and his lofty character, and in sickness, sorrow, and disappointment he practised daily the courage he preached.

Instead of mockery—the besetting sin of his generation—this man, and this man alone, had for men’s follies and absurdities only infinite compassion. Of him has been aptly quoted Bacon’s beautiful phrase, ‘he had an aspect as though he pitied men.’ His philosophy remains for ever to the unquiet heart at once balm and tonic—the cool hand of compassion on the burning forehead—the touch of a friend, who knows—the strong grasp of help to raise the feeble from his weakness and despair, and to make him do what he can.

Some of the axioms have become part of men’s speech, if not part of their soul.

‘Great thoughts come from the heart.’

‘We should comfort ourselves for not having fine talents, as we comfort ourselves for not having fine positions; we can be above both by the heart.’

‘Great men undertake great things because they are great, and fools because they think them easy.’

‘Would you say great things? Then first accustom yourself never to say false ones.’

‘Who can bear all, can dare all.’

‘Envy is confessed inferiority.’

‘Few sorrows are without remedy: despair is more deceptive than hope.’

‘Who gives his word lightly, breaks it.’

‘He who has great feeling, knows much.’

‘To the passions one owes the best things of the mind.’

Into that mad devotion to wit which was the snare of all his compeers, Vauvenargues never fell. He worshipped at the shrine of a diviner goddess called Truth. There is not a single example—even in his maxims, when the temptation would naturally be strongest—of his sacrificing fidelity to smartness.

In February 1746, after he had been less than a year in Paris, he published anonymously that book by which he has gone down the ages and up to the gods, and which contains only the ‘Introduction to the Knowledge of the Human Mind,’ some ‘Reflections,’ the ‘Counsels to a Young Man,’ a few critical articles, the ‘Meditation on Faith,’ and the ‘Maxims.’

Clear, clean, and vigorous in style, as sharp and brief as a military order—it was well said by a friend that its author ‘wanted first of all to get along quickly and drag little baggage after him;’ and better said by himself that, ‘when an idea will not bear a simple form of expression, it is the sign for rejecting it.’

It was not the sort of work likely to bring him present fame, or money. He did not expect them. As he worked in his miserable lodgings, ill lit and ill warmed, already a prey to consumption, and suffering often acutely from the old frost-bites—no such hopes had buoyed him. But he did what he had told other men to do—worked for the work’s sake—and he found what he had told them they would find, joy in the working and satisfaction in a noble aim, be it unrewarded for ever.

The book dropped from the press perfectly stillborn. Reflections and moralities in the Paris of 1746! No, thank you. No one even troubled to abuse it. No one, except Marmontel, who was Vauvenargues’ personal friend, reviewed it. But Voltaire loudly pronounced it one of the best books in the language: ‘The age ... is not worthy of you, but it has you, and I bless Nature. A year ago I said you were a great man, and you have betrayed my secret.’ After Vauvenargues’ death he wrote of him, ‘How did you soar so high in this age of littleness?’ and spoke of the ‘Maxims’ as characteristic of a profoundly sincere and thoughtful mind, wholly above all jealousies and party spirit. For sixty years the book lay germinating in a hard and barren soil, unworthy of it; and then rose fresh and strong from oblivion to the just and growing fame it enjoys to-day. It has been well said ‘to give the soul of man an impetus towards truth.’

Though his tastes, his poverty, and his health alike precluded Vauvenargues from joining in the socialities of the cafés and the salons during his brief life in Paris, he saw sometimes Marmontel and d’Argental, and often Voltaire. Marmontel was still only a boy who had just started literary life on a capital of six louis and the patronage of Voltaire; and d’Argental, Voltaire’s dear ‘guardian angel,’ was the nephew of Madame de Tencin, and, perhaps, the author of her novels. Marmontel was on a very different plane of intellect and character from Vauvenargues—while the one was a lusty boy beginning the world, the other was a patient thinker who was leaving it. But in those bare and dreary surroundings, in the disfigured invalid of whom men had never heard, even the commonplace cleverness of a Marmontel worshipped a hero. Long years after, he speaks of Vauvenargues’ ‘unalterable serenity’—of his brave and tender heart. ‘With him one learnt to live and learnt to die.’

As for Voltaire, one can picture him just elected to the French Academy, the protégé of Madame de Pompadour, the dearest friend of young Frederick the Great, and fast becoming the most astonishing man in Europe, entering into the dull room, full of liveliness and animation, ay, and full too of real kindness and sympathy, while the invalid sat by the fireside listening silently awhile, and then striking across the Master’s brilliant volubility with some quiet truth which he had long proved and pondered. That he found Voltaire’s conversation a powerful stimulus to his own mind, and a very real delight, is not doubtful. There are few Voltaires in the world, and it was one of Vauvenargues’ misfortunes that, save Victor Mirabeau, he had known scarcely anyone who was his intellectual equal.

But if Voltaire roused the mind, Vauvenargues strengthened the soul. After his death, Voltaire wrote of him that he had always seen him ‘the most unfortunate and the most tranquil of men.’ It was this lucky genius of an Arouet who brought his fumings and his impatience, his irritableness over this, his chagrins about that, for the consolation of the man to whose sufferings his own had been as a drop in the ocean. Vauvenargues always seems the elder of the two, as it were. He was as certainly the wiser, as he was certainly the far inferior genius.

What were his thoughts when those few friends had left him? It is on their testimony that he never uttered a complaining or a bitter word. His writings contain not an angry line—not one rebellion against God and Fate. It was the happy people who grumbled—perhaps it always is. Once, only once, there is a striving against destiny. In a moment of relaxation from bodily pain he wrote to an intimate friend, ‘I have need of all your affection, my dear Saint-Vincens: all Provence is in arms, and I am here at my fireside.’ He went on to offer his feeble help to the service he had loved, and to beg for the smallest post in his old active career.

But in a second came realisation. He was too ill to be of any use. Only thirty-two, he saw life slipping from him, and leaving him at that fireside a wreck, only fit for the hulks. But he bore ‘his dark hour unseen,’ and troubled no man with his troubles.

His disease gained on him daily now. For the last year he was too ill to write. How far harder to die bravely by inches, unable even to do one’s work, than to rush a smiling hero upon the swords in a glorious moment of exaltation, unweakened by disease, and uplifted by the applause of just men and of one’s own heart!