Chapter II: Part 2

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

_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.