Read Ebook: The Friends of Voltaire by Hall Evelyn Beatrice

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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 Encyclopaedic 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.

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 Elo?sa 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.

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 Encyclopaedia 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 , 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.

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 , 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 ?cus 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.

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 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.

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 , 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 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 Ang?lique, 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 Ang?lique 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.

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 Encyclopaedia. 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.

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 Encyclopaedia 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 Encyclopaedia 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.

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 Encyclopaedia 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.

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 Encyclopaedia, 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 Helv?tius, Raynal, and Galiani, gave lessons in metaphysics to a German princess, and was, for himself, not only an encyclopaedist, 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 Vrilli?re, 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.

In 1755, during his work at the Encyclopaedia 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.

There was a third house where he visited much more often and got on much better; but that was not because Madame d'?pinay 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'?pinay'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.

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