Part 2

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 The permit to continue publishing the work was rescinded.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

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.