Part 4
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
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?