ong the most
extraordinary men that have ever lived; she delights in his
conversation, and his visits have given her the most uncommon pleasure.
All this was perhaps true enough. Catherine probably rated the
philosopher at his true worth as a great talker and a singular and
original genius, but this did not prevent her, any more than it need
prevent us, from seeing the limits and measure. She was not one of the
weaker heads who can never be content without either wholesale
enthusiasm or wholesale disparagement.

Diderot had a companion who pleased her better than Diderot himself.
Grimm came to St. Petersburg at this time to pay his first visit, and
had a great success. "The Empress," wrote Madame Geoffrin to King
Stanislas, "lavished all her graces on Grimm. And he has everything that
is needed to make him worthy of them. Diderot has neither the fineness
of perception, nor the delicate tact that Grimm has, and so he has not
had the success of Grimm. Diderot is always in himself, and sees nothing
in other people that has not some reference to himself. He is a man of a
great deal of understanding, but his nature and turn of mind make him
good for nothing, and, more than that, would make him a very dangerous
person in any employment. Grimm is quite the contrary."[86]

[86] Mouy's _Corresp. du roi Stanislas_, p. 501.

In truth, as we have said before, Grimm was one of the shrewdest heads
in the Encyclopaedic party; he had much knowledge, a judgment both solid
and acute, and a certain easy fashion of social commerce, free from
raptures and full of good sense. Yet he was as devoted and ecstatic in
his feelings about the Empress as his more impetuous friend. "Here," he
says, "was no conversation of leaps and bounds, in which idleness
traverses a whole gallery of ideas that have no connection with one
another, and weariness draws you away from one object to skim a dozen
others. They were talks in which all was bound together, often by
imperceptible threads, but all the more naturally, as not a word of what
was to be said had been led up to or prepared beforehand." Grimm cannot
find words to describe her verve, her stream of brilliant sallies, her
dashing traits, her eagle's _coup d'oeil_. No wonder that he used to
quit her presence so electrified as to pass half the night in marching
up and down his room, beset and pursued by all the fine and marvellous
things that had been said. How much of all this is true, and how much