t correspondent was Madame d'Epinay, the kindly
benefactress of Rousseau a quarter of a century earlier, the friend of
Diderot, the more than friend of Grimm. In 1783 she died, and either in
that year or the next, Mademoiselle Voland, who had filled so great a
space in the life of Diderot. The ghosts and memories of his friends
became the majority, and he consoled himself that he should not long
survive.

[199] Grimm died in 1807, Holbach in 1789, Catherine in 1796, and
Frederick in 1786.

[200] See _Oeuv._, xix. 317, 326.

[201] _Oeuv._, vi. 442, where Diderot gives a sketch of this
interesting man.

The days of intellectual excitement and philanthropic hope seemed at
their very height, but in fact they were over. "Nobody," said
Talleyrand, "who has not lived before 1789, knows how sweet life can
be." The old world had its last laugh over the _Marriage of Figaro_
(April 1784), but in the laugh of Figaro there is a strange ring. Under
all its gaiety, its liveliness, its admirable _naivete_, was something
sombre. It was pregnant with menace. Its fooling was the ironical
enforcement of Raynal's trenchant declaration that "the law is nothing,
if it be not a sword gliding indistinctly over the heads of all, and
striking down whatever rises above the horizontal plane along which it
moves."

Diderot himself is commonly accused of having fomented an atrocious
spirit by the horrible couplet--

Et ses mains ourdiraient les entrailles du pretre,
Au defaut d'un cordon pour etrangler les rois.[202]

[202] "Is it not possible that the virtuous and moderate proposal to
strangle the last Jesuit in the bowels of the last Jansenist might
do something towards reconciling matters?"--Voltaire to Helvetius,
May 11, 1761.

That the verses could have actually excited the spirit of the Terrorists
is impossible, for they were not given to the world until 1795. And in
the second place, so far as Diderot's intention is concerned, any one
who reads the piece from which the lines are taken, will perceive that
the whole performance is in a vein of playful phantasy, and that the
particular verses are placed dramatically in the mouth of a proclaimed
Eleutheromane, or maniac for liberty.[203] Diderot was not likely to
foresee that what he designed for an illustration of the frenzy of the
Pindaric dithyramb, would so soon be mistaken for a short formula of
practical politics.[204]

[203] _Les