unsels whose justice you recognise, but
which you have no longer strength to follow. It is the pusillanimity
that springs from consciousness of weakness, or else it is the idleness
that is one of the results of weakness and pusillanimity, which disgusts
me with a task that would be more likely to hurt than to improve my
work.

Solve senescentem mature sanus equum, ne
Peccet ad extremum ridendus et ilia ducat."

And so he contented himself with some rough notes of phenomena that were
corroborative of the speculation of his youth.[206]

[205] _Mem. sur la Vie et les Ouvrages de Diderot_, p. 412.

[206] Grimm, _Corr. Lit._, xi. 120.

In the early spring of 1784 Diderot had an attack which he knew to be
the presage of the end. Dropsy set in, and he lingered until the summer.
The priest of Saint Sulpice, the centre of the philosophic quarter, came
to visit him two or three times a week, hoping to achieve at least the
semblance of a conversion. Diderot did not encourage conversation on
theology, but when pressed he did not refuse it. One day when they
found, as two men of sense will always find, that they had ample common
ground in matters of morality and good works, the priest ventured to
hint that an exposition of such excellent maxims, accompanied by a
slight retractation of Diderot's previous works, would have a good
effect on the world. "I daresay it would, monsieur le cure, but confess
that I should be acting an impudent lie." And no word of retractation
was ever made. As the end came suddenly, the priest escaped from the
necessity of denying the funeral rites of the Church.

For thirty years Diderot had been steadfast to his quarters on an upper
floor in the Rue Taranne, and even now, when the physicians told him
that to climb such length of staircase was death to him, he still could
not be induced to stir. It would have been easier, his daughter says, to
effect a removal from Versailles itself. Grimm at length asked the
Empress of Russia to provide a house for her librarian, and when the
request was conceded, Diderot, who could never be ungracious, allowed
himself to be taken from his garret to palatial rooms in the Rue de
Richelieu. He enjoyed them less than a fortnight. Though visibly growing
weaker every day, he did all that he could to cheer the people around
him, and amused himself and them by arranging his pictures and his
books. In the evening, to the last, he found strength to converse on