less prudent and less temperate than Voltaire, flaunted openly the flag
of revolt. At the head marched Diderot, the most daring of all, the most
genuinely affected by his own ardor, without perhaps being the most sure
of his ground in his negations. His was an original and exuberant
nature, expansively open to all new impressions. "In my country," he
says, "we pass within twenty-four hours from cold to hot, from calm to
storm, and this changeability of climate extends to the persons. Thus,
from earliest infancy, they are wont to shift with every wind. The head
of a Langrois stands on his shoulders like a weathercock on the top of a
church-steeple; it is never steady at one point, and, if it comes round
again to that which it had left, it is not to stop there. As for me, I
am of my country; only residence of the capital and constant application
have corrected me a little."

[Illustration: Diderot----314]

Narrow circumstances had their share in the versatility of Diderot's
genius as well as in the variety of his labors. Son of a cutler at
Langres, a strict and virtuous man, Denys Diderot, born in 1715, had at
first been intended by his father for the church. He was educated at
Harcourt College, and he entered an attorney's office. The young man
worked incessantly, but not a law-book did he open. "What do you mean to
be, pray?" the lawyer asked him one day; "do you think of being an
attorney?" "No." "A barrister?" "No." "A doctor?" "No more than the
rest." "What then?" "Nothing at all. I like study, I am very happy,
very contented, I ask no more." Diderot's father stopped the allowance
he had been making his son, trusting thus to force him to choose a
profession. But the young man gave lessons for a livelihood.

"I know a pretty good number of things," he wrote towards the end of his
life, "but there is scarcely a man who doesn't know his own thing better
than I do. This mediocrity in every sort is the consequence of
insatiable curiosity and of means so small, that they never permitted me
to devote myself to one single branch of human knowledge. I have been
forced all my life to follow pursuits for which I was not adapted, and to
leave on one side those for which I had a call from inclination." Before
he was thirty years old, and without any resource but his lessons and the
work of every sort he did for third parties, Diderot married; he had not
asked the consent of his parents, but this did not pr