event him from
saddling them before long with his wife and child. "She started
yesterday," he writes quite simply to his father, "she will be with you
in three days; you can say anything you like to her, and when you are
tired of her, you can send her back." Diderot intended to be free at any
price, and he threw off, one after another, the fetters he had forged for
himself, not without remorse, however, and not without acknowledging that
he was thus wanting to all natural duties. "What can you expect," he
would exclaim, "of a man who has neglected wife and daughter, got into
debt, given up being husband and father?"

Diderot never neglected his friends; amidst his pecuniary embarrassments,
when he was reduced to coin his brain for a livelihood, his labor and his
marvellous facility were always at the service of all. It was to satisfy
the requirements of a dangerous fair friend that he wrote his _Pensees
philosophiques,) the sad tale of the _Bijoux indiscrets_ and the _Lettre
sur les Aveugles,_ those early attacks upon religious faith which sent
him to pass a few months in prison at the Castle of Vincennes. It was to
oblige Grimm that he for the first time gave his mind to painting, and
wrote his _Salons,_ intended to amuse and instruct the foreign princes.
"A pleasure which is only for myself affects me but slightly and lasts
but a short time," he used to say; "it is for self and friends that I
read, reflect, write, meditate, hear, look, feel. In their absence, my
devotion towards them refers everything to them. I am always thinking of
their happiness. Does a beautiful line strike me, they shall know it.
Have I stumbled upon a beautiful trait, I make up my mind to communicate
it to them. Have I before my eyes some enchanting scene; unconsciously,
I meditate an account of it for them. To them I have dedicated the use
of all my senses and of all my faculties, and that perhaps is the reason
why everything is exaggerated, everything is embellished a little in my
imagination and in my talk; and they sometimes reproach me with this, the
ingrates!"

It was, further, in conjunction with his friends and in community of
ideas that Diderot undertook the immense labor of the _Encyclopaedia_.
Having, in the first instance, received a commission from a publisher to
translate the English collection of [Ephraim] Chambers, Diderot was
impressed with a desire to unite in one and the same collection all the
efforts and all the