k II. gave D'Alembert a pension; it had but lately been Louis
XIV. who thus lavished kindnesses on foreign scholars: he made an offer
to the Encyclopaedists to go and finish their vast undertaking at Berlin.
Catherine II. made the same offers, asking D'Alembert, besides, to take
charge of the education of her son. "I know your honesty too well," she
wrote, "to attribute your refusals to vanity; I know that the cause is
merely love of repose in order to cultivate literature and friendship.
But what is to prevent your coming with all your friends? I promise you
and them too all the comforts and every facility that may depend upon me;
and perchance you will find more freedom and repose than you have at
home. You do not yield to the entreaties of the King of Prussia, and to
the gratitude you owe him, it is true, but then he has no son. I confess
that I have my son's education so much at heart, and that you are so
necessary to me, that perhaps I press you too much. Pardon my
indiscretion for the reason's sake, and rest assured that it is esteem
which has made me so selfish."

D'Alembert declined the education of the hereditary Grand Duke, just as
he had declined the presidency of the Academy at Berlin; an infidel and
almost a materialist by the geometer's rule, who knows no power but the
laws of mathematics, he did not carry into anti-religious strife the
bitterness of Voltaire, or the violence of Diderot. "Squelch the thing!
you are always repeating to me," he said to Voltaire on the 4th of May,
1762. "Ah! my good friend, let it go to rack and ruin of itself, it is
hurrying thereto faster than you suppose." More and more absorbed by
pure science, which he never neglected save for the French Academy, whose
perpetual secretary he had become, D'Alembert left to Diderot alone the
care of continuing the _Encyclopaedia_. When he died, in 1783, at
fifty-six years of age, the work had been finished nearly twenty years.
In spite of the bad faith of publishers, who mutilated articles to render
them acceptable, in spite of the condemnation of the clergy and the
severities of the council, the last volumes of the _Encyclopaedia_ had
appeared in 1765.

This immense work, unequal and confused as it was, a medley of various
and often ill-assorted elements, undertaken for and directed to the fixed
end of an aggressive emancipation of thought, had not sufficed to absorb
the energy and powers of Diderot. "I am awaiting with impatien