ctioned." Diderot did not offer himself;
he set out for St. Petersburg; the Empress Catherine had loaded him with
kindnesses. Hearing of the poverty of the philosopher who was trying to
sell his library to obtain a dower for his daughter, she bought the
books, leaving the enjoyment of them to Diderot, whom she appointed her
librarian, and, to secure his maintenance in advance, she had a sum of
fifty thousand livres remitted to him. "So here I am obliged, in
conscience, to live fifty years," said Diderot.

[Illustration: Diderot and Catherine II----321]

He passed some months in Russia, admitted several hours a day to the
closet of the empress, chatting with a frankness and a freedom which
sometimes went to the extent of license. Catherine II. was not alarmed.
"Go on," she would say; amongst men anything is allowable." When the
philosopher went away, he shed hot tears, and "so did she, almost," he
declares. He refused to go to Berlin; absolute power appeared to him
more arbitrary and less indulgent in the hands of Frederick than with
Catherine. "It is said that at Petersburg Diderot is considered a
tiresome reasoner," wrote the King of Prussia to D' Alembert in January,
1774; "he is incessantly harping on the same things. All I know is that
I couldn't stand the reading of his, books, intrepid reader as I am;
there is a self-sufficient tone and an arrogance in them which revolts my
sense of freedom." The same sense of freedom which the king claimed for
himself whilst refusing it to the philosopher, the philosopher, in his
turn, refused to Christians not less intolerant than he. The eighteenth
century did not practise on its own account that respect for conscience
which it, nevertheless, powerfully and to its glory promoted.

Diderot died on the 29th of July, 1784, still poor, an invalid for some
time past, surrounded to the end by his friends, who rendered back to him
that sincere and devoted affection which he made the pride of his life.
Hearing of his sufferings from Grimm, the Empress Catherine had hired a
furnished apartment for him; he had just installed himself in it when he
expired; without having retracted any one of his works, nearly all
published under the veil of the anonymous, he was, nevertheless, almost
reconciled with the church, and was interred quietly in the chapel of the
Virgin at St. Roch. The charm of his character had often caused people
to forget his violence, which he himself no longer