est, most upright, most patient, most
sensible of men. Diderot never ceased to regret that the old man's
portrait had not been taken with his apron on, his spectacles pushed up,
and a hand on the grinder's wheel. After his death, none of his
neighbours could speak of him to his son without tears in their eyes.
Diderot, wild and irregular as were his earlier days, had always a true
affection for his father. "One of the sweetest moments of my life," he
once said, "was more than thirty years ago, and I remember it as if it
were yesterday, when my father saw me coming home from school, my arms
laden with the prizes I had carried off, and my shoulders burdened with
the wreaths they had given me, which were too big for my brow and had
slipped over my head. As soon as he caught sight of me some way off, he
threw down his work, hurried to the door to meet me, and fell a-weeping.
It is a fine sight--a grave and sterling man melted to tears."[1] Of his
mother we know less. He had a sister, who seems to have possessed the
rough material of his own qualities. He describes her as "lively,
active, cheerful, decided, prompt to take offence, slow to come round
again, without much care for present or future, never willing to be
imposed on by people or circumstance; free in her ways, still more free
in her talk; she is a sort of Diogenes in petticoats.... She is the most
original and the most strongly-marked creature I know; she is goodness
itself, but with a peculiar physiognomy."[2] His only brother showed
some of the same native stuff, but of thinner and sourer quality. He
became an abbe and a saint, peevish, umbrageous, and as excessively
devout as his more famous brother was excessively the opposite. "He
would have been a good friend and a good brother," wrote Diderot, "if
religion had not bidden him trample under foot such poor weaknesses as
these. He is a good Christian, who proves to me every minute of the day
how much better it would be to be a good man. He shows that what they
call evangelical perfection is only the mischievous art of stifling
nature, which would most likely have spoken as lustily in him as in
me."[3]

Diderot, like so many others of the eighteenth-century reformers, was a
pupil of the Jesuits. An ardent, impetuous, over-genial temperament was
the cause of frequent irregularities in conduct. But his quick and
active understanding overcame all obstacles. His teachers, ever wisely
on the alert for superior capaci