s of isolation are less than the evils of rash and premature
organisation. Fontenelle was the first and in some respects the greatest
type of this important class. He was sceptical, learned, ingenious,
eloquent. He stretched hands (1657-1757) from the famous quarrel between
Ancients and Moderns down to the Encyclopaedia, and from Bossuet and
Corneille down to Jean Jacques and Diderot. When he was born, the man of
letters did not exist. When he died, the man of letters was the most
conspicuous personage in France. But when Diderot first began to roam
about the streets of Paris, this enormous change was not yet complete.

For some ten years (1734-1744) Diderot's history is the old tale of
hardship and chance; of fine constancy and excellent faith, not wholly
free from an occasional stroke of rascality. For a time he earned a
little money by teaching. If the pupil happened to be quick and docile,
he grudged no labour, and was content with any fee or none. If the pupil
happened to be dull, Diderot never came again, and preferred going
supperless to bed. His employers paid him as they chose, in shirts, in a
chair or a table, in books, in money, and sometimes they never paid him
at all. The prodigious exuberance of his nature inspired him with a
sovereign indifference to material details. From the beginning he
belonged to those to whom it comes by nature to count life more than
meat, and the body than raiment. The outward things of existence were
to him really outward. They never vexed or absorbed his days and nights,
nor overcame his vigorous constitutional instinct for the true
proportions of external circumstance. He was of the humour of the old
philosopher who, when he heard that all his worldly goods had been lost
in a shipwreck, only made for answer, _Jubet me fortuna expeditius
philosophari_. Once he had the good hap to be appointed tutor to the
sons of a man of wealth. He performed his duties zealously, he was well
housed and well fed, and he gave the fullest satisfaction to his
employer. At the end of three months the mechanical toil had grown
unbearable to him. The father of his pupils offered him any terms if he
would remain. "Look at me, sir," replied the tutor; "my face is as
yellow as a lemon. I am making men of your children, but each day I am
becoming a child with them. I am a thousand times too rich and too
comfortable in your house; leave it I must. What I want is not to live
better, but to avoid dying." Agai