Baron d’Holbach was first of all ‘an atheist, and not ashamed;’ but he was also very rich, very liberal, very hospitable, with a charming country house at Grandval, near Charenton, where he entertained the free-thinkers of all nations, and where his table was equally celebrated for its cook and its conversation. The former was so good that Denis was always over-eating himself; and the latter was, in a moral sense, so bad that he enjoyed it to the utmost.
The Grandval household was fettered by none of the tiresome rules which are apt to make visiting, when one has passed the easily adaptable season of youth, a hazardous experiment. The hostess ‘fulfilled no duties and exacted none.’ The visitors were as free as in their own homes. Diderot would get up at six, take a cup of tea, fling open the windows to admit the air and sunshine, and then fall to work. At two came dinner. The house was always full of people who met now for the first time. In that free style, glowing with life and colour, Diderot recorded to Mademoiselle Volland the Rabelaisian conversation which made these dinners so long, and, to him, so delightful. He reported to her verbatim the amazing liberty of speech which distinguished them, just as he reported to her in minutest detail the indigestions for which the too excellent cook was responsible.
The unbridled talk of d’Holbach’s mother-in-law continually set the table in a roar. Diderot himself was at his best—full of bonhomie and joie-de-vivre—laughing one minute and crying the next, warm in generous pity for sorrow, quick to be irritated or appeased, pouring out torrents of splendid ideas and then of grossest ribaldry, his mouth speaking always from the fulness of his heart, utterly indiscreet, brilliant, ingenuous, delightful; an orator ‘drunk with the exuberance of his own verbosity,’ who could argue that black was white, and then that white was black again, and whose seduction and danger lay in the fact that he always fully believed both impossibilities himself. No subject that was started found him cool or neutral. ‘He is too hot an oven,’ said Voltaire; ‘everything gets burnt in him.’
When the dinner was over he would thrust his arm through his host’s and walk in the garden with him. He at least did his best to imbue the dogmatic atheism of d’Holbach with luxuriance and warmth. At seven they came back to the house, and supper was followed by picquet and by talk till they went to bed.
Among many other visitors whom Diderot met while he was what he called ‘veuf’ at Grandval were at least four Englishmen—Sterne, Wilkes, Garrick, and Hume.
Diderot has been well called the most English of the Frenchmen of the eighteenth century. He began his literary career by making translations from our language. In a passion of admiration he had fallen at the feet of the ‘divine Richardson,’ and imitated ‘Pamela’ in a very bad novel of his own, ‘The Nun;’ in another, ‘Jacques, the Fatalist,’ he tried to accustom France to romance in the style of Sterne. He had taught his fellow-citizens, he said, to read and to esteem Bacon. He was familiar with the works of Pope, Chaucer, Tillotson, and Locke; and he has left a noble and famous criticism upon Shakespeare: ‘He is like the St. Christopher of Notre-Dame, an unshapen Colossus, rudely carven, but beneath whose legs we can all walk without our brows touching him.’
To Garrick, Diderot paid exaggerated homage, and went into raptures over the wonderful play of his face. He admired Wilkes’s morals as well as his mind, and in 1768 wrote him a flattering letter. As for Hume, he liked the delightful Diderot better than any other philosopher he met in France. It is Diderot who tells the story of Hume saying at d’Holbach’s table, ‘I do not believe there is such a thing as an atheist; I have never seen one,’ and of d’Holbach’s replying, ‘Then you have been a little unfortunate; you are sitting now with seventeen.’ Sterne, whose ‘Tristram Shandy’ was delighting France in general and Diderot in particular when its author was at Grandval, on his return home sent Denis English books.
In 1761 Diderot produced a play. ‘The Father of the Family’ is, it must be confessed, a sad bore with his lachrymose moralities; but he is exhilarating compared to ‘The Natural Son,’ Diderot’s second play, which was acted in 1771. The universal Denis was no playwright.
In 1772 he published the ten volumes of plates which he had laboriously prepared to supplement the text of the Encyclopædia; and in May 1773, when he was sixty years old, he visited Catherine the Great.
He had had relations with her for some years. One fine day, in 1765, it had suddenly occurred to him that his dearest Angélique, over whom he had poured such streams of paternal sentiment, would have positively no dot. Her fond, improvident father had, of course, never attempted to save anything for her, and, if he knew his own disposition, must have known too he never would save anything. The only thing he had of value in the world, besides his head, was his library. Catherine the Great was a magnificent patron of letters; and Diderot was her especial protégé. He would sell his books to her! She delightedly accepted the offer. She gave him for them a sum equal to about seven hundred pounds, and appointed him her librarian at a salary of a thousand livres a year, fifty years’ payment being made in advance.