For the first time in his history Diderot found himself rich. When a patron so munificent asked him to visit her, how could he decline? All the Encyclopædists were her warm admirers; she herself used to say modestly that Voltaire had made her the fashion. Denis hated long journeys and loved Paris, but go he must. He left France on May 10, 1773. He stopped at The Hague—where he characteristically admired the beauty of the women, and the turbot—and at last arrived at St. Petersburg.
For a monarch who complained that she might have been the head of Medusa—everyone turned to stone when she entered the room—Diderot must have been a singularly refreshing guest. It was one of the most charming traits in his character that he respected persons no more than a child does, or a dog. All etiquette fled before his breezy, impulsive personality. The very clothes he arrived in were so shabby, her Majesty had to present him immediately with a court suit. He was with her every afternoon. He said what he liked, and as much as he liked, which was a very great deal. In the heat and excitement of his arguments he would hammer the Imperial knees black and blue, till the Empress had to put a table in front of her for safety. If he ever did recollect her august position, ‘Allons!’ she would cry; ‘between men everything is permissible.’ He evolved the most magnificent, impossible schemes for the government of her empire—which would have upset it in a week if she had tried them, said she. During his stay, his dearest Grimm was also a guest. In March 1774, Denis left; and by the time he reached Paris again, was persuaded that he had enjoyed himself very much indeed.
Four years later, in 1778, he first saw in the flesh the great elder brother of his order, the master-worker in the temple slowly lifting its gorgeous towers towards the light—Voltaire. They had not always agreed on paper: their goal had been the same, but not the road to it. ‘But we are not so far apart,’ says old Voltaire; ‘we only want a conversation to understand each other.’ Accordingly, when he came on his last triumph to the capital, Diderot went to see him in the Villettes’ house on what is now the Quai Voltaire. Few details of their interviews have been preserved; but it is said that they discussed Shakespeare, and that when Diderot left, Voltaire said of him: ‘He is clever, but he lacks one very necessary talent—that of dialogue.’ On his part, Diderot compared Voltaire to a haunted castle falling into ruins—‘but one can easily see it is still inhabited by a magician.’
Voltaire died. Diderot was himself growing old; he had acquired, he thought in Russia, the seeds of a lung disease. Angélique married a M. de Vandeul, on the strength of the dot provided by the sale of the library. Madame Diderot, poor soul, had become not a little worried and embittered. It is the careless who make the care-worn, and Diderot was almost to the last the engaging, light-hearted scamp whose troubles are always flung on to some patient scapegoat.
In 1783, or 1784, the death of Mademoiselle Volland gave him a real grief. Twenty years before he had written to her with an exquisite eloquence of the calm and gentle approach of the great rest, Death: ‘One longs for the end of life as, after hard toil, one longs for the end of the day.’ He proved in himself the truth of his own words. He had not even a hope of the immortality of the soul; but he had worked hard, the evening was come, and he was weary. He was still working—writing the ‘Life of Seneca.’ He was still his all too lovable, spontaneous self, talking with that marvellous inspiration of which the best of his books can convey little idea.
A fortnight before he died he moved into a new home, given him by Catherine the Great, in the Rue Richelieu, opposite the birthplace of Molière and almost next door to the house where Voltaire had lived with Madame du Châtelet, and after her death. The curé of Saint-Sulpice came to see him, and suggested that a retractation of his sceptical opinions would produce good effect. ‘I dare say it would,’ said Denis, ‘but it would be a most impudent lie.’ In his last conversation Madame de Vandeul records that she heard him say: ‘The first step towards philosophy is unbelief.’
The end came very suddenly. On the last day of July 1784, he was supping with his wife and daughter, and at dessert took an apricot. Nanette gently remonstrated. ‘Mais que diable de mal veux-tu que cela me fasse?’ he cried. They were his last words and perfectly characteristic. He died as he sat, a few minutes later.
If to be great means to be good, then Denis Diderot was a little man. But if to be great means to do great things in the teeth of great obstacles, then none can refuse him a place in the temple of the Immortals.
His fiction, taken from rottenness, has returned to it, and is justly dead. His plays were damned on their appearance. His moving criticisms on art and the drama, his satirical dialogue, ‘Rameau’s Nephew’—nearly all the printed talk of this most matchless of all talkers—are rarely read. His letters to Mademoiselle Volland will last so long as the proper study of mankind is man. But it is as the father of the Encyclopædia that Denis Diderot merits eternal recognition. Guilty as he was in almost every relation of life towards the individual, for mankind, in the teeth of danger and of infidelity, at the ill-paid sacrifice of the best years of his exuberant life, he produced that book which first levelled a free path to knowledge and enfranchised the soul of his generation.