[182] Diderot’s daughter, in her memoir of him, speaks of his imprisonment in the Bastille as brought about through the resentment of a lady of whom he had spoken slightingly; and her husband left a statement in MS. to the same effect (printed at the end of the Mémoires by Naigeon). The lady is named as Madame Dupré de Saint-Maur, a mistress of the King, and the offence is said to have been committed in the story entitled Le Pigeon blanc. Howsoever this may have been, the prosecution was quite in the spirit of the period, and the earlier Pensées were made part of the case against him. See Delort, Hist. de la détention des philosophes, 1829, ii, 208–16. M. de Vandeul-Diderot testifies that the Marquis Du Chatelet, Governor of Vincennes, treated his prisoner very kindly. Buckle (1-vol. ed. p. 425) does not seem to have fully read the Lettre, which he describes as merely discussing the differentiation of thought and sensation among the blind. [↑]
[183] His friend Meister (À la mémoire de Diderot, 1786, app. to Naigeon’s Mémoires de Diderot, 1821, p. 424) writes as if Diderot had written the whole Apologie “in a few days.” The third part, a reply to the pastoral of the Bishop of Auxerre, appeared separately as a Suite to the others. [↑]
[184] Apologie, as cited, 2e partie, p. 87 sq. [↑]
[185] Observations sur l’instruction pastorale de Mons. l’Évêque d’Auxerre, Berlin, 1752, p. 17. [↑]
[187] Cp. Morley, Diderot, pp. 98–99. [↑]
[188] Carlyle, Frederick, bk. xviii, ch. ix, end. [↑]
[189] D’Argenson, Mémoires, iv, 188. [↑]
[191] “Quelle abominable homme!” he writes to Mdlle. Voland (15 juillet, 1759); and Lord Morley pronounces de Prades a rascal (Diderot, p. 98). Carlyle is inarticulate with disgust—but as much against the original heresy as against the treason to Frederick. As to that, Thiébault was convinced that de Prades was innocent and calumniated. Everybody at court, he declares, held the same view. Mes Souvenirs de vingt ans de séjour à Berlin, 2e édit. 1805, v, 402–404. [↑]