church-steeple; it is never steady at one point, and, if it comes round
again to that which it had left, it is not to stop there.  As for me, I
am of my country; only residence of the capital and constant application
have corrected me a little."

[Illustration: Diderot----314]

Narrow circumstances had their share in the versatility of Diderot's
genius as well as in the variety of his labors.  Son of a cutler at
Langres, a strict and virtuous man, Denys Diderot, born in 1715, had at
first been intended by his father for the church.  He was educated at
Harcourt College, and he entered an attorney's office.  The young man
worked incessantly, but not a law-book did he open.  "What do you mean to
be, pray?" the lawyer asked him one day; "do you think of being an
attorney?"  "No."  "A barrister?"  "No."  "A doctor?"  "No more than the
rest."  "What then?"  "Nothing at all.  I like study, I am very happy,
very contented, I ask no more."  Diderot's father stopped the allowance
he had been making his son, trusting thus to force him to choose a
profession.  But the young man gave lessons for a livelihood.

"I know a pretty good number of things," he wrote towards the end of his
life, "but there is scarcely a man who doesn't know his own thing better
than I do.  This mediocrity in every sort is the consequence of
insatiable curiosity and of means so small, that they never permitted me
to devote myself to one single branch of human knowledge.  I have been
forced all my life to follow pursuits for which I was not adapted, and to
leave on one side those for which I had a call from inclination."  Before
he was thirty years old, and without any resource but his lessons and the
work of every sort he did for third parties, Diderot married; he had not
asked the consent of his parents, but this did not prevent him from
saddling them before long with his wife and child.  "She started
yesterday," he writes quite simply to his father, "she will be with you
in three days; you can say anything you like to her, and when you are
tired of her, you can send her back."  Diderot intended to be free at any
price, and he threw off, one after another, the fetters he had forged for
himself, not without remorse, however, and not without acknowledging that
he was thus wanting to all natural duties.  "What can you expect," he
would exclaim, "of a man who has neglected wife and daughter, got into
debt, given up being husband and father?"

Diderot never neglected his friends; amidst his pecuniary embarrassments,
when he was reduced to coin his brain for a livelihood, his labor and his
marvellous facility were always at the service of all.  It was to satisfy
the requirements of a dangerous fair friend that he wrote his _Pensees
philosophiques,) the sad tale of the _Bijoux indiscrets_ and the _Lettre
sur les Aveugles,_ those early attacks upon religious faith which sent
him to pass a few months in prison at the Castle of Vincennes.  It was to
oblige Grimm that he for the first time gave his mind to painting, and
wrote his _Salons,_ intended to amuse and instruct the foreign princes.
"A pleasure which is only for myself affects me but slightly and lasts
but a short time," he used to say; "it is for self and friends that I
read, reflect, write, meditate, hear, look, feel.  In their absence, my
devotion towards them refers everything to them.  I am always thinking of
their happiness.  Does a beautiful line strike me, they shall know it.
Have I stumbled upon a beautiful trait, I make up my mind to communicate
it to them.  Have I before my eyes some enchanting scene; unconsciously,
I meditate an account of it for them.  To them I have dedicated the use
of all my senses and of all my faculties, and that perhaps is the reason
why everything is exaggerated, everything is embellished a little in my
imagination and in my talk; and they sometimes reproach me with this, the
ingrates!"

It was, further, in conjunction with his friends and in community of
ideas that Diderot undertook the immense labor of the _Encyclopaedia_.
Having, in the first instance, received a commission from a publisher to
translate the English collection of [Ephraim] Chambers, Diderot was
impressed with a desire to unite in one and the same collection all the
efforts and all the talents of his epoch, so as to render joint homage to
the rapid progress of science.  Won over by his enthusiasm, D'Alembert
consented to share the task; and he wrote the beautiful exposition in the
introduction.  Voltaire sent his articles from Delices.  The Jesuits had
proposed to take upon themselves a certain number of questions, but their
co-operation was declined: it was a monument to philosophy that the
Encyclopaedists aspired to raise; the clergy were in commotion at seeing
the hostile army, till then uncertain and unbanded, rally organized and
disciplined around this vast enterprise.  An early veto, soon, however,
taken off, compelled the philosophers to a certain moderation; Voltaire
ceased writing for the _Encyclopaedia;_ it was not sufficiently
free-going for him.  "You admit articles worthy of the Trevoux journal,"
he said to D'Alembert.  New severities on the part of the Parliament and
the grand council dealt a blow to the philosophers before long: the
editors' privilege was revoked.  Orders were given to seize Diderot's
papers.  Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who was at that time director of the
press, and favorable to freedom without ever having abused it in thought
or action, sent him secret warning.  Diderot ran home in consternation.
"What's to be done?"  he cried; "how move all my manuscripts in twenty-
four hours?  I haven't time even to make a selection.  And, above all,
where find people who would and can take charge of them safely?"  "Send
them all to me," replied M. de Malesherbes; "nobody will come thither to
look for them."

Feeble governments are ill served even by their worthiest servants; the
severities ordered against the _Encyclopaedia_ did not stop its
publication; D'Alembert, however, weary of the struggle, had ceased to
take part in the editorship.  Naturally cool and moderate, when it was
nothing to do with Mdlle. de Lespinasse, the great affection of his life,
the illustrious geometer was content with a little.  "Twelve hundred
livres a year are enough for me," he wrote to the Great Frederick who was
pressing him to settle in his dominions.  "I will not go and reap the
succession to Maupertuis during his lifetime.  I am overlooked by
government, just as so many others by Providence; persecuted as much as
anybody can be, if some day I have to fly my country, I will simply ask
Frederick's permission to go and die in his dominions, free and poor."

[Illustration: Alembert----317]

Frederick II. gave D'Alembert a pension; it had but lately been Louis
XIV. who thus lavished kindnesses on foreign scholars: he made an offer
to the Encyclopaedists to go and finish their vast undertaking at Berlin.
Catherine II. made the same offers, asking D'Alembert, besides, to take
charge of the education of her son.  "I know your honesty too well," she
wrote, "to attribute your refusals to vanity; I know that the cause is
merely love of repose in order to cultivate literature and friendship.
But what is to prevent your coming with all your friends?  I promise you
and them too all the comforts and every facility that may depend upon me;
and perchance you will find more freedom and repose than you have at
home.  You do not yield to the entreaties of the King of Prussia, and to
the gratitude you owe him, it is true, but then he has no son.  I confess
that I have my son's education so much at heart, and that you are so
necessary to me, that perhaps I press you too much.  Pardon my
indiscretion for the reason's sake, and rest assured that it is esteem
which has made me so selfish."

D'Alembert declined the education of the hereditary Grand Duke, just as
he had declined the presidency of the Academy at Berlin; an infidel and
almost a materialist by the geometer's rule, who knows no power but the
laws of mathematics, he did not carry into anti-religious strife the
bitterness of Voltaire, or the violence of Diderot.  "Squelch the thing!
you are always repeating to me," he said to Voltaire on the 4th of May,
1762.  "Ah! my good friend, let it go to rack and ruin of itself, it is
hurrying thereto faster than you suppose."  More and more absorbed by
pure science, which he never neglected save for the French Academy, whose
perpetual secretary he had become, D'Alembert left to Diderot alone the
care of continuing the _Encyclopaedia_.  When he died, in 1783, at
fifty-six years of age, the work had been finished nearly twenty years.
In spite of the bad faith of publishers, who mutilated articles to render
them acceptable, in spite of the condemnation of the clergy and the
severities of the council, the last volumes of the _Encyclopaedia_ had
appeared in 1765.

This immense work, unequal and confused as it was, a medley of various
and often ill-assorted elements, undertaken for and directed to the fixed
end of an aggressive emancipation of thought, had not sufficed to absorb
the energy and powers of Diderot.  "I am awaiting with impatience the
reflections of _Pantophile Diderot on Tancrede,_" wrote Voltaire:
"everything is within the sphere of activity of his genius: he passes
from the heights of metaphysics to the weaver's trade, and thence he
comes to the stage."

The stage, indeed, occupied largely the attention of Diderot, who sought
to introduce reforms, the fruit of his own thought as well as of
imitation of the Germans, which he had not perhaps sufficiently
considered.  For the classic tragedies, the heritage of which Voltaire
received from the hands of Racine, Diderot aspired to substitute the
natural drama.  His two attempts in that style, _Le Pere de Famille_ and
_Le Fils natural,_ had but little success in France, and contributed to
develop in Germany the school already founded by Lessing.  An excess of
false sensibility and an inflation of expression had caused certain true
ideas to fall flat on the French stage.

"You have the inverse of dramatic talent," said Abbe Arnauld to Diderot;
"the proper thing is to transform one's self into all the characters, and
you transform all the characters into yourself."  The criticism did
Diderot wrong: he had more wits than his characters, and he was worth
more at bottom than those whom he described.  Carried away by the
richness as well as the unruliness of his mind, destitute as he was of
definite and fixed principles, he recognized no other moral law than the
natural impulse of the soul.  "There is no virtue or vice," he used to
say, "but innate goodness or badness."  Certain religious cravings,
nevertheless, sometimes: asserted themselves in his conscience: he had.
a glimmering perception of the necessity for a higher rule and law.
"O God, I know not whether Thou art," he wrote in his _Interpretation de
la Nature,_ but I will think as if Thou didst see into my soul, I will
act as if I were in Thy presence."

A strange illusion on the part of the philosopher about the power of
ideas as well as about the profundity of evil in the human heart!
Diderot fancied he could regulate his life by a perchance, and he was
constantly hurried away by the torrent of his passion into a violence of
thought and language foreign to his natural benevolence.  It was around
his name that the philosophic strife had waxed most fierce: the active
campaign undertaken by his friends to open to him the doors of the French
Academy remained unsuccessful.  "He has too many enemies," said Louis XV.
"his election shall not be sanctioned."  Diderot did not offer himself;
he set out for St. Petersburg; the Empress Catherine had loaded him with
kindnesses.  Hearing of the poverty of the philosopher who was trying to
sell his library to obtain a dower for his daughter, she bought the
books, leaving the enjoyment of them to Diderot, whom she appointed her
librarian, and, to secure his maintenance in advance, she had a sum of
fifty thousand livres remitted to him.  "So here I am obliged, in
conscience, to live fifty years," said Diderot.

[Illustration: Diderot and Catherine II----321]

He passed some months in Russia, admitted several hours a day to the
closet of the empress, chatting with a frankness and a freedom which
sometimes went to the extent of license.  Catherine II. was not alarmed.
"Go on," she would say; amongst men anything is allowable."  When the
philosopher went away, he shed hot tears, and "so did she, almost," he
declares.  He refused to go to Berlin; absolute power appeared to him
more arbitrary and less indulgent in the hands of Frederick than with
Catherine.  "It is said that at Petersburg Diderot is considered a
tiresome reasoner," wrote the King of Prussia to D' Alembert in January,
1774; "he is incessantly harping on the same things.  All I know is that
I couldn't stand the reading of his, books, intrepid reader as I am;
there is a self-sufficient tone and an arrogance in them which revolts my
sense of freedom."  The same sense of freedom which the king claimed for
himself whilst refusing it to the philosopher, the philosopher, in his
turn, refused to Christians not less intolerant than he.  The eighteenth
century did not practise on its own account that respect for conscience
which it, nevertheless, powerfully and to its glory promoted.

Diderot died on the 29th of July, 1784, still poor, an invalid for some
time past, surrounded to the end by his friends, who rendered back to him
that sincere and devoted affection which he made the pride of his life.
Hearing of his sufferings from Grimm, the Empress Catherine had hired a
furnished apartment for him; he had just installed himself in it when he
expired; without having retracted any one of his works, nearly all
published under the veil of the anonymous, he was, nevertheless, almost
reconciled with the church, and was interred quietly in the chapel of the
Virgin at St. Roch.  The charm of his character had often caused people
to forget his violence, which he himself no longer remembered the next
day.  "I should like to know this hot-headed metaphysician," was the
remark made to Buffon by President De Brosses, who happened to be then at
Paris; and he afterwards added,

"He is a nice fellow, very pleasant, very amiable, a great philosopher,
a mighty arguer, but a maker of perpetual digressions.  Yesterday he made
quite five and twenty between nine o'clock and one, during which time he
remained in my room.  O, how much more lucid is Buffon than all those
gentry!"

The magistrate's mind understood and appreciated the great naturalist's
genius.  Diderot felt in his own fashion the charm of nature, but, as was
said by Chevalier Chastellux, "his ideas got drunk and set to work
chasing one another."  The ideas of Buffon, on the other hand, came out
in the majestic order of a system under powerful organization, and
informed as it were with the very secrets of the Creator.  "The general
history of the world," he says, "ought to precede the special history of
its productions; and the details of singular facts touching the life and
habits of animals, or touching the culture and vegetation of plants,
belong perhaps less to natural history than do the general results of the
observations which have been made on the different materials which
compose the terrestrial globe, on the elevations, the depressions, and
the unevennesses of its form, on the movement of the seas, on the
trending of mountains, on the position of quarries, on the rapidity and
effects of the currents of the sea--this is nature on the grand scale."

M. Fleurens truly said, " Bufon aggrandizes every subject he touches."
Born at Montbard in Burgundy on the 7th of September, 1707, Buffon
belonged to a family of wealth and consideration in his province.  In his
youth he travelled over Europe with his friend the Duke of Kingston; on
returning home, he applied himself at first to mathematics, with
sufficient success to be appointed at twenty-six years of age, in 1733,
adjunct in the mechanical class at the Academy of Sciences.  In 1739, he
received the superintendence of the _Jardin du Roi,_ not long since
enlarged and endowed by Richelieu, and lovingly looked after by the
scholar Dufay, who had just died, himself designating Buffon as his
successor.  He had shifted from mechanics to botany, "not," he said,
"that he was very fond of that science, which he had learned and
forgotten three times," but he was aspiring just then to the _Jardin du
Roi;_ his genius was yet seeking its proper direction.  "There are some
things for me," he wrote to President De Brosses, "but there are some
against, and especially my age; however, if people would but reflect,
they would see that the superintendence of the _Jardin du Roi_ requires
an active young man, who can stand the sun, who is conversant with plants
and knows the way to make them multiply, who is a bit of a connoisseur in
all the sorts used in demonstration there, and above all who understands
buildings, in such sort that, in my own heart, it appears to me that I
should be exactly made for them: but I have not as yet any great hope."

[Illustration: Buffon  323]

In Buffon's hands the _Jardin du Roi_ was transformed; in proportion as
his mind developed, the requirements of the study appeared to him greater
and greater; he satisfied them fearlessly, getting together collections
at his own expense, opening new galleries, constructing hot-houses, being
constantly seconded by the good-will of Louis XV., who never shrank from
expenses demanded by Buffon's projects.  The great naturalist died at
eighty years of age, without having completed his work; but he had
imprinted upon it that indisputable stamp of greatness which was the
distinctive feature of his genius.  The _Jardin du Roi,_ which became the
_Jardin des Plantes,_ has remained unique in Europe.

Fully engaged as he was in those useful labors, from the age of thirty,
Buffon gave up living at Paris for the greater part of the year.  He had
bought the ruins of the castle of Montbard, the ancient residence of the
Dukes of Burgundy, overlooking his native town.  He had built a house
there which soon became dear to him, and which he scarcely ever left for
eight months in the year.  There it was, in a pavilion which overhung the
garden planted in terraces, and from which he had a view of the rich
plains of La Brenne, that the great naturalist, carefully dressed by five
o'clock in the morning, meditated the vast plan of his works as he walked
from end to end and side to side.  "I passed delightful hours there," he
used to say.  When he summoned his secretary, the work of composition was
completed.  "M. de Buffon gives reasons for the preference he shows as to
every word in his discourses, without excluding from the discussion even
the smallest particles, the most insignificant conjunctions," says Madame
Necker; "he never forgot that he had written 'the style is the man.'
The language could not be allowed to derogate from the majesty of the
subject.  'I made it a rule,' he used to say, 'to always fix upon the
noblest expressions.'"

It was in this dignified and studious retirement that Buffon quietly
passed his long life.  "I dedicated," he says, " twelve, nay, fourteen,
hours to study; it was my whole pleasure.  In truth, I devoted myself to
it far more than I troubled myself about fame; fame comes afterwards, if
it may, and it nearly always does."

Buffon did not lack fame; on the appearance of the first three volumes of
his "Histoire naturelle," published in 1749, the breadth of his views,
the beauty of his language, and the strength of his mind excited general
curiosity and admiration.  The Sorbonne was in a flutter at certain bold
propositions; Buffon, without being disconcerted, took pains to avoid
condemnation.  "I took the liberty," he says in a letter to M. Leblant,
"of writing to the Duke of Nivernais (then ambassador at Rome), who has
replied to me in the most polite and most obliging way in the world; I
hope, therefore, that my book will not be put in the Index, and, in
truth, I have done all I could not to deserve it and to avoid theological
squabbles, which I fear far more than I do the criticisms of physicists
and geometricians."  "Out of a hundred and twenty assembled doctors," he
adds before long, "I had a hundred and fifteen, and their resolution even
contains eulogies which I did not expect."  Despite certain boldnesses
which had caused anxiety, the Sorbonne had reason to compliment the great
naturalist.  The unity of the human race as well as its superior dignity
were already vindicated in these first efforts of Buffon's genius, and
his mind never lost sight of this great verity.  "In the human species,"
he says, "the influence of climate shows itself only by slight varieties,
because this species is one, and is very distinctly separated from all
other species; man, white in Europe, black in Africa, yellow in Asia, and
red in America, is only the same man tinged with the hue of climate; as
he is made to reign over the earth, as the whole globe is his domain, it
seems as if his nature were ready prepared for all situations; beneath
the fires of the south, amidst the frosts of the north, he lives, he
multiplies, he is found to be so spread about everywhere from time
immemorial that he appears to affect no climate in particular.  .  .  .
Whatever resemblance there may be between the Hottentot and the monkey,
the interval which separates them is immense, since internally he is
garnished with mind and externally with speech."

Buffon continued his work, adroitly availing himself of the talent and
researches of the numerous co-operators whom he had managed to gather
about him, directing them all with indefatigable vigilance in their
labors and their observations.  "Genius is but a greater aptitude for
perseverance," he used to say, himself justifying his definition by the
assiduity of his studies.  "I had come to the sixteenth volume of my work
on natural history," he writes with bitter regret, "when a serious and
long illness interrupted for nearly two years the course of my labors.
This shortening of my life, already far advanced, caused one in my works.
I might, in the two years I have lost, have produced two or three volumes
of the history of birds, without abandoning for that my plan of a history
of minerals, on which I have been engaged for several years."

In 1753 Buffon had been nominated a member of the French Academy.  He had
begged his friends to vote for his compatriot, Piron, author of the
celebrated comedy _Metromanie,_ at that time an old man and still poor.
"I can wait," said Buffon.  "Two days before that fixed for the
election," writes Grimm, "the king sent for President Montesquieu, to
whose lot it had fallen to be director of the Academy on that occasion,
and told him that, understanding that the Academy had cast their eyes
upon M. Piron, and knowing that he was the author of several licentious
works, he desired the Academy to choose some one else to fill the vacant
place.  His Majesty at the same time told him that he would not have any
member belonging to the order of advocates."

Buffon was elected, and on the 25th of August, 1754, St. Louis' day, he
was formally received by the Academy; Grimm describes the session.
"M. de Buffon did not confine himself to reminding us that Chancellor
Seguier was a great man, that Cardinal Richelieu was a very great man,
that Kings Louis XIV. and Louis XV.  were very great men too, that the
Archbishop of Sens (whom he succeeds) was also a great man, and finally
that all the forty were great men; this celebrated man, disdaining the
stale and heavy eulogies which are generally the substance of this sort
of speech, thought proper to treat of a subject worthy of his pen and
worthy of the Academy.  He gave us his ideas on style, and it was said,
in consequence, that the Academy had engaged a writing-master."

"Well-written works are the only ones which will go down to posterity,"
said Buffon in his speech; "quantity of knowledge, singularity of facts,
even novelty in discoveries, are not certain guaranties of immortality;
knowledge, facts, discoveries, are easily abstracted and transferred.
Those things are outside the man; the style is the man himself; the
style, then, cannot be abstracted, or transferred, or tampered with; if
it be elevated, noble, sublime, the author will be equally admired at all
times, for it is only truth that is durable and even eternal."

Never did the great scholar who has been called "the painter of nature"
relax his zeal for painstaking as a writer.  "I am every day learning to
write," he would still say at seventy years of age.

To the _Theorie de la Terre,_ the _Idees generales sur les Animaux,_ and
the _Histoire de l'Homme,_ already published when Buffon was elected by
the French Academy, succeeded the twelve volumes of the _Histoire des
Quadrupedes,_ a masterpiece of luminous classifications and incomparable
descriptions; eight volumes on _Oiseaux_ appeared subsequently, a short
time before the _Histoire des Mineraux;_ lastly, a few years before his
death, Buffon gave to the world the _Epoques de la Nature_.  "As in civil
history one consults titles, hunts up medals, deciphers antique
inscriptions to determine the epochs of revolutions amongst mankind, and
to fix the date of events in the moral world, so, in natural history, we
must ransack the archives of the universe, drag from the entrails of the
earth the olden monuments, gather together their ruins and collect into a
body of proofs all the indications of physical changes that can guide us
back to the different ages of nature.  It is the only way of fixing
certain points in the immensity of space, and of placing a certain number
of memorial-stones on the endless road of time."

"This is what I perceive with my mind's eye," Buffon would say, "thus
forming a chain which, from the summit of Time's ladder, descends right
down to us."  "This man," exclaimed Hume, with an admiration which
surprised him out of his scepticism, "this man gives to things which no
human eye has seen a probability almost equal to evidence."

Some of Buffon's theories have been disputed by his successors' science;
as D'Alembert said of Descartes: "If he was mistaken about the laws of
motion, he was the first to divine that there must be some."  Buffon
divined the epochs of nature, and by the intuition of his genius,
absolutely unshackled by any religious prejudice, he involuntarily
reverted to the account given in Genesis.  "We are persuaded," he says,
"independently of the authority of the sacred books, that man was created
last, and that he only came to wield the sceptre of the earth when that
earth was found worthy of his sway."

It has often been repeated, on the strength of some expressions let fall
by Buffon amongst intimates, that the panorama of nature had shut out
from his eyes the omnipotent God, creator and preserver of the physical
world as well as of the moral law.  Wrong has been done the great
naturalist; he had answered beforehand these incorrect opinions as to his
fundamental ideas.  "Nature is not a being," he said; "for that being
would be God;" and he adds, "Nature is the system of the laws established
by the Creator."  The supreme notion of Providence appears to his eyes in
all its grandeur, when he writes, "The verities of nature were destined
to appear only in course of time, and the Supreme Being kept them to
Himself as the surest means of recalling man to Him when his faith,
declining in the lapse of ages, should become weak; when, remote from his
origin, he might begin to forget it; when, in fine, having become too
familiar with the spectacle of nature, he would no longer be moved by it,
and would come to ignore the Author.  It was necessary to confirm from
time to time, and even to enlarge, the idea of God in the mind and heart
of man.  Now every new discovery produces this grand effect, every new
step that we make in nature brings us nearer to the Creator.  A new
verity is a species of miracle; its effect is the same, and it only
differs from the real miracle in that the latter is a startling stroke
which God strikes instantaneously and rarely, instead of making use of
man to discover and exhibit the marvels which He has hidden in the womb
of Nature, and in that, as these marvels are operating every instant, as
they are open at all times and for all time to his contemplation, God is
constantly recalling him to Himself, not only by the spectacle of the
moment, but, further, by the successive development of His works."

Buffon was still working at eighty years of age; he had undertaken a
dissertation on style, a development of his reception speech at the
French Academy.  Great sorrows had crossed his life.  Married late to a
young wife whom he loved, he lost her early; she left him a son, brought
up under his wing, and the object of his constant solicitude.  Just at
the time of sending him to school, he wrote to Madame Daubenton, wife of
his able and learned co-operator: "I expect Buffonet on Sunday.  I have
arranged all his little matters he will have a private room, with a
closet for his man-servant; I have got him a tutor in the school-house
itself, and a little companion of his own age.  I do not think that he
will be at all unhappy."  And, at a later date, when he is expecting this
son who has reached man's estate, and has been travelling in Europe: "My
son has just arrived; the empress and the grand-duke have treated him
very well, and we shall have some fine minerals, the collection of which
is being at this moment completed.  I confess that anxiety about his
return has taken away my sleep and the power of thinking."

When the young Count de Buffon, an officer in the artillery, and at first
warmly favorable to the noble professions of the French Revolution, had,
like his peers, to mount the scaffold of the Terror, he damned with one
word the judges who profaned in his person his father's glory.
"Citizens," he exclaimed from the fatal car, "my name is Buffon."  With
less respect for the rights of genius than was shown by the Algerian
pirates who let pass, without opening them, the chests directed to the
great naturalist, the executioner of the Committee of public safety cut
off his son's head.

This last drop of bitterness, and the cruel spectacle of social disorder,
Buffon had been spared; he had died at the _Jardin du Roi_ on the 14th of
April, 1788, preserving at eighty years of age, and even in the
feebleness of ill health, all the powers of his intelligence and the calm
serenity of 'his soul.  His last lines dictated to his son were addressed
to Madame Necker, who had been for a long time past on the most intimate
terms with him.  Faithful in death to the instincts of order and
regularity which had always controlled his mind even in his boldest
flight, he requested that all the ceremonies of religion should be
fulfilled around his body.  His son had it removed to Montbard, where it
lies between his father and his wife.

Buffon had lived long, he had accomplished in peace his great work, he
had reaped the fruits of it.  On the eve of the terrible shocks whereof
no presage disturbed his spirit, "directed for fifty years towards the
great objects of nature," the illustrious scholar had been permitted to
see his statue placed during his lifetime in the _Jardin du Roi_.  On
sending to the Empress Catherine his bust which she had asked him for,
he wrote to his son who had charge of it: "I forgot to remark to you,
whilst talking of bust and effigy, that, by the king's order, they have
put at the bottom of my statue the following inscription: _Majestati
naturae par ingenium_ (Genius to match the majesty of nature).  It is not
from pride that I send you this, but perhaps Her Majesty will have it put
at the bottom of the bust."

"How many great men do you reckon?" Buffon was asked one day.  "Five,"
answered he at once: " Newton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Montesquieu, and myself."

This self-appreciation, fostered by the homage of his contemporaries,
which showed itself in Buffon undisguisedly with an air of ingenuous
satisfaction, had poisoned a life already extinguished ten years before
amidst the bitterest agonies.  Taking up arms against a society in which
he had not found his proper place, Jean Jacques Rousseau had attacked the
present as well as the past, the Encyclopaedists as well as the old
social organization.  It was from the first his distinctive trait to
voluntarily create a desert around him.  The eighteenth century was in
its nature easily seduced; liberal, generous, and open to allurements, it
delighted in intellectual contentions, even the most dangerous and the
most daring; it welcomed with alacrity all those who thus contributed to
its pleasures.  The charming drawing-rooms of Madame Geoffrin, of Madame
du Deffand, of Madlle. Lespinasse, belonged of right to philosophy.
"Being men of the world as well as of letters, the philosophers of the
eighteenth century had passed their lives in the pleasantest and most
brilliant regions of that society which was so much attacked by them.
It had welcomed them, made them famous; they had mingled in all the
pleasures of its elegant and agreeable existence; they shared in all its
tastes, its manners, all the refinements, all the susceptibilities of a
civilization at the same time old and rejuvenated, aristocratic and
literary; they were of that old regimen which was demolished by their
hands.  The philosophical circle was everywhere, amongst the people of
the court, of the church, of the long robe, of finance; haughty here,
complaisant there, at one time indoctrinating, at another amusing its
hosts, but everywhere young, active, confident, recruiting and battling
everywhere, penetrating and fascinating the whole of society " [M.
Guizot, Madame la comtesse de Rumford].  Rousseau never took his place in
this circle; in this society he marched in front like a pioneer of new
times, attacking tentatively all that he encountered on his way.  "Nobody
was ever at one and the same time more factious and more dictatorial," is
the clever dictum of M. Saint Marc Girardin.

Rousseau was not a Frenchman: French society always felt that, in
consequence of certain impressions of his early youth which were never to
be effaced.  Born at Geneva on the 28th of June, 1712, in a family of the
lower middle class, and brought up in the first instance by an
intelligent and a pious mother, he was placed, like Voltaire and Diderot,
in an attorney's office.  Dismissed with disgrace "as good for nothing
but to ply the file," the young man was bound apprentice to an engraver,
"a clownish and violent fellow," says Rousseau, "who succeeded very
shortly in dulling all the brightness of my boyhood, brutalizing my
lively and loving character, and reducing me in spirit, as I was in
fortune, to my real position of an apprentice."

Rousseau was barely sixteen when he began that roving existence which is
so attractive to young people, so hateful in ripe age, and which lasted
as long as his life.  Flying from his master whose brutality he dreaded,
and taking refuge at Oharmettes in Savoy with a woman whom he at first
loved passionately, only to leave her subsequently with disgust, he had
reached the age of one and twenty, and had already gone through many
adventures when he set out, heart-sore and depraved, to seek at Paris a
means of subsistence.  He had invented a new system of musical notation;
the Academy of Sciences, which had lent him a favorable ear, did not
consider the discovery useful.  Some persons had taken an interest in
him, but Rousseau could never keep his friends; and he had many, zealous
and devoted.  He was sent to Venice as secretary to the French ambassador
M. de Montaigu.  He soon quarrelled with the ambassador and returned to
Paris.  He found his way into the house of Madame Dupin, wife of a rich
farmer-general (of taxes).  He was considered clever; he wrote little
plays, which he set to music.  Enthusiastically welcomed by the friends
of Madame Dupin, he contributed to their amusements.  "We began with the
_Engagement temeraire,_" says Madame d'Epinay in her Memoires: "it is a
new play by M. Rousseau, a friend of M. de Francueil's, who introduced
him to us.  The author played a part in his piece.  Though it is only a
society play, it was a great success.  I doubt, however, whether it would
be successful at the theatre, but it is the work of a clever man and no
ordinary man.  I do not quite know, though, whether it is what I saw of
the author or of the piece that made me think so.  He is complimentary
without being polite, or at least without having the air of it.  He seems
to be ignorant of the usages of society, but it is easy to see that he
has infinite wit.  He has a brown complexion, and eyes full of fire light
up his face.  When he has been speaking and you watch him, you think him
good-looking; but when you recall him to memory, it is always as a plain
man.  He is said to be in bad health; it is probably that which gives him
from time to time a wild look."

It was amid this brilliant intimacy, humiliating and pleasant at the same
time, that Rousseau published his _Discours sur les Sciences et les
Arts_.  It has been disputed whether the inspiration was such as he
claimed for this production, the first great work which he had ever
undertaken and which was to determine the direction of his thoughts.
"I was going to see Diderot at Vincennes," he says, "and, as I walked, I
was turning over the leaves of the _Mercure de France,_ when I stumbled
upon this question proposed by the Academy of Dijon: Whether the advance
of sciences and arts has contributed to the corruption or purification of
morals.  All at once I felt my mind dazzled by a thousand lights, crowds
of ideas presented themselves at once with a force and a confusion which
threw me into indescribable bewilderment; I felt my head seized with a
giddiness like intoxication, a violent palpitation came over me, my bosom
began to heave.  Unable to breathe any longer as I walked, I flung myself
down under one of the trees in the avenue, and there spent half an hour
in such agitation that, on rising up, I found all the front of my
waistcoat wet with tears without my having had an idea that I had shed
any."  Whether it were by natural intuition or the advice of Diderot,
Jean Jacques had found his weapons; poor and obscure as he was, he
attacked openly the brilliant and corrupt society which had welcomed him
for its amusement.  Spiritualistic at heart and nurtured upon Holy
Scripture in his pious childhood, he felt a sincere repugnance for the
elegant or cynical materialism which was every day more and more creeping
over the eighteenth century.  "Sciences and arts have corrupted the
world," he said, and he put forward, as proof of it, the falsity of the
social code, the immorality of private life, the frivolity of the
drawing-rooms into which he had been admitted.  "Suspicions,
heart-burnings, apprehensions, coldness, reserve, hatred, treason, lurk
incessantly beneath that uniform and perfidious veil of politeness, under
that so much vaunted urbanity which we owe to the enlightenment of our
age."

Rousseau had launched his paradox; the frivolous and polite society which
he attacked was amused at it without being troubled by it: it was a new
field of battle opened for brilliant jousts of wit; he had his partisans
and his admirers.  In the discussion which ensued, Jean Jacques showed
himself more sensible and moderate than he had been in the first
exposition of his idea; he had wanted to strike, to astonish he soon
modified the violence of his assertions.  "Let us guard against
concluding that we must now burn all libraries and pull down the
universities and academies," he wrote to King Stanislaus: "we should only
plunge Europe once more into barbarism, and morals would gain nothing by
it.  The vices would remain with us, and we should have ignorance
besides.  In vain would you aspire to destroy the sources of the evil;
in vain would you remove the elements of vanity, indolence, and luxury;
in vain would you even bring men back to that primal equality, the
preserver of innocence and the source of all virtue: their hearts once
spoiled will be so forever.  There is no remedy now save some great
revolution, almost as much to be feared as the evil which it might cure,
and one which it were blamable to desire and impossible to forecast.  Let
us, then, leave the sciences and arts to assuage, in some degree, the
ferocity of the men they have corrupted.  .  ..  The enlightenment of the
wicked is at any rate less to be feared than his brutal stupidity."

Rousseau here showed the characteristic which invariably distinguished
him from the philosophers, and which ended by establishing deep enmity
between them and him.  The eighteenth century espied certain evils,
certain sores in the social and political condition, believed in a cure,
and blindly relied on the power of its own theories.  Rousseau, more
earnest, often more sincere, made a better diagnosis of the complaint; he
described its horrible character and the dangerousness of it, he saw no
remedy and he pointed none out.  Profound and grievous impotence, whose
utmost hope is an impossible recurrence to the primitive state of
savagery!  "In the private opinion of our adversaries," says M. Roy de
Collard eloquently, "it was a thoughtless thing, on the great day of
creation, to let man loose, a free and intelligent agent, into the midst
of the universe; thence the mischief and the mistake.  A higher wisdom
comes forward to repair the error of Providence, to restrain His
thoughtless liberality, and to render to prudently mutilated mankind the
service of elevating it to the happy innocence of the brute."

Before Rousseau, and better than he, Christianity had recognized and
proclaimed the evil; but it had at the same time announced to the world a
remedy and a Saviour.

Henceforth Rousseau had chosen his own road: giving up the drawing-rooms
and the habits of that elegant society for which he was not born and the
admiration of which had developed his pride, he made up his mind to live
independent, copying music to get his bread, now and then smitten with
the women of the world who sought him out in his retirement,--in love
with Madame d'Epinay and Madame d'Houdetot, anon returning to the coarse
servant-wench whom he had but lately made his wife, and whose children he
had put in the foundling-hospital.  Music at that time absorbed all
minds.  Rousseau brought out a little opera entitled _Le Devin de
village_ (The Village Wizard), which had a great success.  It was played
at Fontainebleau before the king.  "I was there that day," writes
Rousseau, "in the same untidy array which was usual with me; a great deal
of beard and wig rather badly trimmed.  Taking this want of decency for
an act of courage, I entered in this state the very room into which would
come, a short time afterwards, the king, the queen, the royal family, and
all the court.  .  .  .  When the lights were lit, seeing myself in this.
array in the midst of people all extensively got up, I began to be ill at
ease; I asked myself if I were in my proper place, if I were properly
dressed, and, after a few moments' disquietude, I answered yes, with an
intrepidity which arose perhaps more from the impossibility of getting
out of it than from the force of my arguments.  After this little
dialogue, I plucked up so much, that I should have been quite intrepid if
there had been any need of it.  But, whether it were the effect of the
master's presence or natural kindness of heart, I observed nothing but
what was obliging and civil in the curiosity of which I was the object.
I was steeled against all their gibes, but their caressing air, which I
had not expected, overcame me so completely, that I trembled like a child
when things began.  I heard all about me a whispering of women who seemed
to me as beautiful as angels, and who said to one another below their
breath, 'This is charming, this is enchanting: there is not a note that
does not appeal to the heart.'  The, pleasure of causing emotion in so
many lovable persons moved me myself to tears."

The emotions of the eighteenth century were vivid and easily roused;
fastening upon everything without any earnest purpose, and without any
great sense of responsibility, it grew as hot over a musical dispute as
over the gravest questions of morality or philosophy.  Grimm had attacked
French music, Rousseau supported his thesis by a _Lettre sur la Musique_.
It was the moment of the great quarrel between the Parliament and the
clergy.  "When my letter appeared, there was no more excitement save
against me," says Rousseau; "it was such that the nation has never
recovered from it.  When people read that this pamphlet probably
prevented a revolution in the state, they will fancy they must be
dreaming."  And Grimm adds in his correspondence: "The Italian actors who
have been playing for the last ten months on the stage of the Opera de
Paris and who are called here bouffons, have so absorbed the attention of
Paris that the Parliament, in spite of all its measures and proceedings
which should have earned it celebrity, could not but fall into complete
oblivion.  A wit has said that the arrival of Manelli saved us from a
civil war; and Jean Jacques Rousseau of Geneva, whom his friends have
dubbed the citizen of citizens (_le citoyen par excellence_), that
eloquent and bilious foe of the sciences, has just set fire to the four
corners of Paris with a _Lettre sur la Musique,_ in which he proves that
it is impossible to set French words to music.  .  .  .  What is not easy
to believe, and is none the less true for all that, is that M. Rousseau
was afraid of being banished for this pamphlet.  It would have been odd
to see Rousseau banished for having spoken ill of French music, after
having with impunity dealt with the most delicate political matter."

Rousseau had just printed his _Discours sur l'Inegalite des conditions,_
a new and violent picture of the corruptions of human society.
"Inequality being almost nil in a state of nature," he says, "it derives
its force and increment from the development of our faculties and from
the progress of the human mind .  .  .  according to the poet it is gold
and silver, but according to the philosopher it is iron and corn which
have civilized men and ruined the human race."

The singularity of his paradox had worn off; Rousseau no longer
astounded, he shocked the good sense as well as the aspirations,
superficial or generous, of the eighteenth century.  The _Discours sur
l'Inegalite des conditions_ was not a success.  "I have received, sir,
your new book against the human race," wrote Voltaire; "I thank you for
it.  You will please men to whom you tell truths about them, and you will
not make them any better.  Never was so much good wit expended in the
desire to make beasts of us; one feels disposed to walk on all fours when
one reads your work.  However, as it is more than sixty years since I
lost the knack, I unfortunately find it impossible to recover it, and I
leave that natural gait to those who are better fitted for it than you or
I.  No more can I embark upon a visit to the savages of Canada, first,
because the illnesses to which I am subject render a European doctor
necessary to me; secondly, because war has been introduced into that
country, and because the examples of our nations have rendered the
savages almost as wicked as ourselves.  I shall confine myself to being a
peaceable savage in the solitude I have selected hard by your own
country, where you ought to be."

Rousseau had, indeed, thought of returning and settling at Geneva.  In
1754, during a trip he made thither, he renounced the Catholic faith
which he had embraced at sixteen under the influence of Madame de Warens,
without any more conviction than he carried with him in his fresh
abjuration.  "Ashamed," says he, "at being excluded from my rights of
citizenship by the profession of a cult other than that of my fathers, I
resolved to resume the latter openly.  I considered that the Gospel was
the same for all Christians, and that, as the fundamental difference of