LITMIR.BIZ

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ridiculous traditions, supplied the largest materials at once for horror and ridicule.

      At length the storm broke forth. The infidelity which had danced and smiled, and made calembourgs and scoffed, in the full-dress circles of the nobles; made its appearance in the streets and highways, in rags and riot, with the axe for the pen, and blood for the ink, and trampled the whole polished race of scoffers in the mire of Revolution.

      The Encyclopédie was the great text-book of the literary faction, and Diderot and D'Alembert were the editors of its first seven volumes – D'Alembert writing the preliminary discourse upon the progress of the sciences. But the latter mixed caution with his courage; for on the issue of the government prohibition of the work, he abandoned the editorship and left it to Diderot.

      At length, in 1752, the King of Prussia, who, with all his fame, had the weakness of being emulous of French flattery, offered him an appointment at Berlin, with an allowance of five hundred pounds a-year, and the reversionary office of president of the academy. But this royal offer he refused, on the ground of his reluctance to quit Paris, and the fear that the employment would be inconsistent with his freedom. At this period his fixed income seemed to be about seventy pounds a-year; yet, when we suffer ourselves to be astonished at the apparent magnanimity of the refusal, we are to remember that this sum, a hundred years ago, and in Paris, would be about equivalent to two hundred pounds a-year in England at the present day; that, like all Frenchmen, he hated Germany; that Frederic's dealings with Voltaire gave by no means a favourable specimen of his friendships; and that, to a Frenchman of that day, Paris was all the world. But, ten years after, the Empress Catharine made him the much more tempting offer of the tutorship of her son, afterwards the unfortunate Emperor Paul. The salary was to be magnificent, no less than four thousand pounds a-year; still he refused the offer, and preferred remaining in Paris.

      Whether we are to applaud his magnanimity, or blame his habits, on this occasion, may fairly be a question. The possession of the four thousand pounds a-year, even if it were limited to the period of tuition, would have made him opulent; and his opulence would undoubtedly have given him the means of extensive benevolence, of relieving private distress, of assisting his less fortunate literary brethren, of promoting public objects, and ultimately, perhaps, of founding some valuable institution which might last for ages. But D'Alembert, and men like him, seem to live only for themselves. It would have cost him an absence from Paris for a certain period to have obtained this power of public good; and he preferred living without it, and haunting, night after night, the coteries of the old blue-stockings who kept open house for the evening gossipry of the capital.

      Nothing can form a stronger contrast to the general passion of the French character for change, than its devotion to the same coterie for half a century together. In the middle of the eighteenth century two houses in Paris were especially the rendezvous of the talkers, idlers, and philosophers of Paris. That some of those visitants were men of remarkable ability, there can be no doubt. But this perpetual haunting of the same coffee-cups, this regularity of trifling, this wretched inability to remain at home for a single evening, is so wholly irreconcilable with our English sense of domestic duties, of the attachment of parents to their families, and of the exercise of the natural affections, that we find it utterly impossible to attach any degree of respect to the perpetual lounger at another's fire-side. Madame Geoffrin had now succeeded to Madame de Tencin, as the receiver of the coterie. Madame du Deffand held a kind of rival, but inferior, coterie. The former had a house, the latter had only a lodging; the former was good-humoured, amiable, and kind – the latter satirical and cold; but both were clever, and, at all events, both received the gossips, wise and foolish, of Paris. At the lodging of Madame du Deffand, D'Alembert met Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse, a species of companion to Madame. She was the illegitimate daughter of a woman of fashion, as D'Alembert was the son. The circumstance was too common in Parisian high life, to involve any censure on the parents, or any disgrace on the children; but it may have produced a degree of sympathy, which suddenly rose to its height by their taking a lodging together! Those things, too, were so frequent in France, that, except the laugh of the moment, no one seems to have taken notice of the connexion; and they continued to carry it on, as well received as ever, and holding their evening coterie with undiminished applause.

      "No one," observes the noble biographer, "whispered a syllable of suspicion, respecting a connexion which all were fully convinced could be only of the most innocent kind." This French credulity is too simple for our credence. That a he and she philosophic pair should have lived in the same apartments for a dozen years with perfect innocency, may have been the case in Paris; but the story would not be believed in any less immaculate region on the face of the earth. The plain truth seems to be, that the general looseness of Parisian society saw nothing gross in the grossest connexion. Even where they affected virtue, they palpably preferred their having an evening lounge open to them, to any consideration grounded on common propriety and a sense of shame.

      But the philosopher was a dirty fellow after all, and it only does credit to his noble biographer's sense of propriety to admit, that "his conduct must seem strange to all men of right and honourable feelings." In fact, the philosopher seems to have lent his aid very zealously to a correspondence carried on by his sensitive fellow-lodger! with a view to a marriage with a Spanish Marquis Mora. Among other proofs, he went every morning to the post-office to receive the Spaniard's letters for the lady. "I confess," says Lord Brougham, "I am driven, how reluctantly soever, to the painful conclusion, that he lent himself to the plan of her inveigling the Spaniard into a marriage." And this was not the only instance of his by-play. Mademoiselle professed also to have fallen in love with a M. Guibert, known as a military writer. Guibert exhibited his best tactics, in keeping clear of the lady. "All this time, she continued," says his lordship, "to make D'Alembert believe, that she had no real passion for any one but himself." No one can easily suppose that they were not connected in a plan of obtaining for her a settlement in life by marriage. But, if this marriage-intrigue was in every sense, and on all sides, contemptible; what are we to think of the nature of the connexion existing between this sensitive lady and D'Alembert, living for years under the same roof? The whole matter would be too repulsive for the decorums of biography, if it were not among the evidences of that utter corruption of morals, and callousness of feeling, which were finally avenged in the havoc of the Revolution.

      D'Alembert's income had been increased by his appointment to the office of secretary to the Academy, in 1772. Unfortunately for his literary fame, it became a part of his duty to write the éloges of the deceased members, an office which he fulfilled with equal diligence and unproductiveness; for, of those unfortunate performances he wrote no less than eighty-three. But the French are fond of fooleries of this kind; a few sounding sentences with them are biography; a few rambling sketches fill up the outline to their taste; and the whole forms a specimen of that eloquence which men are content to admire on the other side of the Channel.

      At length his career drew to a close. Towards his sixty-fourth year, his health began to decline. It had never been robust, though his habits had been temperate; but feebleness of stomach, and an organic disease, predicted the approach of his dissolution. He died on the 29th of October 1783, in the sixty-seventh year of his age. Notwithstanding his feebleness of body, his intellectual vigour remained – thus adding one to the many proofs of the distinct natures of mind and body. In his intervals of ease, he continued to occupy himself with mathematical investigations. With a deplorable want of feeling, he talked with levity of his approaching departure – an event awful to the best, and, to the wisest, solemn in proportion to their wisdom. He died in the fulness of that scientific reputation which he deserved, and of that literary reputation which he did not deserve; but, by the combination of both, ranking as the most distinguished intellectual name of Europe in his day.

      The life of a later philosopher, the unfortunate Lavoisier, gives Lord Brougham an opportunity of rendering justice to an eminent foreigner, and of vindicating the claims of his own still more memorable countrymen, Black and Watt. Chemistry is especially the science of the eighteenth century, as geometry was of the seventeenth. It is a characteristic of that great, however slow, change, which is now evidently in progress through Europe, that those sciences which most promote the comforts, the powers, and the progress of the multitude, obviously occupy the largest share of mental illustration. Of all the sciences, chemistry is that one which contributes most largely to the dominion of man over

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