bly universal."[79] We have already seen Catherine's generosity in
buying Diderot's books, and paying him for guarding them as her
librarian. "I should never have expected," she says, "that the purchase
of a library would bring me so many fine compliments; all the world is
bepraising me about M. Diderot's library. But now confess, you to whom
humanity is indebted for the strong support that you have given to
innocence and virtue in the person of Calas, that it would have been
cruel and unjust to separate a student from his books."[80] "Ah, madam,"
replies the most graceful of all courtiers, "let your imperial majesty
forgive me; no, you are not the aurora borealis; you are assuredly the
most brilliant star of the north, and never was there one so beneficent
as you. Andromeda, Perseus, Callisto are not your equals. All these
stars would have left Diderot to die of starvation. He was persecuted in
his own country, and your benefactions came thither to seek him! Lewis
XIV. was less munificent than your majesty: he rewarded merit in foreign
countries, but other people pointed it out to him, whereas you, madame,
go in search of it and find it for yourself. Your generous pains to
establish freedom of conscience in Poland are a piece of beneficence
that the human race must ever celebrate."[81]

[79] November 1, 1773.

[80] November 1766.

[81] December 22, 1766.

When the first Partition of Poland took place seven years later,
Catherine found that she had not cultivated the friendship of the French
philosophers to no purpose. The action of the dominant party in Poland
enabled Catherine to take up a line which touched the French
philosophers in their tenderest part. The Polish oligarchy was Catholic,
and imposed crushing disabilities on the non-Catholic part of the
population. "At the slightest attempt in favour of the non-Catholics,"
King Stanislas writes to Madame Geoffrin, of the Diet of 1764, "there
arose such a cry of fanaticism! The difficulty as to the naturalisation
of foreigners, the contempt for _roturiers_ and the oppression of them,
and Catholic intolerance, are the three strongest national prejudices
that I have to fight against in my countrymen; they are at bottom good
folk, but their education and ignorance render them excessively stubborn
on these three heads."[82] Poland in short reproduced in an aggravated
and more barbaric form those evils of Catholic feudalism, in which the
philosophers saw t