k's
field-marshal, Schmettau. Goethe, who saw her (1797) many years after
Diderot was dead, describes her as one of those whom one cannot
understand without seeing; as a person not rightly judged unless
considered not only in connection, but in conflict, with her time. If
she was remarkable to Goethe when fifty years had set their mark upon
her, she was even more so to the impetuous Diderot in all the flush and
intellectual excitement of her youth. It was to the brilliance and
versatility of the Princess Galitzin that her husband's house owed its
consideration and its charm. "She is very lively," said Diderot, "very
gay, very intelligent; more than young enough, instructed and full of
talents; she has read; she knows several languages, as Germans usually
do; she plays on the clavecin, and sings like an angel; she is full of
expressions that are at once ingenuous and piquant; she is exceedingly
kind-hearted."[95] But he could not persuade her to take his philosophy
on trust. Diderot is said, by the Princess's biographer, to have been a
fervid proselytiser, eager to make people believe "his poems about
eternally revolving atoms, through whose accidental encounter the
present ordering of the world was developed." The Princess met his
brilliant eloquence with a demand for proof. Her ever-repeated _Why?_
and _How?_ are said to have shown "the hero of atheism his complete
emptiness and weakness."[96] In the long run Diderot was completely
routed in favour of the rival philosophy. Hemsterhuys became bound to
the Princess by the closest friendship, and his letters to her are as
striking an illustration as any in literature of the peculiar devotion
and admiration which a clever and sympathetic woman may arouse in
philosophic minds of a certain calibre--in a Condillac, a Joubert, a
D'Alembert, a Mill. Though Hemsterhuys himself never advanced from a
philosophy of religion to the active region of dogmatic professions, his
disciple could not find contentment on his austere heights. In the very
year of Diderot's death (1784) the Princess Galitzin became a catholic,
and her son became not only a catholic but a zealous missionary of the
faith in America.

[95] _Oeuv._, xix. 342.

[96] Dr. Katerkamp's _Denkwuerdigkeiten aus dem Leben der Furstinn
Amalie von Gallitzin_, p. 45.

This, however, was not yet. The patriotic Bjoernstaehl was very anxious
that Diderot should go to Stockholm, to see for himself that the
Holstein