erlocutor, I pray you to turn your eyes to the
public--that imbecile crowd that pronounces judgment on us, that
disposes of our honour, that lifts us to the clouds or trails us through
the mud. Opinion passed through every phase about Desroches. The
shifting event is ever their one measure of praise and blame. A fault
which nobody thought more than venial became gradually aggravated in
their eyes by a succession of incidents which it was impossible for
Desroches either to foresee or to prevent. At first opinion was on his
side, and his wife was thought to have carried things with too high a
hand. Then, after she had fallen ill, and her child had died, and her
aged mother had passed away in the fulness of years, he began to be held
answerable for all this sea of troubles. Why had not Desroches written
to his wife, beset her doors, waylaid her as she went to church? He
had, as matter of fact, done all these things, but the public did not
know it. The important thing is, not to know, but to talk. Then, as it
befell, his wife's brother took Desroches's place in his regiment; there
he was killed. More exclamations as to the misfortune of being connected
with such a man. How was Desroches responsible for the death of his
mother-in-law, already well stricken in years? How could he foresee that
a hostile ball would pierce his brother-in-law in his first campaign?
But his wife? He must be a barbarian, a monster, who had gradually
pressed a poniard into the bosom of a divine woman, his wife, his
benefactress, and then left her to die, without showing the least sign
of interest or feeling. And all this, cries Diderot, for not knowing
what was concealed from him, and what was unknown and unsuspected even
by those who were daily about her? What presumption, what bad logic,
what incoherence, what unjustified veering and vacillation in all these
public verdicts from beginning to end!

[3] _Oeuv._, v. 342.

Yet we feel that Diderot's impetuous taunts fail to press to the root of
the matter. Diderot excels in opening a subject; he places it in a new
light; he furnishes telling concrete illustrations; he thoroughly
disturbs and unsettles the medium of conventional association in which
it has become fixed. But he does not leave the question readjusted. His
mind was not of that quality which is slow to complain where it cannot
explain; which does not quit a discussion without a calm and orderly
review of the conditions that underlie t