Eleutheromanes, ou les Furieux de la Liberte._ _Oeuv._,
ix. 16.

[204] It is a curious illustration of the carelessness with which
the so-called negative school have been treated, that so
conscientious a writer as M. Henri Martin (_Hist. de France_, xvi.
146) should have taxed Diderot, among other sinister maxims, with
this, that "the public punishment of a king changes the spirit of a
nation for ever." Now the words occur in a collection of
observations on government, which Diderot wrote on the margin of his
copy of Tacitus, and which are entitled _Principes de Politique des
Souverains_ (1775). Some of the most pungent maxims are obviously
intended for irony on the military and Machiavellian policy of
Frederick the Great, while others on the policy of the Roman
emperors are shrewd and sagacious. The maxim from which M. Martin
quotes is the 147th, and in it the sombre words of his quotation
follow this:--"_Let the people never see royal blood flow for any
cause whatever._ The public punishment of a king," etc.! See
_Oeuv._, ii. 486.

In 1780 his townsmen of Langres paid him a compliment, which showed that
the sage was not without honour in his own country. They besought him to
sit for his portrait, to be placed among the worthies in the town hall.
Diderot replied by sending them Houdon's bronze bust, which was received
with all distinction and honour. Naigeon hints that in the last years of
his life Diderot paid more attention to money than he had ever done
before;[205] not that he became a miser, but because, like many other
persons, he had not found out until the close of a life's experience
that care of money really means care of the instrument that procures
some of the best ends in life. For a moment we may regret that he was
too much occupied in attending to his affairs to take the unwise
Naigeon's wise counsel, that he should devote himself to a careful
revision of all that he had written. Perhaps Diderot's instinct was
right. Among the distractions of old age, he had turned back to his
Letter on the Blind, and read it over again without partiality. He
found, as was natural, some defects in a piece that was written
three-and-thirty years before, but he abstained from attempting to
remove them, for fear that the page of the young man should be made the
worse by the retouching of the old man. "There comes a time," he
reflects, "when taste gives co