ritation. When the young
Mademoiselle Phlipon, in after years famous as wife of the virtuous
Roland, was taken to a sitting of the Academy, she was curious to see
the author of the Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopaedia, but his
small face and sharp thin voice made her reflect with some
disappointment, that the writings of a philosopher are better to know
than his mask.[101] In everything except zeal for light and
emancipation, D'Alembert was the opposite of Diderot. Where Diderot was
exuberant, prodigal, and disordered, D'Alembert was a precisian.
Difference of temperament, however, did not prevent their friendship
from being for many years cordial and intimate. When the Encyclopaedia
was planned, it was to D'Alembert, as we have said, that Diderot turned
for aid in the mathematical sciences, where his own knowledge was not
sufficiently full nor well grounded. They were in strong and singular
agreement in their idea of the proper place and function of the man of
letters. One of the most striking facts about their alliance, and one
of the most important facts in the history of the Encyclopaedia, is that
henceforth the profession of letters became at once definite and
independent. Diderot and D'Alembert both of them remained poor, but they
were never hangers-on. They did not look to patrons, nor did they bound
their vision by Versailles. They were the first to assert the lawful
authority of the new priesthood. They revolted deliberately and in set
form against the old system of suitorship and protection. "Happy are men
of letters," wrote D'Alembert, "if they recognise at last that the
surest way of making themselves respectable is to live united and almost
shut up among themselves; that by this union they will come, without any
trouble, to give the law to the rest of the nation in all affairs of
taste and philosophy; that the true esteem is that which is awarded by
men who are themselves worthy of esteem.... As if the art of instructing
and enlightening men were not, after the too rare art of good
government, the noblest portion and gift in human reach."[102]

This consciousness of the power and exaltation of their calling, which
men of letters now acquired, is much more than the superficial fact
which it may at first seem to be. It marked the rise of a new teaching
order and the supersession of the old. The highest moral ideas now
belonged no longer to the clergy, but to the writers; no longer to
official Catholicis