n he plunged from comfort into the life
of the garret. If he met any old friend from Langres, he borrowed, and
the honest father repaid the loan. His mother's savings were brought to
him by a faithful creature who had long served in their house, and who
now more than once trudged all the way from home on this errand, and
added her own humble earnings to the little stock. Many a time the hours
went very slowly for the necessitous man. One Shrove Tuesday he rose in
the morning, and found his pockets empty even of so much as a
halfpenny. His friends had not invited him to join their squalid
Bohemian revels. Hunger and thoughts of old Shrovetide merriment and
feasting in the far-off home made work impossible. He hastened out of
doors and walked about all day visiting such public sights as were open
to the penniless. When he returned to his garret at night, his landlady
found him in a swoon, and with the compassion of a good soul she forced
him to share her supper. "That day," Diderot used to tell his children
in later years, "I promised myself that if ever happier times should
come, and ever I should have anything, I would never refuse help to any
living creature, nor ever condemn him to the misery of such a day as
that."[6] And the real interest of the story lies in the fact that no
oath was ever more faithfully kept. There is no greater test of the
essential richness of a man's nature than that this squalid adversity,
not of the sentimental introspective kind but hard and grinding, and not
even kept in countenance by respectability, fails to make him a savage
or a miser or a misanthrope.

Diderot had his bitter moments. He knew the gloom and despondency that
have their inevitable hour in every solitary and unordered life. But the
fits did not last. They left no sour sediment, and this is the sign of
health in temperament, provided it be not due to mere callousness. From
that horrible quality Diderot assuredly was the furthest removed of any
one of his time. Now and always he walked with a certain large
carelessness of spirit. He measured life with a roving and liberal eye.
Circumstance and conventions, the words under which men hide things, the
oracles of common acceptance, the infinitely diversified properties of
human character, the many complexities of our conduct and destiny--all
these he watched playing freely around him, and he felt no haste to
compress his experience into maxims and system. He was absolutely
uncram