res, nearly all the rest having gone:
"Well, there are two things that warn us of our end, and set us
musing--old ruins, and the short duration of those who began life with
us." He is taken by a host over-devoted to such joys, to walk among
dung-heaps. "After all," he says, "it ought not to offend one's sense.
To an honest nose that has preserved its natural innocence, 'tis not a
goat, but a bemusked and ambre-scented woman, who smelleth ill."

"When I compare our friendships to our antipathies, I find that the
first are thin, small, pinched; we know how to hate, but we do not know
how to love."

"A poet who becomes idle, does excellently well to be idle; he ought to
be sure that it is not industry that fails, but that his gift is
departing from him."

"Comfort the miserable; that is the true way to console yourself for my
absence. I recollect saying to the Baron, when he lost his first wife,
and was sure that there was not another day's happiness left for him in
this world, 'Hasten out of doors, seek out the wretched, console them,
and then you will pity yourself, if you dare.'"[209]

"An infinitude of tyrannical things interpose between us and the duties
of love and friendship; and we do nothing aright. A man is neither free
for his ambition, nor free for his taste, nor free for his passion. And
so we all live discontented with ourselves. One of the great
inconveniences of the state of society is the multitude of our
occupations and, above all, the levity with which we make engagements to
dispose of all our future happiness. We marry, we go into business, we
have children, all before we have common sense."[210]

After some equivocal speculations as to the conduct of a woman who, by
the surrender of herself for a quarter of an hour to the desires of a
powerful minister, wins an appointment for her husband and bread for her
six children, he exclaims: "In truth, I think Nature heeds neither good
nor evil; she is wholly wrapped up in two objects, the preservation of
the individual and the propagation of the species."[211] True; but the
moral distinction between right and wrong is so much wrung from the
forces that Diderot here calls Nature.

The intellectual excitement in which he lived and the energy with which
he promoted it, sought relief either in calm or else in the play of
sensibility. "A delicious repose," he writes in one of his most harassed
moments, "a sweet book to read, a walk in some open and solitary s