t or to
speak. He was next to me, and I kept pressing his hand and gazing at
him."[235] Mademoiselle Voland appears on some occasion to have compared
Diderot with his friend. "No more comparison, I beseech you, my good
friend, between Grimm and me. I console myself for his superiority by
frankly recognising it. I am vain of the victory that I thus gain over
my self-love, and you must not deprive me of that little
advantage."[236] Grimm, however, knew better than Diderot how to unite
German sentimentalism with a steady selfishness. "I have just received
from Grimm," writes good-natured Diderot, "a note that wounds my too
sensitive spirit. I had promised to write him a few lines on the
exhibition of pictures in the Salon; he writes to me that if it is not
ready to-morrow, it will be of no use. I will be revenged for this kind
of hardness, and in a way that becomes me. I worked all day yesterday,
and all day to-day. I shall pass the night at work, and all to-morrow,
and at nine o'clock he shall receive a volume of manuscript."[237] We
may doubt whether his German friend would feel the force of a rebuke so
extremely convenient to himself.

While Grimm was amusing himself at Madame d'Epinay's country house,
Diderot was working at the literary correspondence which Grimm was
accustomed to send to St. Petersburg and the courts of Germany. While
Grimm was hunting pensions and honorary titles at Saxe-Gotha, or
currying favour with Frederick and waiting for gold boxes at Potsdam,
Diderot was labouring like any journeyman in writing on his behalf
accounts and reviews of the books, good, bad, and indifferent, with
which the Paris market teemed. When there were no new books to talk
about, the ingenious man, with the resource of the born journalist, gave
extracts from books that did not exist.[238] When we hear of Paris being
the centre of European intelligence and literary activity, we may
understand that these circular letters of Grimm and Diderot were the
machinery by which the light of Paris was diffused among darker lands.
It is not too much to say that no contemporary record so intelligent, so
independent, so vigorous, so complete, exists of any other remarkable
literary epoch.

The abbe Raynal, of whom we shall have more to say in a later chapter,
had founded this counterpart of a modern review in 1747, and he sent a
copy of it in manuscript once a month to anybody who cared to pay three
hundred francs a year. In 1753 Raynal