hat he was in the habit of making at the theatre. He used to
go to the highest seats in the house, thrust his fingers into his ears,
and then, to the astonishment of his neighbours, watch the performance
with the sharpest interest. As a constant playgoer, he knew the words of
the plays by heart, and what he sought was to isolate the gesture of the
performers, and to enjoy and criticise that by itself. He kept his ears
tightly stopped, so long as the action and play went well with the words
as he remembered them, and he only listened when some discord in gesture
made him suppose that he had lost his place. The people around him were
more and more amazed as they saw him, notwithstanding his stopped ears,
shed copious tears in the pathetic passages. "They could not refrain
from hazarding questions, to which I answered coldly, 'that everybody
had his own way of listening, and that my way was to stop my ears, so as
to understand better'--laughing within myself at the talk to which my
oddity gave rise, and still more so at the simplicity of some young
people who also put their fingers into their ears to hear after my
fashion, and were quite astonished that the plan did not succeed."[260]
This was an odd and whimsical way of acting on a conviction which lay
deep in Diderot's mind, namely, that language is a very poor,
misleading, and utterly inadequate instrument for representing what it
professes, and what we stupidly suppose it, to represent. Rousseau had
expressed the same kind of feeling when he said that definitions might
be good things, if only we did not employ words in making them.

A curious circumstance is worth mentioning in connection with the Three
Dialogues appended to _The Natural Son_. Diderot informs his readers
that the incidents of _The Natural Son_ had actually occurred in real
life, and that he knew the personages. In the Dialogues it is assumed
that the play had been written by the hero himself, and the hero is the
chief speaker. Not a word is said from which the reader would guess that
Diderot had borrowed the substance of his plot and some of its least
insipid scenes from Goldoni. We can hardly wonder that he was charged
with plagiarism. Yet it was not deliberate, we may be sure. When Diderot
was strongly seized by an idea, outer circumstances were as if they did
not exist. He was swept up into the clouds. "Diderot is a good and
worthy man," wrote Madame Geoffrin to the King of Poland, "but he has
such a