discovered the infidelity of his mistress and broke with her. But by
this time his wife's virtues seem to have gone a little sour, as
disregarded prudence and thwarted piety are so apt to do. It was too
late now to knit up again the ravelled threads of domestic concord.
During a second absence of his wife in Champagne (1754), he formed a new
attachment to the daughter of a financier's widow (Mdlle. Voland). This
lasted to the end of the lady's days (1783 or 1784).

There is probably nothing very profitable to be said about all this
domestic disorder. We do not know enough of the circumstances to be sure
of allotting censure in exact and rightful measure. We have to remember
that such irregularities were in the manners of the time. To connect
them by way of effect with the new opinions in religion, would be as
impertinent as to trace the immoralities of Dubois or Lewis the
Fifteenth or the Cardinal de Rohan to the old opinions.

CHAPTER III.

EARLY WRITINGS.

La Rochefoucauld, expressing a commonplace with the penetrative
terseness that made him a master of the apophthegm, pronounced it "not
to be enough to have great qualities: a man must have the economy of
them." Or, as another writer says: "Empire in this world belongs not so
much to wits, to talents, and to industry, as to a certain skilful
economy and to the continual management that a man has the art of
applying to all his other gifts."[18] Notwithstanding the peril that
haunts superlative propositions, we are inclined to say that Diderot is
the most striking illustration of this that the history of letters or
speculation has to furnish. If there are many who have missed the mark
which they or kindly intimates thought them certain of attaining, this
is mostly not for want of economy, but for want of the great qualities
which were imputed to them by mistake. To be mediocre, to be sterile, to
be futile, are the three fatal endings of many superbly announced
potentialities. Such an end nearly always comes of exaggerated faculty,
rather than of bad administration of natural gifts. In Diderot were
splendid talents. It was the art of prudent stewardship that lay beyond
his reach. Hence this singular fact, that he perhaps alone in literature
has left a name of almost the first eminence, and impressed his
greatness upon men of the strongest and most different intelligence, and
yet never produced a masterpiece; many a fine page, as Marmontel said,
but no one fi