of state and director of the university of St. Petersburg.  How he came by any papers of Diderot it is impossible to guess.  It is assumed that when Mademoiselle Voland died her family gave his letters and other papers back to Diderot.  These, along with other documents, are supposed to have been given by Diderot to Grimm.  Thence they went to the Library of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg.  Whether Jeudy-Dugour sold copies or originals, and whether he made the copies, if copies they were, from the Library, which was, however, rigorously closed during the reign of Nicholas I., are literary secrets which it is impossible to fathom.  So far as Diderot is concerned, some of the spirit of mystification that haunted literature in the eighteenth century still hovers about it in the nineteenth.  This we shall presently find in a still more interesting monument of Diderot than even his letters to Mademoiselle Voland.[194]

They are not a continuous series.  It was only when either Diderot was absent from Paris, or his correspondent was away at her mother’s house in the country, that letter-writing was necessary.  Diderot appears to have written to her openly and without disguise.  The letters of Mademoiselle Voland in reply were for obvious reasons not sent to Diderot’s house, but under cover to the office of Damilaville, so well known to the reader of Voltaire’s correspondence.  Damilaville was a commissioner in one of the revenue departments, and it is one among many instances of the connivance between authority and its foes, that most of the letters and packets of Voltaire, Diderot, and the rest of the group, should have been taken in, sent out, guarded, and franked by the head of a government office.  The trouble that Damilaville willingly took in order to serve his friends is another example of what we have already remarked as the singular amiability and affectionate solicitude of those times.  “Think of Damilaville’s attention,” says Diderot on one occasion:  “to-day is Sunday, and he was obliged to leave his office.  He was sure that I should come this evening, for I never fail when I hope for a letter from you.  He left the key with two candles on a table, and between the two candles your little letter, and a pleasant note of his own.”  And by the light of the candles Diderot at once wrote a long answer.[195]

We need not wonder if much is said in these letters of tardy couriers, missing answers, intolerable absences, dreary partings, delicious anticipations.  All these are the old eternal talk of men and women, ever since the world began; without them we should hardly know that we are reading the words of man to woman.  They are in our present case only the setting of a curiously frank and open picture of a man’s life.