It is held by some that one of the best means of giving the sense of a little fixity to lives that are but as the evanescent fabric of a dream and the shadow of smoke, is to secure stability of topographical centre by abiding in the same house.  Diderot is one of the few who complied with this condition.  For thirty years he occupied the fourth and fifth floors of a house which was still standing not long ago, at the corner of the Rue Saint Benoit by the Rue Taranne, in that Paris which our tourists leave unexplored, but which is nevertheless the true Paris of the eighteenth century.  Of the equipment of his room we have a charming picture by the hand of its occupant.  It occurs in his playful Regrets on My Old Dressing-gown, so rich in happy and delightful touches.

“What induced me to part with it?  It was made for me; I was made for it.  It moulded itself to all the turns and outlines of my body without fretting me.  I was picturesque and beautiful; its successor, so stiff, so heavy, makes a mere mannikin of me.  There was no want to which, its complaisance did not lend itself, for indigence is ever obsequious.  Was a book covered with dust, one of the lappets offered itself to wipe the dust away.  Did the thick ink refuse to flow from the pen, it offered a fold.  You saw traced in the long black lines upon it how many a service it had rendered me.  Those long lines announced the man of letters, the writer, the workman.  And now I have all the mien of a rich idler; you know not who I may be.  I was the absolute master of my old robe; I am the slave of my new one.  The dragon that guarded the golden fleece was not more restless than I. Care wraps me about.

“The old man who has delivered himself up bound hand and foot to the caprices of a young giddypate, says from morning to night:  Ah, where is my old, my kind housekeeper?  What demon possessed me the day that I dismissed her for this creature?  Then he sighs, he weeps.  I do not weep nor sigh; but at every moment I say:  Cursed be the man who invented the art of making common stuff precious by dyeing it scarlet!  Cursed be the costly robe that I stand in awe of!  Where is my old, my humble, my obliging piece of homespun?

“That is not all, my friend.  Hearken to the ravages of luxury—­of a luxury that must needs be consistent with itself.  My old gown was at one with the things about me.  A straw-bottomed chair, a wooden table, a deal shelf that held a few books, and three or four engravings, dimmed by smoke, without a frame, nailed at the four corners to the wall.  Among the engravings three or four casts in plaster were hung up; they formed, with my old dressing-gown, the most harmonious indigence.  All has become discord.  No more ensemble, no more unity, no more beauty.

“The woman who comes into the house of a widower, the minister who steps into the place of a statesman in disgrace, the molinist bishop who gets hold of the diocese of a jansenist bishop—­none of these people cause more trouble than the intruding scarlet has caused to me.