Another time the child, whispering in his ear, asks why her mother bade her not remind him that the morrow was the mother’s fete-day.  The presence of the blithe all-hoping young, looking on with innocent unconscious eyes at the veiled tragedy of love turned to bitter discord, gives to such scenes their last touch of piteousness.  Diderot, however, observed the day, and presented a bouquet which was neither well or ill received.  At the birthday dinner the master of the house presided.  “If you had been behind the curtains, you would have said to yourself, how can all this gossip and twaddle find a place in the same head with certain ideas!  And in truth I was charming, and played the fool to a marvel."[199]

In the midst of distractions great and small, was an indomitable industry.  “I tell you,” he wrote, “and I tell all men, when you are ill at ease with yourself, instantly set about some good work.  In busying myself to soothe the trouble of another, I forget my own.”  He was assiduous in teaching his daughter, though he complained that her mother crushed out in a day what it had taken him a month to implant.  The booksellers found him the most cheerful and strenuous bondsman that ever booksellers had.  He would pass a whole month without a day’s break, working ten hours every day at the revision of proof-sheets.  Sometimes he remains a whole week without leaving his workroom.  He wears out his eyes over plates and diagrams, bristling with figures and letters, and with no more refreshing thought in the midst of this sore toil than that insult, persecution, torment, trickery, will be the fruit of it.  He not only spent whole days bent over his desk, until he had a feeling as of burning flame within him; he also worked through the hours of the night.  On one of these occasions, worn out with fatigue and weariness, he fell asleep with his head on his desk; the light fell down among his papers, and he awoke to find half the books and papers on the desk burnt to ashes.  “I kept my own counsel about it,” he writes, “because a single hint of such an accident would have robbed my wife of sleep for the rest of her life."[200]

His favourite form of holiday was a visit to Holbach’s country house at Grandval.  Here he spent some six weeks or more nearly every autumn after 1759.  The manner of life there was delightful to him.  There was perfect freedom, the mistress of the house neither rendering strict duties of ceremony nor exacting them.  Diderot used to rise at six or at eight, and remain in his own room until one, reading, writing, meditating.  Nobody was more exquisitely sensible than Diderot to the charm of loitering over books, “over those authors,” as he said, “who ravish us from ourselves, in whose hands nature has placed a fairy wand, with which they no sooner touch us, than straightway we forget the evils of life, the darkness lifts from our souls, and we are reconciled to existence."[201] The musing suggestiveness of reading