Men knew how to be as wrong-headed and as graceless as women.  We have already mentioned the name of Landois in connection with Diderot’s article on Liberty.  Landois seems to have been a marvel of unreasonableness, but he was a needy man of letters, and that was enough to make Diderot ready to bear with him and to succour him.  He wound up an epistle abounding, after the manner of the worthless failures of the world, in reproaches and grievances against his benefactor, with a cool request about a manuscript that was full of dangerous matter.  “Why, that,” replied Diderot, “is a work that might well be the ruin of me!  And it is after you have on two separate occasions charged me with the most atrocious and deliberate offences towards you, that you now propose that I should revise and print your work!  You know that I have a wife and child, that I am a marked man, that you are putting me into the class of hardened offenders; never mind, you don’t think of one of these things.  You take me for an imbecile, or else you are one.  But you are no imbecile....  I see through men’s designs, and often enough I lend myself to them, without deigning to disabuse them as to the stupidity which they impute to me.  It is enough if I perceive in their design some great service for them, and not an excess of inconvenience for myself.  It is not I who am the fool, so often as people take me for one.”  Diderot then seems half to forget to whom he is writing and pours out what reads like a long soliloquy on morals, conduct, and the philosophy of life.  He insists that man, with all his high-flying freedom of will, is but a little link in a great chain of events.  He is a creature to be modified from without; hence the good effects of example, discourse, education, pleasures, pains, greatness, misery.  Hence a sort of philosophy of commiseration, which attaches us strongly to the good, and irritates us no more against the bad than against a wind-storm that fills our eyes with dust.  If you adopt such principles as these, they will reconcile you with others and yourself; you will neither praise nor blame yourself for what you are.  To reproach others with nothing, to repent yourself of nothing—­these are the two first steps towards wisdom; this is the philosophy that reconciles us with the human race and with life.[228]

When he was in the very midst of all the toil and strife that the Encyclopaedia brought upon him, he could not refuse to spend three whole days in working like a galley-slave at an account of an important discovery that had been made by some worthy people with whom he was acquainted slightly.  “But while I was busy about their affairs, my own are at a standstill.  I write to you from Le Breton’s, with a mass of uncorrected proofs before me, and the printers crying out for them.  Still Grimm must be right, when he says that time is not a thing of which we are free to dispose at our own fancy; that we owe it first and foremost to our friends, our relations, our daily duties; and that in the lavish profusion of our time on people who are indifferent, there is nothing less than vice."[229] Yet in spite of Grimm’s most just remonstrance, the lavish profusion always went on as before.