His father was one of the bravest, most upright, most patient, most sensible of men.  Diderot never ceased to regret that the old man’s portrait had not been taken with his apron on, his spectacles pushed up, and a hand on the grinder’s wheel.  After his death, none of his neighbours could speak of him to his son without tears in their eyes.  Diderot, wild and irregular as were his earlier days, had always a true affection for his father.  “One of the sweetest moments of my life,” he once said, “was more than thirty years ago, and I remember it as if it were yesterday, when my father saw me coming home from school, my arms laden with the prizes I had carried off, and my shoulders burdened with the wreaths they had given me, which were too big for my brow and had slipped over my head.  As soon as he caught sight of me some way off, he threw down his work, hurried to the door to meet me, and fell a-weeping.  It is a fine sight—­a grave and sterling man melted to tears."[1] Of his mother we know less.  He had a sister, who seems to have possessed the rough material of his own qualities.  He describes her as “lively, active, cheerful, decided, prompt to take offence, slow to come round again, without much care for present or future, never willing to be imposed on by people or circumstance; free in her ways, still more free in her talk; she is a sort of Diogenes in petticoats....  She is the most original and the most strongly-marked creature I know; she is goodness itself, but with a peculiar physiognomy."[2] His only brother showed some of the same native stuff, but of thinner and sourer quality.  He became an abbe and a saint, peevish, umbrageous, and as excessively devout as his more famous brother was excessively the opposite.  “He would have been a good friend and a good brother,” wrote Diderot, “if religion had not bidden him trample under foot such poor weaknesses as these.  He is a good Christian, who proves to me every minute of the day how much better it would be to be a good man.  He shows that what they call evangelical perfection is only the mischievous art of stifling nature, which would most likely have spoken as lustily in him as in me."[3]

Diderot, like so many others of the eighteenth-century reformers, was a pupil of the Jesuits.  An ardent, impetuous, over-genial temperament was the cause of frequent irregularities in conduct.  But his quick and active understanding overcame all obstacles.  His teachers, ever wisely on the alert for superior capacity, hoped to enlist his talents in the Order.  Either they or he planned his escape from home, but his father got to hear of it.  “My grandfather,” says Diderot’s daughter, “kept the profoundest silence, but as he went off to bed took with him the keys of the yard door.”  When he heard his son going downstairs, he presented himself before him, and asked whither he was bound at twelve o’clock at night.  “To Paris,” replied the youth, “where I am to join the Jesuits.”  “That will not be to-night; but your wishes shall