CHAPTER II.

YOUTH.


Denis Diderot was born at Langres in 1713, being thus a few months
younger than Rousseau (1712), nearly twenty years younger than Voltaire
(1694), nearly two years younger than Hume (1711), and eleven years
older than Kant (1724). His stock was ancient and of good repute. The
family had been engaged in the great local industry, the manufacture of
cutlery, for no less than two centuries in direct line. Diderot liked to
dwell on the historic prowess of his town, from the days of Julius
Cæsar and the old Lingones and Sabinus, down to the time of the Great
Monarch. With the taste of his generation for tracing moral qualities to
a climatic source, he explained a certain vivacity and mobility in the
people of his district by the great frequency and violence of its
atmospheric changes from hot to cold, from calm to storm, from rain to
sunshine. "Thus they learn from earliest infancy to turn to every wind.
The man of Langres has a head on his shoulders like the weathercock at
the top of the church spire. It is never fixed at one point; if it
returns to the point it has left, it is not to stop there. With an
amazing rapidity in their movements, their desires, their plans, their
fancies, their ideas, they are cumbrous in speech. For myself, I belong
to my country side." This was thoroughly true. He inherited all the
versatility of his compatriots, all their swift impetuosity, and
something of their want of dexterity in expression.

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