lie_, wrote one who for a while had sat at Diderot's feet;[57] and we
may dismiss this tale as the lees of Diderot's strong, careless,
sensualised understanding. He was afterwards the author of a work, La
Religieuse, on which the superficial critic may easily pour out the
vials of affected wrath. There, however, he was executing a profound
pathological study in a serious spirit. If the subject is horrible, we
have to blame the composition of human character, or the mischievousness
of a human institution. La Religieuse is no continuation of the vein of
defilement which began and ended with the story of 1748--a story which
is one among so many illustrations of Guizot's saying about the
eighteenth century, that it was the most tempting and seductive of all
centuries, for it promised full satisfaction at once to all the
greatnesses of humanity and to all its weaknesses. Hettner quotes a
passage from the minor writings of Niebuhr, in which the historian
compares Diderot with Petronius, as having both of them been honest and
well-intentioned men, who in shameless times were carried towards
cynicism by their deep contempt for the prevailing vice. "If Diderot
were alive now," says Niebuhr, "and if Petronius had only lived in the
fourth instead of the third century, then the painting of obscenity
would have been odious to them, and the inducement to it infinitely
smaller."[58] There is no trace in Diderot of this deep contempt for the
viciousness of his time. All that can be said is that he did not escape
it in his earlier years, in spite of the natural wholesomeness and
rectitude of his character.

It is worthy of remark that the dissoluteness of the middle portion of
the century was not associated with the cynical and contemptuous view
about women that usually goes with relaxed morality. There was a more or
less distinct consciousness of a truth which has ever since grown into
clearer prominence with the advance of thought since the Revolution. It