There could have been no better education. It was the seed-time of all his energies, of his encyclopædic knowledge, of his manifold hold on life, of his extraordinary capacity. He found time in the midst of it to fall in love with and marry a pious, honest, and affectionate girl who happened to be living in a room near him, but who was so ignorant that she once scolded him for the amount (very far from excessive) that he took for his writings; she could not imagine that mere writing could be worth so much. That he was not always faithful to her scarcely needs to be told; that could, perhaps, have been otherwise at no period, least of all in eighteenth-century Paris. There is a deep pathos in the brief story of her long life and her devotion to the husband whose own energies were at the service of any human being, however poor or disreputable, who cared to climb up the stairs to his room. In the early days of poverty she would make little sacrifices to procure a cup of coffee or similar trifling luxury for her husband; and during his last illness, though she would have given her life, her daughter wrote, to make him a Christian, yet realizing how deeply rooted his convictions were, she shielded him from the efforts of the orthodox, and would not leave the parish _curé_ alone with him for an instant; at his death, the daughter adds, she “regretted the unhappiness he had caused her as another would have regretted happiness.” But we do not regret unhappiness; it is but another way of saying that life is complex and full of mitigation. In tenderness Diderot was never deficient; he was clearly a man of deep family affection; he seems to have inherited this from his father; so judicious a critic as Sainte-Beuve remarks that of the whole group of _philosophes_--not eminent, perhaps, in this respect--Diderot was the one who “most piously cultivated the relations of father, of son, of brother, and who best felt and practised family morality,” and we constantly come across traces of this “piety.” He tells us with great glee how, when he was once walking through his native Langres, a townsman came up to him and said, “Monsieur Diderot, you are a good man, but, if you think that you will ever be equal to your father, you are mistaken.” His eldest sister seems to have had something of his own downrightness and solidity; he loves her, he says, not because she is his sister, but because he “likes excellent things.” His only brother was an ecclesiastic and a bigot, but Diderot dwells on the inexhaustible charity by which this rather eccentric man had impoverished himself. At the latter part of his life Diderot’s letters are full of proof of his tender love for his daughter, of the care and thought he devoted to her education, of the gentleness with which he sought to open to her the mysteries of the world.