The Empress, the Wit and the Disappointed

When I first went to university, it was to study Maths and Physics. It didn’t work out. I spent a rather purgatorial time immersed in the politics of the far left – all about ‘having faith in the working class’ which always left me a little uneasy, as I felt the left ought to be about evidence not faith – and even became president of my college students’ union, but at the end of the process I had no degree.

This struck me as annoying, so I immediately signed up to study something completely different. French. That gave my mother a wonderful told-you-so moment: she pointed out that I had always been temperamentally far more suited to the humanities than the sciences. And she was right.

Fortune favours the bold. Sometimes, I find it favours the downright impertinent. At the end of my first year of French studies, I let my professor know that I wanted to do a PhD.

‘Come and see me at the beginning of your fourth year,’ he sagely told me. 

After all, I had a failed degree behind me, and I certainly had something to prove before I could be considered for postgraduate studies. Like graduating, for instance.

Well, I stuck it out. At the beginning of my fourth year, a message trickled through to me that Professor William Barber would like to see me. I made an appointment and dropped in for a chat.

It seemed that he was now open to the idea of my doing a PhD. I was delighted. Why, I’d even chosen the extraordinary man I wanted to study. Denis Diderot, the son of a craftsman, had emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the leading figures of the French enlightenment. He was the prime mover of the Encyclopédie: at a time when the belief was that driving knowledge forward was the most important endeavour of mankind, what could be more valuable than to bring all available knowledge together in one easily accessible place – the first Encyclopaedia ever?

Denis Diderot: an extraordinary brain and a delightful wit

But what appealed to me most about Diderot was his extraordinary wit. If you don’t know his Jacques the Fatalist, you should try to find it and read it: it’s rich in lessons about tolerance and decency, and is also one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read.

William Barber, my Professor, invited me to sit down.

‘Subject to your getting a sufficiently good degree, I’d be happy to supervise you doing a PhD,’ he told me.

I was delighted.

‘I’d like you to work on Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis.’

I was disappointed.

Maupertuis was someone I’d heard of, but only because he appeared in two footnotes of a work of Diderot’s. It was a bit of a come down. And yet – William was right. Maupertuis was a scientist as well as a philosopher. My failed studies of science had at least equipped me with enough knowledge to understand his work.

‘Of course,’ William had assured me, ‘you don’t have to choose Maupertuis. But if you want me to supervise you, that’s who I’d like you to work on.’

Since I did want to work with William, I accepted his suggestion. For the next ten years, Maupertuis would dominate my life, as I wrote his Intellectual Biography. He may have been obscure and I may have done little to shine much light on his life, but I enjoyed what I did. There’s also a little pride in having been, however briefly, the world’s leading authority on Maupertuis, which I never would have been on Diderot. That’s big fish in a small pond thinking, I know, but hey, that’s not without its satisfaction.

So, I have no complaints about William’s decision.

On the other hand, I do still sometimes regret not having worked on Diderot. He was so much more attractive a character than Maupertuis. If nothing else, he didn’t take himself half so seriously - Maupertuis had what was no doubt to his mind an accurate estimate, to everyone else a wildly overblown one, of what was due to him.

So it was a pleasure to come across an anecdote about Diderot I was unaware of while reading a biography of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. Well, I say reading, but in reality I was listening to it: these days I often find it easier to listen to books than read them. 

Catherine was a great fan of Diderot’s, and even had him come to Russia as a guest for several months.

Diderot did outstanding work but it wasn’t well paid. He was never wealthy. He was devoted to his daughter, the only child he and his wife had after a series of miscarriages. When the daughter reached adulthood, he was anxious to raise a dowry for her. With little material wealth, he decided that all he could do was sell his library. He went looking for 15,000 French pounds (yes, the pound was a French currency too at one time) for it.

Catherine decided to offer him 16,000. But then she attached a condition to the sale. On the grounds that it was wrong to separate a scholar from his books, she insisted that he should keep them for her during his lifetime.

In effect, she had made him a librarian of hers. So she decided to pay him 1000 pounds a year to play that role. That worked fine in the first year, but his pay failed to show up in the second. Catherine, much embarrassed, made up for the oversight, by sending him fifty thousand pounds.

As she told him, that was fifty years’ salary, paid in advance.

Ah, yes. He was a special man, our Diderot. And, to be fair, Catherine was a pretty remarkable woman too.

Catherine the Great
As keen a fan of Diderot as I am. But with the means to prove it