Darwin's Ghosts

by Rebecca Stott

  That copy of Telliamed, printed in London in 1750, ordered by Anderson-Henry, and posted from Edinburgh to Kent in 1867, disappeared deep into a box stored in the family attic at Down House; it was not retrieved until 1993. The archivist noted that in Maillet’s yellowed pages, Darwin had placed a single line in the margin to mark up paragraphs of special interest to him: passages on fish transforming into birds, sea men, ape-human breeding, and finally Telliamed’s statement that he was absolutely sure that all species might have come into being through adaptation and transmigration without any divine intervention. Darwin also wrote the words “Men with Tails” beside the passage in Telliamed that Owen had used to ridicule him in that terrible review. Understandably, the book failed to find a place on Darwin’s study bookshelves; it was relegated to the box in the attic instead.

  *Leghorn is the English name for Livorno’s old form, Legorno.

  *Voltaire formed his pen name from an anagram of his original name in 1718. Given that a manuscript of Telliamed was circulating in Paris at this time, the two anagrammed names might have a connection.

  *Maillet held this position for four years, from 1715 to 1719; for the first two years he was based in Leghorn, for the second two in Marseilles.

  7

  The Hotel of the Philosophers

  PARIS, 1749

  At 7:30 on the morning of July 24, 1749, two police agents carrying search warrants climbed the stairs above the upholsterer’s shop at 3, rue de l’Estrapade in the Latin Quarter of Paris.* They had come to interrogate the man living with his wife and young son on the third floor. As a writer of books deemed contrary to religion, the state, and the king, the suspect, Denis Diderot, had been under police surveillance for six months. His last book, Philosophical Thoughts (Pensées philosophiques), which placed Catholicism on the same level as all other religions and implied that none had any exclusive claim to truth, had been banned by the Parliament of Paris and burned in the public marketplace. But Denis Diderot was well connected and had influence in high places. The inspector of books, Joseph d’Hémery, and his men would have to keep their wits about them.

  To the police agents’ frustration, when they reached the third floor, the man with large dark eyes and flowing hair who appeared at the doorway wearing only his dressing gown seemed to have been expecting them. The rooms had been tidied since their last visit. On the family dining table, books and handwritten papers had been arranged neatly; natural history books were to be seen everywhere, but there was not a single illegal or banned book. They found a microscope and twenty-one cartons containing hundreds of manuscripts stacked in piles on the floor. He was editing an important work, Diderot told them by way of explanation, his eyes flashing provocatively, a book in many volumes that would bring knowledge to the people and dispel superstition and ignorance. But Joseph d’Hémery was not interested in the Encyclopedia (Encyclopédie). He was looking for proof that Diderot had, despite police warnings, published a still more dangerous book than his last, an anonymous work called Letter on the Blind (Lettre sur les aveugles) now circulating in the cafés and salons of Paris. They found two copies of that manuscript on the desk. “In the presence of the said Diderot,” Commissioner Rochebrune recorded in the police files, “we continued our search in the other rooms, and having opened the wardrobes and chests of drawers, found no papers therein.” Finally d’Hémery produced his arrest papers, the notorious lettres de cachet, and explained to Diderot’s furious wife, Nanette, as they bundled her husband into a carriage, that Monsieur Diderot was under arrest. No, he was not going to the Bastille. The Bastille was full. Madame Diderot would find him at Vincennes, a medieval fortress and former royal residence six miles east of Paris.

  Denis Diderot, aged around fifty (an engraving from a painting, ca. 1767).

  Getty Images

  Denis Diderot was only one of hundreds of Parisian subversives in d’Hémery’s files that year. It was 1749; there was a dangerous spirit brimming among the savants of the city. The citizens of Paris were hungry and the king and his government ministers unpopular. Louis XV had won the War of the Austrian Succession but had thrown the victory away by negotiating a weak treaty. Now he had imposed a punishing new tax on his people to pay for a war that had achieved very little. Government ministers, fearing revolution, had appointed hundreds of new police agents and charged them to round up and imprison anyone who threatened the status quo by writing, publishing, translating, or selling subversive propaganda or satirical poetry, ballads, or books. Across Paris, poets, intellectuals, actors, and booksellers passed illegal manuscripts or antiroyalist propaganda from one to another, in garrets and cafés and public gardens. To control this rising tide of sedition, d’Hémery and his agents opened new files every day, gathered lists, followed paper trails, recorded overheard conversations, interviewed witnesses, friends, priests, and concierges, recruited more spies, and interrogated suspects, and back in their offices they studied the books and manuscripts they had impounded to prepare heresy and sedition cases for the courts.

  In Paris in 1749, everyone was watching everyone else.

  Diderot was not only clever, d’Hémery reflected a few days later as he leafed through the philosopher’s file while preparing to take a carriage ride out to Vincennes to interrogate him, he was also potentially one of the most dangerous men in Paris, a silver-tongued and persistently impious man, a provocateur.

  The book burning in 1746 did not stop “the Boy,” as d’Hémery called Diderot. It added luster to his reputation among the intellectuals of Paris and increased his book’s sales on the black market. Two years later a parish priest reported Diderot to the authorities, claiming that he was writing yet another subversive book. The priest’s report, filed away by the police, was uncompromising: “M. Diderot is a young man who passed his early years in debauchery,” it began.

  The remarks that Diderot sometimes makes in the household clearly prove that he is a deist, if not worse. He utters blasphemies against Jesus Christ and the Holy Virgin that I would not venture to put into writing.… It is true that I have never spoken to this young man and do not know him personally, but I am told that he had a great deal of wit and that his conversation is very amusing. In one of his conversations he admitted to being the author of one of the two works condemned by the Parlement and burned about two years ago. I have been informed that for more than a year he has been working on another book still more dangerous to religion.

  In January 1749, in the hope of locating a network of philosophes as well as getting hold of this book that was “still more dangerous,” d’Hémery had found time to interrogate Diderot himself. He impounded the manuscript he found in the philosopher’s atelier, a book called The Skeptic’s Walk (Promenade du sceptique) that made a number of disparaging remarks about the Church. Because it was veiled in allegory and written as a meandering conversation, it was almost impossible to pin the author down to particular claims. Diderot, in his dressing gown in midwinter, had been a charming, though frustratingly evasive, suspect; d’Hémery had found himself quickly ensnared in the philosopher’s headache-inducing wit and intellectual parrying, his words ink clouds as opaque as the book under investigation. He had, to d’Hémery’s relief, finally responded to threats of prison by promising not to publish the book.

  Now here they were again six months later. Different neighborhood, different spy network, same dangerous philosopher.

  In his headquarters, the pages of Letter on the Blind laid out in front of him, Joseph d’Hémery found the new work as impossible to pin down as The Skeptic’s Walk. Ostensibly a series of philosophical speculations based on an eye operation that Professor Réaumur had performed on a blind girl, it was all twists and turns of logic and rhetoric, a speculation on the psychology of the blind, on the relativity of morality and of ideas about God, and on the question of how anyone could know anything beyond the tangible physical world. The priest had been right. Despite its tricks and ink clouds, there was no doubting that Letter on the
Blind was a more dangerous book than the last. Philosophical Thoughts had been the work of a deist, but Letter on the Blind had been written by an atheist. And there was a new scientific turn in the writing, too, d’Hémery noted. Hidden away among all the philosophical panache and fireworks, among all the conversational speculation on blindness and sight, d’Hémery found a series of extraordinary propositions about the earth and nature. The speaker—whoever he was supposed to be—claimed that all higher animals including man had transformed since the birth of time from “a multitude of shapeless things … some with no stomach and others no intestines”; that all these monsters had died out gradually, leaving only organisms that “could exist by themselves and perpetuate themselves” and that the world was “subject to revolutions that all prove a continual tendency to destruction”; that through unimaginable stretches of time “a rapid succession of beings … follow each other, thrust one another aside and disappear,” giving life on the earth only an appearance of “a passing symmetry, a momentary order.” There was no God here. There was no Maker. According to Diderot, species had not been made at the birth of time by a benevolent God with Man’s best interests at heart; they had mutated from shapeless monsters across millions of years.

  D’Hémery respected cleverness; he admired new ideas. He was well read. But he had people to report to, and his job was to say one way or another whether the men and women in his files were heretics. He had to assess degrees of dangerous thinking. And with Diderot there was no question. But he was also one of the cleverest heretics in Paris, probably in the world. You had to admire him—his imagination, his vision. But a heretic was a heretic, and it was d’Hémery’s job to bring them in.

  And what of the Boy? How had this confident, dangerous atheism come into being in the mind of the young philosopher of the rue de l’Estrapade? After all, Diderot had a wife and a young child. Was he really prepared to risk his own safety and theirs to articulate a vision of a godless earth? To what end?

  Growing up in Langres, a stifling and conservative town in northeastern France, Diderot had been under the constant surveillance of his father, of his pious and supercilious elder brother who was training for the priesthood, and of the local priests. Everything in Langres revolved around the church. All truth was their truth. There was no questioning them. So young Diderot had run with the pack. He had done what was expected of him in the hope of one day getting away. He was inducted into minor orders at the age of thirteen and experienced a period of intense religious belief under the influence of his Jesuit teachers, but when he turned sixteen he moved to Paris to attend school and to learn to think for himself.

  Paris, with its freethinkers, libraries, and cafés, its philosophical and metaphysical conversations, worked its spell on him. Living on very little money, he put together a substantial library scavenged from booksellers in the Marais, attended lectures and the theater when he could afford to, read voraciously, and worked as a tutor giving mathematics lessons to private students. For a brief period he considered first becoming a priest and then practicing law; he even wrote the occasional sermon for money. But most of his time he devoured books and conversation. He married a beautiful young seamstress and settled down to a life dedicated to learning. He could, he told his father, make a living in Paris.

  Then in the early 1740s the Paris savants began discussing Trembley’s polyp, the pond creature that could regenerate itself. Until the mid-1740s, Diderot, then in his early thirties, would argue at these gatherings in salons, garrets, and coffeehouses that though you could not prove definitively that God existed, you had only to look at the complexity of design in a butterfly’s wing or in the eye of a mite to see a designer at work. But the polyp took him in a new philosophical direction. He bought natural history books or borrowed them from friends or from the Royal Library or from the library of the Parisian botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi. He reread Lucretius, Empedocles, and Epicurus, trying to understand their answers to these same questions about life. He read works by the Dutch theologian and physicist Bernard Nieuwentijt, by the French physicist and clergyman Jean-Antoine Nollet, and by the English clergyman and natural philosopher William Derham, and John Needham’s book on the microscope. He read illegal books, too, books that pursued metaphysical questions through the natural sciences,* and that asked questions that were contrary to the teachings of the Church.

  First there was the dangerous Vénus physique, part erotica, part natural philosophical treatise, written by the French mathematician and philosopher Pierre-Louis Maupertuis and published in 1745. For Maupertuis, the polyp proved that nature had self-organizing and self-patterning (but blind) powers based on motion and gravitational attraction. Then there was the physician-philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, who came to the most radical conclusions of all in his Man Machine (L’Homme machine) in 1747, arguing not only that all matter contains within itself the power that produces its own activity and organization but that there was no spiritual or supernatural presence in the universe. All talk of souls and spirits could now be swept away, La Mettrie declared.

  By the middle of the 1740s, Diderot’s curiosity about the natural sciences had gained a political edge. Everywhere in the coffeehouses and salons of Paris, young men talked of the corruption of the Church, condemning Catholicism’s recent history of torture and intimidation, the Edict of Nantes, censorship. They said that the priests kept the people deliberately in the dark to control them, that Christianity was no more than a set of myths and rituals of no greater truth or validity than any other world religion. This was heady talk, subversive and liberating. For Diderot and for many of his new friends, politics, the natural sciences, metaphysics, and theology were all intimately connected. Their questions multiplied, multiheaded, like the polyp itself. They could not be contained, branching and forking into anatomy, philosophy, microscopy, physics, mineralogy, mathematics, and optics. Diderot began to hatch a plan for an encyclopedia, an attempt to bring knowledge directly to the people, bypassing the priests, pollinated in this world of the salons and the freethinking of the cafés. The light—the new knowledge—was not in the pulpit, he declared to anyone who would listen; instead, the answers were in the shaft of a microscope, in experiment, in what you could touch, in the branches of knowledge.

  For a philosopher fascinated by questions derived from the natural sciences, there was no shortage of new books to read or people to debate with. In 1749 an acquaintance of Diderot’s and a man he much admired, Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon and eminent director of the Jardin du Roi, the botanical garden at the heart of Paris, had just brought out the first volumes of his ambitiously comprehensive history of animal species. He had set out to map, define, and describe the entire animal world, not as a tedious, myopic work of taxonomy or classification, but as a kind of literary encyclopedia of natural history and as an attempt to understand the connections between all species. Although Buffon believed that species were fixed and that there was no evidence to support the transformist ideas of Maillet or the materialism of Maupertuis or La Mettrie, he kept circling around transformist theories, returning to them, rebutting them, redefining them, opening them up and closing them down. But even in 1749 he was describing the “imperceptible shadings” he saw between one species and another and was prepared to speculate that all species had been made from a common plan or mold. Diderot also read Benoît de Maillet’s Telliamed and his epic description of men with tails and time stretching back millions of years. Polyps, men with tails, eons of time, chance, a cosmos in a continual state of growth and decay, flux and reflux: all of these ideas were taking shape in his mind and provoking yet more questions.

  A new set of questions now vexed the philosopher, waking him in the night and usurping the theological questions that had fascinated him as a boy: How did life begin? What nature of a being is man? Where is the soul if an animal can regenerate itself from any fragment of its own body? What is the relationship between man and other animals? Are species fixed
or variable? How does inert matter come into life? How long has it all taken? For forty years Diderot would go on searching out answers to this same set of metaphysical questions derived from the natural sciences in every library, salon, conversation, and book in France. He was still deep in those questions when he wrote Letter on the Blind, and when he was arrested and taken by carriage to the prison of Vincennes.

  On July 31, 1749, d’Hémery and his superior, Nicolas-René Berryer, the lieutenant general of the police, interrogated the still defiant philosopher of the rue de l’Estrapade. He refused to admit to anything. Diderot even declared under oath that he had not written Letter on the Blind or any of the other heretical books that had been attributed to him. The following day, Berryer called Diderot’s publisher, Laurent Durand, in for questioning. Durand, probably under duress, confirmed under oath that Diderot was the author of Philosophical Thoughts, Letter on the Blind, and the other books under investigation. Instead of acting, Berryer decided to bide his time. The philosopher was suffering. He was desperate. It was only a matter of time before he would confess.

  Although his prison room in Vincennes was large and airy enough, Diderot had no books with him other than the first three volumes of Buffon’s Natural History, which he studied intensively, taking copious notes, and copies of Milton and Plato; he had no candles, no contact with his philosopher friends, no Rousseau or d’Alembert to talk with. His wife, whose mother had died that year, wrote distraught letters complaining that she was struggling alone with their small son, François, who was sickly, and that the publishers had canceled the stipend they paid him for his editorial work. Durand, who had invested so much money in the Encyclopedia project, complained to Diderot about being harassed; the police were watching him; he was losing money. Now he had to issue an explanation to the subscribers. “The detention of M. Diderot, the only man of letters we know of capable of so vast an enterprise and who alone possesses the key of this whole operation,” he warned, “can bring about our ruin.” The police agents threatened to tell Nanette about Diderot’s mistress if he did not cooperate with their investigations. After another week of sleepless nights, anxiety, and nightmares, Diderot confessed to everything.