27. “I was informed that there was a Courtesan”: Ibid., 249–50.
28. what he described as “troublous times”: Rothschild, “Benoît de Maillet’s Marseilles Letters,” 117.
29. He offered his eighty-volume oriental library: Ibid., 136.
30. The French capital overwhelmed his imagination: Rothschild (1968), “Benoît de Maillet’s Letters to the Marquis de Caumont,” 332.
31. his five notebooks on Ethiopia and Coptic Christianity: Ibid., 334.
32. a bestselling heretical book written by two Dutchmen: On Ceremonies, see Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s “Religious Ceremonies of the World” (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press, 2010).
33. As Maillet lay dying in his house in Marseilles: Rothschild, “Benoît de Maillet’s Letters to the Marquis de Caumont,” 335.
34. “Even after centuries of petrification”: Letter cited in Benítez, “Benoît de Maillet et la littérature clandestine,” 153–54.
35. Telliamed at last found its way into print: On Mascrier’s changes, see Albert V. Carozzi’s edition of the text and study of the changes: Carozzi, Telliamed, 26–30.
36. “What a folly in this author to substitute Telliamed”: A. J. Dézallier d’Argenville, L’Histoire naturelle éclaircie dans une de ses parties principales.… (Paris: Debure l’aîné, 1757), 74.
37. “This consul Maillet was one of those charlatans”: Voltaire (J.F.M. Arouet) in Cabales (1772), in Oeuvres complètes, 70 vols. (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1875), 2:749.
38. “He was a Jesuit for a long time”: Darnton, “A Police Officer Sorts His Files,” 158; I have used Darnton’s translation of this passage but have translated the French titles into English.
39. “I am bound to read it”: Darwin to Isaac Anderson-Henry, May 22, 1867, Letter 5545, DCP.
7. THE HOTEL OF THE PHILOSOPHERS
1. They had come to interrogate the man: Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 55–56.
2. “In the presence of the said Diderot”: Paul Bonnefon, “Diderot prisonnier à Vincennes,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 6 (1899): 204–5.
3. “passed his early years in debauchery”: Ibid., 203.
4. He impounded the manuscript he found: See Wilson, Diderot, 63–64.
5. Letter on the Blind had been written by an atheist: There were deaths and births in these years. Denis and Nanette buried their six-week-old firstborn child, a daughter—Angélique—in 1744; Nanette gave birth to a son in 1746, but the boy was sickly; Diderot’s mother died in 1748. Diderot began a passionate affair with a younger and married woman—a writer, Madeleine d’Arsant de Puisieux—while Nanette was pregnant with the boy. On the emergence of Diderot’s atheism, see Aram Vartanian, “From Deist to Atheist: Diderot’s Philosophical Orientation, 1746–1749,” Diderot Studies 1 (1949): 31–51.
6. Paris savants began discussing Trembley’s polyp: See May Spanger, “Science, philosophie et littérature: Le polype de Diderot,” Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie 23 (1997): 89–107.
7. you had only to look at the complexity of design: Diderot makes this argument in Philosophical Thoughts (1746).
8. For Maupertuis, the polyp proved: The historian of evolution Ernst Mayr claims that Maupertuis was not an evolutionist and that he was more of a cosmologist than a biologist. Instead, Mayr argues, he was one of the pioneers of genetics. Maupertuis proposed a theory of pangenesis, arguing that particles from both mother and father were responsible for the characteristics of the child. Bowler credits him with conducting studies on heredity, with elucidating the natural origin of human races, and with the originating idea that forms of life may have changed with time. His philosophy was basically materialist. Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, 328–29.
9. no spiritual or supernatural presence in the universe: Vartanian, “From Deist to Atheist,” 31–51, and Crocker, “Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Transformism,” 117.
10. an acquaintance of Diderot’s and a man he much admired: Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History, edited by L. Pearce Williams, translated by Sarah Lucille Bonnefoi (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), 199.
11. Although Buffon believed that species were fixed: Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Buffon and the Problem of Species,” in Glass, Temkin, and Straus, Forerunners of Darwin, 68. Ernst Mayr claims that though Buffon was not an evolutionist, “it is nonetheless true that he was the father of evolutionism”: Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, 330.
12. Diderot also read Benoît de Maillet’s Telliamed: Vartanian, “From Deist to Atheist,” 59. Lester Crocker in “Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Transformism” argues that Maillet’s book had no apparent influence on Diderot’s Letter on the Blind.
13. his prison room in Vincennes: See Wilson, Diderot, 105.
14. Diderot had no books with him other than: P. N. Furbank, Diderot: A Critical Biography (London: Secker and Warburg, 1992), 153; Wilson, Diderot, 109.
15. “The detention of M. Diderot”: Bonnefon, “Diderot prisonnier à Vincennes,” 206.
16. he had become a celebrity: Wilson, Diderot, 117.
17. In the long entry “Animal” written for the first volume: Diderot, “Animal,” Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, 17 vols. (Paris: 1751–72), 1:469. See also Mary Efrosni Gregory, Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species (London: Routledge, 2008), 109–10.
18. The Jansenists declared it a work of heresy: See Roger, Buffon, 187–89. 139 “Sur la scène du monde, je m’avance masqué”: Otis Fellows, “Buffon’s Place in the Enlightenment,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 25 (1963): 613.
19. in 1751 the first volume appeared: Wilson, Diderot, 7.
20. There is no record of their first meeting: Wilson argues that d’Holbach and Diderot did not meet until around the autumn of 1751, but Kors argues for an earlier date. Discussing the events of 1751, Rousseau says d’Holbach was already “linked for a long time with Diderot”: Alan Charles Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 14.
21. an elegant and spacious six-story house: Baron d’Holbach bought the house on the rue Royale in 1759, but, as he was holding his salons there before that date, he may have rented it for the first few years. The address today is 8, rue des Moulins. See Wilson, Diderot, 175; André Billy, Diderot: Sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: A. Cresson, 1972), 314–15, quotes the undated bill of sale.
22. “Let us hasten,” he wrote, “to make philosophy popular”: Wilson, Diderot, 198.
23. Rousseau described him as a fervent recruiter of freethinkers: Rousseau writes: “A natural repugnancy prevented me a long time from answering his advances. One day, when he asked me the reason of my unwillingness, I told him he was too rich. He was, however, resolved to carry his point, and at length succeeded. My greatest misfortune proceeded from my being unable to resist the force of marked attention. I have ever had reason to repent of having yielded to it.” Confessions, Book 1.
24. He had a great deal to offer his guests: See Max Pearson Cushing, Baron d’Holbach: A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1914), 21. A catalog of the baron’s library was published by Deburé in Paris in 1789.
25. “[D’Holbach] pursued the incredulity of Diderot”: Dominique-Joseph Garat, Mémoires historiques sur la vie de M. Suard, sur les écrits, et sur le XVIIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1820), 1:208–9.
26. D’Holbach was devastated: For a description of d’Holbach’s grief, see Rousseau’s Confessions, Book 8.
27. the furious evangelism of his atheism: See Michael Bush, introduction to the 1999 Clinamen Press reprint of M. Mirabaud’s 1797 translation of d’Holbach’s System of Nature, ix. D’Holbach’s first child, Charles Marius, was born in August 1757; hi
s two daughters were born in 1758 and 1760, and a further son whose birth date has not survived for the historical record was born some time afterward. See T. C. Newland, “D’Holbach, Religion, and the ‘Encyclopédie,’ ” Modern Language Review 69, no. 3 (1974): 523–33.
28. an unrepentant and unwavering atheist: The Abbé Morellet, a twenty-five-year-old theology student in 1753 and a friend of Diderot’s, described him as having “had in mind the desire to gain proselytes, not precisely to atheism, but to philosophy and reason.… He defended them [his atheistic ideas] without acrimony, and without looking unfavourably upon those who did not share them.” Morellet also described various attempts by young curés to convert the now famously atheist Diderot and the theological wranglings that took place at the rue de l’Estrapade when they turned up to preach. Morellet, Mémoires, 1:29–30, 34–35.
29. he published a further attempt to answer those questions: See Wilson, Diderot, 194.
30. “May it not be,” he wrote, “that, just as an individual organism”: Cited in ibid., 194–95.
31. May it not be … If the faith had not taught us otherwise?: See Arthur O. Lovejoy, “Some Eighteenth-Century Evolutionists,” Popular Science Monthly 65 (1904): 238–51.
32. opaque, incomprehensible, and at best obscure: See Wilson, Diderot, 196–98.
33. “He who resolves to apply himself to the study of philosophy”: Cited in ibid., 198.
34. “in the middle of the persecution incited against philosophy”: Cited in Roger, Buffon, 338. On Buffon and transformism, see Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought, 330–37; Lovejoy, “Buffon and the Problem of Species”; and Mary Efrosni Gregory, Evolutionism in Eighteenth-Century French Thought (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 69–92.
35. “have you ever thought seriously about what living means?”: Diderot to Sophie Volland, October 15, 1759, Denis Diderot, Diderot’s Letters to Sophie Volland: A Selection, translated by Peter France (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 37–38. The English translation lists it as October 17, but the original French edition (edited by Ernest Babelon) gives it as October 15. Cited in Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie, 99.
36. life had become more dangerous within the d’Holbach circle: Cushing, Baron d’Holbach, 26.
37. “The pedlar, the pedlar’s wife, and the apprentice”: Letter to Sophie Volland, October 8, 1768, Diderot, Diderot’s Letters to Sophie Volland, 180–81.
38. “It is raining bombs in the house of the Lord”: Ibid., 189.
39. “So you can see me … surrounded by engravings”: Cited in Wilson, Diderot, 559.
40. “everything is bound up with everything else”: Ibid., 568; on the influences on Rêve, see Crocker, “Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Transformism,” 137–43.
41. Yes, he answered, man, “but not as he is”: Denis Diderot, Oeuvres complètes de Diderot, edited by Jules Assezat and Maurice Tourneux, 20 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1875), 4:94–96.
42. Laurence Sterne’s anarchic Tristram Shandy: He called Tristram Shandy “the craziest, wisest and gayest of all books.… This book that is so mad, so wise and so gay, is the Rabelais of the English.” Cited in Wilson, Diderot, 457.
43. “It is the height of extravagance”: Letter to Sophie Volland, August 31, 1769, Diderot, Diderot’s Letters to Sophie Volland, x.
44. “the whole is constantly changing”: Diderot, Rêve, 180–81.
45. “Let us assume a long succession of armless generations”: Ibid., 180.
46. “Stop thinking about individuals and answer me this”: Ibid., 181.
47. living webs of connectedness: Diderot’s vision of connectedness is essentially Rabelaisian.
48. “tout est en un flux perpetuel”: Buffon had used the idea of flux for the first time in volume 9 (1761) to describe a stream of events in nature: “Nature, I declare, is in a movement of continual flux [de flux continue]; but it is enough for man to seize it in the instant of his century, and to throw a few glances behind and ahead, in order to try to catch a glimpse of what it might have been, and what it could become in time”: “Des animaux communs aux des continents,” in Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749–67).
49. Diderot claimed later that he had indeed destroyed it: Jean Philibert Damiron, Mémoires sur Naigeon et accessoirement sur Sylvain Maréchal et Delalande (Paris: Durand, 1857), 409.
50. d’Holbach … set off his own incendiary device: Kors, D’Holbach’s Coterie, 235–43.
51. “[I have] acquired a taste for solitude”: Letter to Sophie Volland, November 28, 1770, Diderot, Diderot’s Letters to Sophie Volland, 206–7.
52. “a chaos, a great moral sickness”: Voltaire, Oeuvres, 66:394. 153 “I think that nothing has debased our century more”: Cushing, Baron d’Holbach, 58.
53. “I hardly ever go out”: Letter to Sophie Volland, July 22, 1773, Diderot, Diderot’s Letters to Sophie Volland, 209.
54. “My old age does not leave me the time”: Roger, Buffon, 432, and Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought, 336.
55. Buffon’s Epochs of Nature was immediately attacked: Jean Stengers, “Buffon et la Sorbonne,” in Roland Mortier and Hervé Hasquin, eds., Études sur le XVIIIe siècle (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1974), 113–24.
56. “The people need a religion”: Roger, Buffon, 423.
57. “When I become ill and feel my end approaching”: Quoted in Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon, Correspondance inédite de Buffon, edited by H. Nadault de Buffon, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1860), 2:615.
8. ERASMUS UNDERGROUND
1. a lead mine called Tray Cliff: Tray Cliff Cavern is now known as Treak Cliff Cavern. Erasmus Darwin described his cave visits in a letter to Josiah Wedgwood on July 2, 1767, cited in Desmond King-Hele, ed., The Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 44. See John Whitehurst, An Inquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth (London: Bent, 1778). Whitehurst’s biographer Maxwell Craven confirms that although An Inquiry was not published until 1778, a full sketch of its observations and conclusions was in circulation as early as 1763. It seems to have been finished by 1767 and was being circulated among members of the Lunar Society in the 1760s. Erasmus Darwin may well have read this early draft. He would certainly have heard Whitehurst recounting his theories. I am grateful to the historian of science Patricia Fara for a careful and insightful reading of this chapter.
2. the rare fluorite rock called Blue John: See Trevor B. Ford, Treak Cliff Cavern and the Story of Blue John Stone (Castleton: Harrison Taylor, 1992).
3. a temple of mysteries, the altar of the goddess Nature: For evidence of Erasmus Darwin’s neoclassical imagination in relation to caves, see the geological notes to his Temple of Nature. See also Irwin Primer, “Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature: Progress, Evolution, and the Eleusinian Mysteries,” Journal of the History of Ideas 25, no. 1 (1964): 58–76.
4. aristocratic collectors such as … Sir Ashton Lever: For Ashton Lever’s collection, see Richard Daniel Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Belknap Press, 1978), 30.
5. Others declared them to be the remains of the deluge: See John Woodward, for instance, in An Essay Toward a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies, Especially Minerals, etc. (1695), Brief Instructions for Making Observations in All Parts of the World (1696), and An Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Fossils of England, 2 vols. (1728–29).
6. But John Whitehurst had other ideas: Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, 1730–1810 (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), 150–51; Maxwell Craven, John Whitehurst of Derby: Clockmaker and Scientist, 1713–88 (Ashbourne: Mayfield, 1996).
7. “a rarity, the like whereof has not been observ’d before in this Island”: William Stukeley, “An Account of the Impression of the Almost Entire Skeleton of a Large Animal in a Very Hard Stone, Lately presented the Royal Society, from Nottinghamshire,” Philosophical Transactions 30, no. 360 (1719): 963–68.
8. a box of giant fossilized bones and tree trunks and rocks: Josiah Wedgwood described the fossils in a letter to Thomas Bentley, April 2, 1767; cited in Eliza Meteyard, The Life of Josiah Wedgwood, 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1865), 1:501.
9. “These various strata … seem from various circumstances”: Ibid., 500–502.
10. “I have lately travel’d two days into the bowels of the earth”: Erasmus Darwin to Josiah Wedgwood, July 2, 1767; cited in King-Hele, Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 44.
11. “I want to see you and Dr Small much if you will fix a Day”: Erasmus Darwin to Matthew Boulton, July 29, 1767; cited in King-Hele, Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 45.
12. “I do not mean to attack the Christian Religion”: Erasmus Darwin to Richard Gifford, September 4, and October 15, 1768; cited in King-Hele, Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 91–97.
13. an anonymous satirical poem entitled “Omnis e Conchis”: Cited in Desmond King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement (London: Giles de la Mare, 1999), 9.
14. “Don’t kill them all, leave me one”: Ibid., 92.
15. Seventeen-year-old Mary Parker: Mary Parker arrived on July 26, 1770; her first child, Susan, was born in May 1772 and her second child, Mary, in May 1774; see King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement, 106–7.
16. Erasmus’s two daughters continued to live with him: When his two daughters came of age he set up a school for them in Ashbourne and wrote a book on education for them.
17. The Scottish geologist James Hutton came to stay with Erasmus: King-Hele, Collected Letters of Erasmus Darwin, 153–54.
18. “What shall I send you in return for these?” Ibid., 137–38.
19. he was falling in love with a beautiful married woman: Erasmus met Elizabeth Pole for the first time (probably) as early as 1771 (King-Hele, Erasmus Darwin: A Life of Unequalled Achievement, 127) and began treating her children in 1775, possibly earlier. She lost one of her twin babies in 1774—it is probable that he attended the family during the child’s illness.
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