Diderot Senior kept his promise only in part. He sent his son to complete his education in Paris, where he attended not the Jesuit College Louis-le-Grand but the College d'Harcourt, founded by the Jansenists (followers of an austere religious school of thought whose tenets were similar in many ways to those of Calvinism), and later the University of Paris. Diderot's intention to obtain a doctorate in theology was never fulfilled. Instead, he studied mathematics, classical literature and foreign languages without a definite goal in mind, until his father, alarmed at the prospect of having an eternal
student on his hands, cut off all financial support and ordered the young man home. Diderot disobeyed, and for the next several years earned his living in Paris as a journalist and a teacher.
Diderot and d 'Alembert met when the former had just turned thirty. D'Alembert was four years younger but had already distinguished himself in the field of mathematics. He possessed (according to a contemporary account) a "luminous, profound and solid mind"9' that much appealed to Diderot. A foundling who had been abandoned as a baby on the steps of a Paris church, d'Alembert was someone with little concern for social prestige; he maintained that the motto of every man of letters should be "Liberty, Truth and Poverty," the latter achieved, in his case, with no great effort.
Some fifteen years before their meeting, in 1728, the Scottish scholar Ephraim Chambers had published a fairly comprehensive Cyclopedia (the first in the English language, and no relation to the present-day Chambers) that inspired various other such works, among them Dr. Johnson's Dictionary. Early in 1745, the Paris bookseller Andre-Frangois Le Breton, unable to secure the translation of the Cyclopedia into French, engaged the services first of d'Alembert and then of Diderot to edit a similar work but on a vaster scale. Arguing that the Cyclopedia was, to a large extent, a pilfering of a number of French texts, Diderot suggested that to translate the work back into what was effectively its original tongue would be a senseless exercise; better to collect new material and offer readers a comprehensive and up-to-date panorama of what the arts and sciences had produced in recent times.
In a game of self-reflecting mirrors, Diderot defined his grand twenty-eight-volume publication (seventeen volumes of text and eleven of illustrations) in an article titled "Encyclopedie" in that same Encyclopedie: "The goal of the Encyclopedie," he wrote, "is to assemble the knowledge scattered over the surface of the globe and to expose its general system to the men who come after us, so that the labours of centuries past do not prove useless to the centuries to come. . . . May the Encyclopedie become a sanctuary in which human knowledge is protected from time and from change."91 The notion of an encyclopedia as a sanctuary is appealing. In 1783, eleven years after the completion of Diderot's monumental project, the writer Guillaume Grivel imagined this sanctuary as the cornerstone of a future society which, like the one imagined by the Japanese empress, must rebuild itself from its ruins. In the first volume of a novel recounting the adventures of a group of new Crusoes shipwrecked on an uncharted island, Grivel describes how the new colonists rescue several volumes of Diderot's Encyclopedie from their wreck and, on the basis of its learned articles, attempt to reconstruct the society they have been forced to leave behind.92
The Encyclopedie was also conceived as an archival and interactive library. In the prospectus that announced the vast project, Diderot declared that it would "serve all the purposes of a library for a professional man on any subject apart from his own." Defending his decision to arrange this comprehensive "library" in alphabetical order, Diderot explained that it would not destroy liaison between subjects nor violate "the tree of knowledge" but, on the contrary, the system would be made visible in "the disposition of the materials within each article and by the exactitude and frequency of cross-references."93 What he was proposing by these cross-references was to present the diverse articles not as independent texts, each occupying the exclusive field of a given subject, but as a crossweaving of subjects that would in many cases "occupy the same shelf." Thus he imagined his "library" as a room in which different "books" were placed in a single space. A discussion of Calvinism, which, on its own, would have aroused the censorious eye of the Church, is included in an entry on geneva; a critical assessment of the Church's sacraments is implied in a cross-reference such as "anthropophagy: see eucharist, communion, altar, etc." Sometimes he quoted a foreign character (a Chinese savant, a Turk) to voice criticism of religious dogma, simultaneously including the description of other cultures or philosophies; sometimes he took a word in its broadest sense, so that, for example, under AdORATiON he was able to discuss both the worship of God and that of a beautiful woman, daringly associating one with the other.
The first volume of the Encyclopedic sold quickly, in spite of its high price. By the time the second volume appeared, in 1752, the Jesuits were so enraged by what was in their eyes obvious blasphemy that they urged Louis xv to issue a royal ban. Since one of Louis's daughters had fallen deathly ill, his confessor convinced him that "God might save her if the King, as a token of piety, would suppress the Encyclopedie."94 Louis obeyed, but the Encyclopedie resumed publication a year later, thanks to the efforts of the Royal Director of
Publications (a sort of minister of Communications), the enlightened Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who had gone as far as suggesting to Diderot that he hide the manuscripts of future volumes in Malesherbes's own house until the conflict blew over.
Though Diderot does not explicitly mention space in his statement of purpose, the notion of knowledge occupying a physical place is implicit in his words. To assemble scattered knowledge is, for Diderot, to ground that knowledge on a page, and the page between the covers of a book, and the book on the shelves of a library. An encyclopedia can be, among many other things, a space- saving device, since a library endlessly divided into books requires an ever-expanding home that can take on nightmare dimensions. Legend has it that Sarah Winchester, widow of the famous gun-maker whose rifle "won the West," was told by a medium that as long as construction on her California house continued, the ghosts of the Indians killed by her husband's rifle would be kept at bay. The house grew and grew, like a thing in a dream, until its hundred and sixty rooms covered six acres of ground; this monster is still visible in the heart of Silicon Valley.95 Every library suffers from this urge to increase in order to pacify our literary ghosts, "the ancient dead who rise from books to speak to us" (as Seneca described them in the first century a.d.),96 to branch out and bloat until, on some inconceivable last day, it will include every volume ever written on every subject imaginable.