CHAPTER II.
YOUTH.
Denis Diderot was born at Langres in 1713, being thus a few months younger than Rousseau (1712), nearly twenty years younger than Voltaire (1694), nearly two years younger than Hume (1711), and eleven years older than Kant (1724).

His stock was ancient and of good repute.

The family had been engaged in the great local industry, the manufacture of cutlery, for no less than two centuries in direct line.

Diderot liked to dwell on the historic prowess of his town, from the days of Julius Caesar and the old Lingones and Sabinus, down to the time of the Great Monarch.

With the taste of his generation for tracing moral qualities to a climatic source, he explained a certain vivacity and mobility in the people of his district by the great frequency and violence of its atmospheric changes from hot to cold, from calm to storm, from rain to sunshine.