He hastened out of doors and walked about all day visiting such public sights as were open to the penniless.

When he returned to his garret at night, his landlady found him in a swoon, and with the compassion of a good soul she forced him to share her supper.

"That day," Diderot used to tell his children in later years, "I promised myself that if ever happier times should come, and ever I should have anything, I would never refuse help to any living creature, nor ever condemn him to the misery of such a day as that."[6] And the real interest of the story lies in the fact that no oath was ever more faithfully kept.

There is no greater test of the essential richness of a man's nature than that this squalid adversity, not of the sentimental introspective kind but hard and grinding, and not even kept in countenance by respectability, fails to make him a savage or a miser or a misanthrope.
Diderot had his bitter moments.

He knew the gloom and despondency that have their inevitable hour in every solitary and unordered life.