He kept his ears tightly stopped, so long as the action and play went well with the words as he remembered them, and he only listened when some discord in gesture made him suppose that he had lost his place.

The people around him were more and more amazed as they saw him, notwithstanding his stopped ears, shed copious tears in the pathetic passages.

"They could not refrain from hazarding questions, to which I answered coldly, 'that everybody had his own way of listening, and that my way was to stop my ears, so as to understand better'-- laughing within myself at the talk to which my oddity gave rise, and still more so at the simplicity of some young people who also put their fingers into their ears to hear after my fashion, and were quite astonished that the plan did not succeed."[260] This was an odd and whimsical way of acting on a conviction which lay deep in Diderot's mind, namely, that language is a very poor, misleading, and utterly inadequate instrument for representing what it professes, and what we stupidly suppose it, to represent.

Rousseau had expressed the same kind of feeling when he said that definitions might be good things, if only we did not employ words in making them.
A curious circumstance is worth mentioning in connection with the Three Dialogues appended to _The Natural Son_.

Diderot informs his readers that the incidents of _The Natural Son_ had actually occurred in real life, and that he knew the personages.