Feeble governments are ill served even by their worthiest servants; the severities ordered against the _Encyclopaedia_ did not stop its publication; D’Alembert, however, weary of the struggle, had ceased to take part in the editorship. Naturally cool and moderate, when it was nothing to do with Mdlle. de Lespinasse, the great affection of his life, the illustrious geometer was content with a little. “Twelve hundred livres a year are enough for me,” he wrote to the Great Frederick who was pressing him to settle in his dominions. “I will not go and reap the succession to Maupertuis during his lifetime. I am overlooked by government, just as so many others by Providence; persecuted as much as anybody can be, if some day I have to fly my country, I will simply ask Frederick’s permission to go and die in his dominions, free and poor.”
Frederick II. gave D’Alembert a pension; it had but lately been Louis XIV. who thus lavished kindnesses on foreign scholars: he made an offer to the Encyclopaedists to go and finish their vast undertaking at Berlin. Catherine II. made the same offers, asking D’Alembert, besides, to take charge of the education of her son. “I know your honesty too well,” she wrote, “to attribute your refusals to vanity; I know that the cause is merely love of repose in order to cultivate literature and friendship. But what is to prevent your coming with all your friends? I promise you and them too all the comforts and every facility that may depend upon me; and perchance you will find more freedom and repose than you have at home. You do not yield to the entreaties of the King of Prussia, and to the gratitude you owe him, it is true, but then he has no son. I confess that I have my son’s education so much at heart, and that you are so necessary to me, that perhaps I press you too much. Pardon my indiscretion for the reason’s sake, and rest assured that it is esteem which has made me so selfish.”
D’Alembert declined the education of the hereditary Grand Duke, just as he had declined the presidency of the Academy at Berlin; an infidel and almost a materialist by the geometer’s rule, who knows no power but the laws of mathematics, he did not carry into anti-religious strife the bitterness of Voltaire, or the violence of Diderot. “Squelch the thing! you are always repeating to me,” he said to Voltaire on the 4th of May, 1762. “Ah! my good friend, let it go to rack and ruin of itself, it is hurrying thereto faster than you suppose.” More and more absorbed by pure science, which he never neglected save for the French Academy, whose perpetual secretary he had become, D’Alembert left to Diderot alone the care of continuing the _Encyclopaedia_. When he died, in 1783, at fifty-six years of age, the work had been finished nearly twenty years. In spite of the bad faith of publishers, who mutilated articles to render them acceptable, in spite of the condemnation of the clergy and the severities of the council, the last volumes of the _Encyclopaedia_ had appeared in 1765.