The young man worked incessantly, but not a law-book did he open.

"What do you mean to be, pray ?" the lawyer asked him one day; "do you think of being an attorney ?" "No." "A barrister ?" "No." "A doctor ?" "No more than the rest." "What then ?" "Nothing at all.

I like study, I am very happy, very contented, I ask no more." Diderot's father stopped the allowance he had been making his son, trusting thus to force him to choose a profession.

But the young man gave lessons for a livelihood.
"I know a pretty good number of things," he wrote towards the end of his life, "but there is scarcely a man who doesn't know his own thing better than I do.

This mediocrity in every sort is the consequence of insatiable curiosity and of means so small, that they never permitted me to devote myself to one single branch of human knowledge.