as to earn the name
of the musk-bear. He had that firmness and positivity which are not
always beautiful, but of which there is probably too little rather than
too much in the world, certainly in the France of his time, and of which
there was none at all in Rousseau. Above all things he hated
declamation. Apparently cold and reserved, he had sensibility enough
underneath the surface to go nearly out of his mind for love of a singer
at the opera who had a thrilling voice. As he did not believe in the
metaphysical doctrine about the freedom of the will, he accepted from
temperament the necessity which logic confirmed, of guiding the will by
constant pressure from without. "I am surprised," Madame d'Epinay said
to him, "that men should be so little indulgent to one another." "Nay,
the want of indulgence comes of our belief in freedom; it is because the
established morality is false and bad, inasmuch as it starts from this
false principle of liberty." "Ah, but the contrary principle, by making
one too indulgent, disturbs order." "It does nothing of the kind. Though
man does not wholly change, he is susceptible of modification; you can
improve him; hence it is not useless to punish him. The gardener does
not cut down a tree that grows crooked; he binds up the branch and keeps
it in shape; that is the effect of public punishment."[302] He applied
the same doctrine, as we shall see, to private punishment for social
crookedness.

It is easy to conceive how Rousseau's way of ordering himself would
gradually estrange so hard a head as this. What the one thought a
weighty moral reformation, struck the other as a vain desire to attract
attention. Rousseau on the other hand suspected Grimm of intriguing to
remove Theresa from him, as well as doing his best to alienate all his
friends. The attempted alienation of Theresa consisted in the secret
allowance to her mother and her by Grimm and Diderot of some sixteen
pounds a year.[303] Rousseau was unaware of this, but the whisperings
and goings and comings to which it gave rise, made him darkly uneasy.
That the suspicions in other respects were in a certain sense not wholly
unfounded, is shown by Grimm's own letters to Madame d'Epinay. He
disapproved of her installing Rousseau in the Hermitage, and warned her
in a very remarkable prophecy that solitude would darken his
imagination.[304] "He is a poor devil who torments himself, and does not
dare to confess the true subject of all his s