ut liberty, served by twenty domestics, and
cleaning my own shoes every morning, overloaded with gloomy indigestion,
and incessantly sighing for my homely porringer.... Consider how much
money an hour of the life and the time of a man is worth; compare the
kindnesses of Madame d'Epinay with the sacrifice of my native country
and two years of serfdom; and then tell me whether the obligation is
greater on her side or mine." He then urges with a torrent of impetuous
eloquence the thoroughly sound reasons why it was unfair and absurd for
him, a beggar and an invalid, to make the journey with Madame d'Epinay,
rich and surrounded by attendants. He is particularly splenetic that the
philosopher Diderot, sitting in his own room before a good fire and
wrapped in a well-lined dressing-gown, should insist on his doing his
five and twenty leagues a day on foot, through the mud in winter.[310]

The whole letter shows, as so many incidents in his later life showed,
how difficult it was to do Rousseau a kindness with impunity, and how
little such friends as Madame d'Epinay possessed the art of soothing
this unfortunate nature. They fretted him by not leaving him
sufficiently free to follow his own changing moods, while he in turn
lost all self-control, and yielded in hours of bodily torment to angry
and resentful fancies. But let us hasten to an end. Grimm replied to his
eloquent manifesto somewhat drily, to the effect that he would think the
matter over, and that meanwhile Rousseau had best keep quiet in his
hermitage. Rousseau burning with excitement at once conceived a thousand
suspicions, wholly unable to understand that a cold and reserved German
might choose to deliberate at length, and finally give an answer with
brevity. "After centuries of expectation in the cruel uncertainty in
which this barbarous man had plunged me"--that is after eight or ten
days, the answer came, apparently not without a second direct
application for one.[311] It was short and extremely pointed, not
complaining that Rousseau had refused to accompany Madame d'Epinay but
protesting against the horrible tone of the apology which he had sent to
him for not accompanying her. "It has made me quiver with indignation;
so odious are the principles it contains, so full is it of blackness and
duplicity. You venture to talk to me of your slavery, to me who for more
than two years have been the daily witness of all the marks of the
tenderest and most generous friends