othing more to say to you as
to yours." This was the end. Rousseau returned for a moment from ignoble
petulance to dignity and self-respect. He wrote to her that if it is a
misfortune to make a mistake in the choice of friends, it is one not
less cruel to awake from so sweet an error, and two days before he
wrote, he left her house. He found a cottage at Montmorency, and
thither, nerved with fury, through snow and ice he carried his scanty
household goods (Dec. 15, 1757).[316]

We have a picture of him in this fatal month. Diderot went to pay him a
visit (Dec. 5). Rousseau was alone at the bottom of his garden. As soon
as he saw Diderot, he cried in a voice of thunder and with his eyes all
aflame: "What have you come here for?" "I want to know whether you are
mad or malicious." "You have known me for fifteen years; you are well
aware how little malicious I am, and I will prove to you that I am not
mad: follow me." He then drew Diderot into a room, and proceeded to
clear himself, by means of letters, of the charge of trying to make a
breach between Saint Lambert and Madame d'Houdetot. They were in fact
letters that convicted him, as we know, of trying to persuade Madame
d'Houdetot of the criminality of her relations with her lover, and at
the same time to accept himself in the very same relation. Of all this
we have heard more than enough already. He was stubborn in the face of
Diderot's remonstrance, and the latter left him in a state which he
described in a letter to Grimm the same night. "I throw myself into your
arms, like one who has had a shock of fright: that man intrudes into my
work; he fills me with trouble, and I am as if I had a damned soul at my
side. May I never see him again; he would make me believe in devils and
hell."[317] And thus the unhappy man who had began this episode in his
life with confident ecstasy in the glories and clear music of spring,
ended it looking out from a narrow chamber upon the sullen crimson of
the wintry twilight and over fields silent in snow, with the haggard
desperate gaze of a lost spirit.

FOOTNOTES:

[254] _Conf._, ix. 247.

[255] _Conf._, ix. 230. Madame d'Epinay (_Mem._, ii. 132) has given an
account of the installation, with a slight discrepancy of date. When
Madame d'Epinay's son-in-law emigrated at the Revolution, the
Hermitage--of which nothing now stands--along with the rest of the
estate became national property, and was bought after other purchasers
by Robesp