alone: and the meaning of
his pathetic exclamation with the et cetera, which he had benignantly
added: A woman of eighty years of age, etc.

I thought the best answer that could be given to this reproach would be
from Madam le Vasseur herself. I desired her to write freely and
naturally her sentiments to Madam d'Epinay. To relieve her from all
constraint I would not see her letter. I showed her that which I am
going to transcribe. I wrote it to Madam d'Epinay upon the subject of an
answer I wish to return to a letter still more severe from Diderot, and
which she had prevented me from sending.

Thursday.

"My good friend. Madam le Vasseur is to write to you: I have desired her
to tell you sincerely what she thinks. To remove from her all
constraint, I have intimated to her that I will not see what she writes,
and I beg of you not to communicate to me any part of the contents of her
letter.

"I will not send my letter because you do not choose I should; but,
feeling myself grievously offended, it would be baseness and falsehood,
of either of which it is impossible for me to be guilty, to acknowledge
myself in the wrong. Holy writ commands him to whom a blow is given, to
turn the other cheek, but not to ask pardon. Do you remember the man in
comedy who exclaims, while he is giving another blows with his staff,
'This is the part of a philosopher!'

"Do not flatter yourself that he will be prevented from coming by the bad
weather we now have. His rage will give him the time and strength which
friendship refuses him, and it will be the first time in his life he ever
came upon the day he had appointed.

"He will neglect nothing to come and repeat to me verbally the injuries
with which he loads me in his letters; I will endure them all with
patience--he will return to Paris to be ill again; and, according to
custom, I shall be a very hateful man. What is to be done? Endure it
all.

"But do not you admire the wisdom of the man who would absolutely come to
Saint Denis in a hackney-coach to dine there, bring me home in a
hackney-coach, and whose finances, eight days afterwards, obliges him to
come to the Hermitage on foot? It is not possible, to speak his own
language, that this should be the style of sincerity. But were this the
case, strange changes of fortune must have happened in the course of a
week.

"I join in your affliction for the illness of madam,