id as
much of the quarrel which he picked with Diderot as the matter
requires, and it would be superfluous to go over the ground again from
another side. Whether we listen to Rousseau's story or to Diderot's
story, our judgment on what happened remains unchanged. We have already
seen how warm and close an intimacy subsisted between them in the days
when Diderot was a prisoner at Vincennes (1749). When Rousseau made up
his mind to leave Paris and turn hermit (1756), there was a loud outcry
from the social group at Holbach's. They said to him, in the least
theological dialect of their day, what Sir Walter Scott had said to
Ballantyne when Ballantyne thought of leaving Edinburgh, that, "when
our Saviour himself was to be led into temptation, the first thing the
Devil thought of was to get him into the wilderness." Diderot
remonstrated rather more loudly than Rousseau's other friends, but
there was no breach, and even no coolness. What sort of humours were
bred by solitude in Rousseau's wayward mind we know, and the
Confessions tell us how for a year and a half he was silently brooding
over fancied slights and perhaps real pieces of heedlessness. Grimm,
who was Diderot's closest friend next to Mademoiselle Voland, despised
Rousseau, and Rousseau detested Grimm. "Grimm," he one day said to a
disciple, "is the only man whom I have ever been able to hate." Madame
d'Epinay was compelled to go to Geneva for her health, and Grimm easily
persuaded Diderot that Rousseau was bound by all the ties of gratitude
to accompany his benefactress on the expedition. Diderot wrote to the
hermit a very strong letter to this effect: it made Rousseau furious.
He declined the urgent counsel, he quarrelled outright and violently
with Grimm, and after an angry and confusing interview with Diderot,
all intercourse ceased with him also. "That man," wrote Diderot, on the
evening of this, their last interview, "intrudes into my work; he fills
me with trouble, and I feel as if I were haunted by a damned soul at my
side. May I never see him more; he would make me believe in devils and
hell."[231] And writing afterwards to some friend at Geneva, he recalls
the days when he used to pour out the talk of intimacy "with the man
who has buried himself at the bottom of a wood, where his soul has been
soured and his moral nature has been corrupted. Yet how I pity him!
Imagine that I used to love him, that I remember those old days of
friendship, and that I see hi