m now with crime on one side and remorse
on the other, with deep waters in front of him. He will many a time be
the torment of my thought; our common friends have judged between him
and me; I have kept them all, and to him there remains not one."[232]
It was not in Diderot's nature to bear malice, and when eight years
later Rousseau passed through Paris on his ill-starred way to England
and the Derbyshire hills, Diderot described the great pleasure that a
visit from Rousseau would give to him. "Ah, I do well," he says, "not
to let the access to my heart be too easy; when anybody has once found
a place in it, he does not leave it without making a grievous rent;
'tis a wound that can never be thoroughly cauterised."[233]

It is needless to remind the neutral reader that Rousseau uses exactly
the same kind of language about his heart. For this is the worst of
sentimentalism, that it is so readily bent into a substitution of
indulgence to oneself for upright and manly judgment about others. Still
we may willingly grant that in the present rupture of a long friendship,
it was not Diderot who was the real offender. _Too many honest people
would be in the wrong_, he most truly said, _if Jean Jacques were in the
right_.

Of Grimm, I have already said elsewhere as much as is needful to be
said.[234] His judgment in matters of conduct and character was cool and
rather hard, but it was generally sound. He had a keen eye for what was
hollow in the pretensions of the society in which he lived. Above all,
he had the keen eye of his countrymen for his own interest, and for the
use which he could make of other people. The best thing that we know in
his favour, is that he should have won the friendship of Diderot.
Diderot's attachment to Grimm seems like an exaggeration of the excesses
of the epoch of sentimentalism in Germany.

He pines for a letter from him, as he pined for letters from
Mademoiselle Voland. If Grimm had been absent for a few months, their
meeting was like a scene in a melodrama. "With what ardour we enclasped
one another. My heart was swimming. I could not speak a word, nor could
he. We embraced without speaking, and I shed tears. We were not
expecting him. We were all at dessert when he was announced, _'Here is
M. Grimm.'_ '_M. Grimm_,' I exclaimed, with a loud cry; and starting up,
I ran to him and fell on his neck. He sat down, and ate a poor meal, you
may be sure. As for me, I could not open my lips either to ea