His own account was this:  “In my quality of solitary, I am more sensitive than another; if I am wrong with a friend who lives in the world, he thinks of it for a moment, and then a thousand distractions make him forget it for the rest of the day; but there is nothing to distract me as to his wrong towards me; deprived of my sleep, I busy myself with him all night long; solitary in my walks, I busy myself with him from sunrise until sunset; my heart has not an instant’s relief, and the harshness of a friend gives me in one day years of anguish.  In my quality of invalid, I have a title to the considerateness that humanity owes to the weakness or irritation of a man in agony.  Who is the friend, who is the good man, that ought not to dread to add affliction to an unfortunate wretch tormented with a painful and incurable malady?"[289] We need not accept this as an adequate extenuation of perversities, but it explains them without recourse to the theory of uncontrollable insanity.  Insanity came later, the product of intellectual excitation, public persecution, and moral reaction after prolonged tension.  Meanwhile he may well be judged by the standards of the sane; knowing his temperament, his previous history, his circumstances, we have no difficulty in accounting for his conduct.  Least of all is there any need for laying all the blame upon his friends.  There are writers whom enthusiasm for the principles of Jean Jacques has driven into fanatical denigration of every one whom he called his enemy, that is to say, nearly every one whom he ever knew.[290] Diderot said well, “Too many honest people would be wrong, if Jean Jacques were right.”

The first downright breach was with Grimm, but there were angry passages during the year 1757, not only with him, but with Diderot and Madame d’Epinay as well.  Diderot, like many other men of energetic nature unchastened by worldly wisdom, was too interested in everything that attracted his attention to keep silence over the indiscretion of a friend.  He threw as much tenacity and zeal into a trifle, if it had once struck him, as he did into the Encyclopaedia.  We have already seen how warmly he rated Jean Jacques for missing the court pension.  Then he scolded and laughed at him for turning hermit.  With still more seriousness he remonstrated with him for remaining in the country through the winter, thus endangering the life of Theresa’s aged mother.  This stirred up hot anger in the Hermitage, and two or three bitter letters were interchanged,[291] those of Diderot being pronounced by a person who was no partisan of Rousseau decidedly too harsh.[292] Yet there is copious warmth of friendship in these very letters, if only the man to whom they were written had not hated interference in his affairs as the worst of injuries.  “I loved Diderot tenderly, I esteemed him sincerely,” says Rousseau, “and I counted with entire confidence upon the same sentiments in him.  But worn out by his unwearied obstinacy in everlastingly thwarting