which there was none at all in Rousseau.  Above all things he hated declamation.  Apparently cold and reserved, he had sensibility enough underneath the surface to go nearly out of his mind for love of a singer at the opera who had a thrilling voice.  As he did not believe in the metaphysical doctrine about the freedom of the will, he accepted from temperament the necessity which logic confirmed, of guiding the will by constant pressure from without.  “I am surprised,” Madame d’Epinay said to him, “that men should be so little indulgent to one another.”  “Nay, the want of indulgence comes of our belief in freedom; it is because the established morality is false and bad, inasmuch as it starts from this false principle of liberty.”  “Ah, but the contrary principle, by making one too indulgent, disturbs order.”  “It does nothing of the kind.  Though man does not wholly change, he is susceptible of modification; you can improve him; hence it is not useless to punish him.  The gardener does not cut down a tree that grows crooked; he binds up the branch and keeps it in shape; that is the effect of public punishment."[302] He applied the same doctrine, as we shall see, to private punishment for social crookedness.

It is easy to conceive how Rousseau’s way of ordering himself would gradually estrange so hard a head as this.  What the one thought a weighty moral reformation, struck the other as a vain desire to attract attention.  Rousseau on the other hand suspected Grimm of intriguing to remove Theresa from him, as well as doing his best to alienate all his friends.  The attempted alienation of Theresa consisted in the secret allowance to her mother and her by Grimm and Diderot of some sixteen pounds a year.[303] Rousseau was unaware of this, but the whisperings and goings and comings to which it gave rise, made him darkly uneasy.  That the suspicions in other respects were in a certain sense not wholly unfounded, is shown by Grimm’s own letters to Madame d’Epinay.  He disapproved of her installing Rousseau in the Hermitage, and warned her in a very remarkable prophecy that solitude would darken his imagination.[304] “He is a poor devil who torments himself, and does not dare to confess the true subject of all his sufferings, which is in his cursed head and his pride; he raises up imaginary matters, so as to have the pleasure of complaining of the whole human race."[305] More than once he assures her that Rousseau will end by going mad, it being impossible that so hot and ill-organised a head should endure solitude.[306] Rousseauite partisans usually explain all this by supposing that Grimm was eager to set a woman for whom he had a passion, against a man who was suspected of having a passion for her; and it is possible that jealousy may have stimulated the exercise of his natural shrewdness.  But this shrewdness, added to entire want of imagination and a very narrow range of sympathy, was quite enough to account for Grimm’s harsh judgment, without