to his own affairs, and hinted that Grimm was making a tool of him.  Next he wrote to Grimm himself a letter, not unfriendly in form, asking his advice and promising to follow it, but hardly hiding his resentment.  By this time he had found out the secret of Madame d’Epinay’s supposed illness and her anxiety to pass some months away from her family, and the share which Grimm had in it.  This, however, does not make many passages of his letter any the less ungracious or unseemly.  “If Madame d’Epinay has shown friend’ ship to me, I have shown more to her....  As for benefits, first of all I do not like them, I do not want them, and I owe no thanks for any that people may burden me with by force.  Madame d’Epinay, being so often left alone in the country, wished me for company; it was for that she had kept me.  After making one sacrifice to friendship, I must now make another to gratitude.  A man must be poor, must be without a servant, must be a hater of constraint, and he must have my character, before he can know what it is for me to live in another person’s house.  For all that, I lived two years in hers, constantly brought into bondage with the finest harangues about liberty, served by twenty domestics, and cleaning my own shoes every morning, overloaded with gloomy indigestion, and incessantly sighing for my homely porringer....  Consider how much money an hour of the life and the time of a man is worth; compare the kindnesses of Madame d’Epinay with the sacrifice of my native country and two years of serfdom; and then tell me whether the obligation is greater on her side or mine.”  He then urges with a torrent of impetuous eloquence the thoroughly sound reasons why it was unfair and absurd for him, a beggar and an invalid, to make the journey with Madame d’Epinay, rich and surrounded by attendants.  He is particularly splenetic that the philosopher Diderot, sitting in his own room before a good fire and wrapped in a well-lined dressing-gown, should insist on his doing his five and twenty leagues a day on foot, through the mud in winter.[310]

The whole letter shows, as so many incidents in his later life showed, how difficult it was to do Rousseau a kindness with impunity, and how little such friends as Madame d’Epinay possessed the art of soothing this unfortunate nature.  They fretted him by not leaving him sufficiently free to follow his own changing moods, while he in turn lost all self-control, and yielded in hours of bodily torment to angry and resentful fancies.  But let us hasten to an end.  Grimm replied to his eloquent manifesto somewhat drily, to the effect that he would think the matter over, and that meanwhile Rousseau had best keep quiet in his hermitage.  Rousseau burning with excitement at once conceived a thousand suspicions, wholly unable to understand that a cold and reserved German might choose to deliberate at length, and finally give an answer with brevity.  “After centuries of expectation in the cruel uncertainty in which this