barbarous man had plunged me”—­that is after eight or ten days, the answer came, apparently not without a second direct application for one.[311] It was short and extremely pointed, not complaining that Rousseau had refused to accompany Madame d’Epinay but protesting against the horrible tone of the apology which he had sent to him for not accompanying her.  “It has made me quiver with indignation; so odious are the principles it contains, so full is it of blackness and duplicity.  You venture to talk to me of your slavery, to me who for more than two years have been the daily witness of all the marks of the tenderest and most generous friendship that you have received at the hands of that woman.  If I could pardon you, I should think myself unworthy of having a single friend.  I will never see you again while I live, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish the recollection of your conduct from my mind."[312] A flash of manly anger like this is very welcome to us, who have to thread a tedious way between morbid egoistic irritation on the one hand, and sly pieces of equivocal complaisance on the other.  The effect on Rousseau was terrific.  In a paroxysm he sent Grimm’s letter back to him, with three or four lines in the same key.  He wrote note after note to Madame d’Houdetot, in shrieks.  “Have I a single friend left, man or woman?  One word, only one word, and I can live.”  A day or two later:  “Think of the state I am in.  I can bear to be abandoned by all the world, but you!  You who know me so well!  Great God! am I a scoundrel? a scoundrel, I!"[313] And so on, raving.  It was to no purpose that Madame d’Houdetot wrote him soothing letters, praying him to calm himself, to find something to busy himself with, to remain at peace with Madame d’Epinay, “who had never appeared other than the most thoughtful and warm-hearted friend to him."[314] He was almost ready to quarrel with Madame d’Houdetot herself because she paid the postage of her letters, which he counted an affront to his poverty.[315] To Madame d’Epinay he had written in the midst of his tormenting uncertainty as to the answer which Grimm would make to his letter.  It was an ungainly assertion that she was playing a game of tyranny and intrigue at his cost.  For the first time she replied with spirit and warmth.  “Your letter is hardly that of a man who, on the eve of my departure, swore to me that he could never in his life repair the wrongs he had done me.”  She then tersely remarks that it is not natural to pass one’s life in suspecting and insulting one’s friends, and that he abuses her patience.  To this he answered with still greater terseness that friendship was extinct between them, and that he meant to leave the Hermitage, but as his friends desired him to remain there until the spring he would with her permission follow their counsel.  Then she, with a final thrust of impatience, in which we perhaps see the hand of Grimm:  “Since you meant to leave the Hermitage, and felt you ought