There was one man, and only one man, for whose perverse and intractable spirit Diderot’s most friendly patience, helpfulness, and devotion, were no match.  I have already, in dealing with Rousseau,[230] said as much of the quarrel which he picked with Diderot as the matter requires, and it would be superfluous to go over the ground again from another side.  Whether we listen to Rousseau’s story or to Diderot’s story, our judgment on what happened remains unchanged.  We have already seen how warm and close an intimacy subsisted between them in the days when Diderot was a prisoner at Vincennes (1749).  When Rousseau made up his mind to leave Paris and turn hermit (1756), there was a loud outcry from the social group at Holbach’s.  They said to him, in the least theological dialect of their day, what Sir Walter Scott had said to Ballantyne when Ballantyne thought of leaving Edinburgh, that, “when our Saviour himself was to be led into temptation, the first thing the Devil thought of was to get him into the wilderness.”  Diderot remonstrated rather more loudly than Rousseau’s other friends, but there was no breach, and even no coolness.  What sort of humours were bred by solitude in Rousseau’s wayward mind we know, and the Confessions tell us how for a year and a half he was silently brooding over fancied slights and perhaps real pieces of heedlessness.  Grimm, who was Diderot’s closest friend next to Mademoiselle Voland, despised Rousseau, and Rousseau detested Grimm.  “Grimm,” he one day said to a disciple, “is the only man whom I have ever been able to hate.”  Madame d’Epinay was compelled to go to Geneva for her health, and Grimm easily persuaded Diderot that Rousseau was bound by all the ties of gratitude to accompany his benefactress on the expedition.  Diderot wrote to the hermit a very strong letter to this effect:  it made Rousseau furious.  He declined the urgent counsel, he quarrelled outright and violently with Grimm, and after an angry and confusing interview with Diderot, all intercourse ceased with him also.  “That man,” wrote Diderot, on the evening of this, their last interview, “intrudes into my work; he fills me with trouble, and I feel as if I were haunted by a damned soul at my side.  May I never see him more; he would make me believe in devils and hell."[231] And writing afterwards to some friend at Geneva, he recalls the days when he used to pour out the talk of intimacy “with the man who has buried himself at the bottom of a wood, where his soul has been soured and his moral nature has been corrupted.  Yet how I pity him!  Imagine that I used to love him, that I remember those old days of friendship, and that I see him 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]