his old days dying with hunger.  My conscience is more satisfied with the two sous I give him every Monday, than with the hundred farthings I should have distributed amongst all the beggars on the rampart.  You are pleasant men, you philosophers, while you consider the inhabitants of the cities as the only persons whom you ought to befriend.  It is in the country men learn how to love and serve humanity; all they learn in cities is to despise it.”

Such were the singular scruples on which a man of sense had the folly to attribute to me as a crime my retiring from Paris, and pretended to prove to me by my own example, that it was not possible to live out of the capital without becoming a bad man.  I cannot at present conceive how I could be guilty of the folly of answering him, and of suffering myself to be angry instead of laughing in his fare.  However, the decisions of Madam d’Epinay and the clamors of the ‘Cote in Holbachique’ had so far operated in her favor, that I was generally thought to be in the wrong; and the D’Houdetot herself, very partial to Diderot, insisted upon my going to see him at Paris, and making all the advances towards an accommodation which, full and sincere as it was on my part, was not of long duration.  The victorious argument by which she subdued my heart was, that at that moment Diderot was in distress.  Besides the storm excited against the ‘Encyclopedie’, he had then another violent one to make head against, relative to his piece, which, notwithstanding the short history he had printed at the head of it, he was accused of having entirely taken from Goldoni.  Diderot, more wounded by criticisms than Voltaire, was overwhelmed by them.  Madam de Grasigny had been malicious enough to spread a report that I had broken with him on this account.  I thought it would be just and generous publicly to prove the contrary, and I went to pass two days, not only with him, but at his lodgings.  This, since I had taken up my abode at the Hermitage, was my second journey to Paris.  I had made the first to run to poor Gauffecourt, who had had a stroke of apoplexy, from which he has never perfectly recovered:  I did not quit the side of his pillow until he was so far restored as to have no further need of my assistance.

Diderot received me well.  How many wrongs are effaced by the embraces of a friend! after these, what resentment can remain in the heart?  We came to but little explanation.  This is needless for reciprocal invectives.  The only thing necessary is to know how to forget them.  There had been no underhand proceedings, none at least that had come to my knowledge:  the case was not the same with Madam d’ Epinay.  He showed me the plan of the ‘Pere de Famille’.  “This,” said I to him, “is the best defence to the ‘Fils Naturel’.  Be silent, give your attention to this piece, and then throw it at the head of your enemies as the only answer you think proper to make them.”  He did so, and was satisfied with what he had done.