but from the embarrassment of not finding a word proper to say.  Whence comes it that even a child can intimidate a man, whom the power of kings has never inspired with fear?  What is to be done?  How, without presence of mind, am I to act?  If I strive to speak to the persons I meet, I certainly say some stupid thing to them; if I remain silent, I am a misanthrope, an unsociable animal, a bear.  Total imbecility would have been more favorable to me; but the talents which I have failed to improve in the world have become the instruments of my destruction, and of that of the talents I possessed.

At the latter end of this journey, Madam de Luxembourg did a good action in which I had some share.  Diderot having very imprudently offended the Princess of Robeck, daughter of M. de Luxembourg, Palissot, whom she protected, took up the quarrel, and revenged her by the comedy of ’The Philosophers’, in which I was ridiculed, and Diderot very roughly handled.  The author treated me with more gentleness, less, I am of opinion, on account of the obligation he was under to me, than from the fear of displeasing the father of his protectress, by whom he knew I was beloved.  The bookseller Duchesne, with whom I was not at that time acquainted, sent me the comedy when it was printed, and this I suspect was by the order of Palissot, who, perhaps, thought I should have a pleasure in seeing a man with whom I was no longer connected defamed.  He was greatly deceived.  When I broke with Diderot, whom I thought less ill-natured than weak and indiscreet, I still always preserved for his person an attachment, an esteem even, and a respect for our ancient friendship, which I know was for a long time as sincere on his part as on mine.  The case was quite different with Grimm; a man false by nature, who never loved me, who is not even capable of friendship, and a person who, without the least subject of complaint, and solely to satisfy his gloomy jealousy, became, under the mask of friendship, my most cruel calumniator.  This man is to me a cipher; the other will always be my old friend.

My very bowels yearned at the sight of this odious piece:  the reading of it was insupportable to me, and, without going through the whole, I returned the copy to Duchesne with the following letter: 

Montmorency, 21st, May, 1760.

“In casting my eyes over the piece you sent me, I trembled at seeing myself well spoken of in it.  I do not accept the horrid present.  I am persuaded that in sending it me, you did not intend an insult; but you do not know, or have forgotten, that I have the honor to be the friend of a respectable man, who is shamefully defamed and calumniated in this libel.”

Duchense showed the letter.  Diderot, upon whom it ought to have had an effect quite contrary, was vexed at it.  His pride could not forgive me the superiority of a generous action, and I was informed his wife everywhere inveighed against me with a bitterness with which I was not in the least affected, as I knew she was known to everybody to be a noisy babbler.