to do so, I am astonished that your friends could detain you.  For me, I don’t consult mine as to my duties, and I have nothing more to say to you as to yours.”  This was the end.  Rousseau returned for a moment from ignoble petulance to dignity and self-respect.  He wrote to her that if it is a misfortune to make a mistake in the choice of friends, it is one not less cruel to awake from so sweet an error, and two days before he wrote, he left her house.  He found a cottage at Montmorency, and thither, nerved with fury, through snow and ice he carried his scanty household goods (Dec. 15, 1757).[316]

We have a picture of him in this fatal month.  Diderot went to pay him a visit (Dec. 5).  Rousseau was alone at the bottom of his garden.  As soon as he saw Diderot, he cried in a voice of thunder and with his eyes all aflame:  “What have you come here for?” “I want to know whether you are mad or malicious.”  “You have known me for fifteen years; you are well aware how little malicious I am, and I will prove to you that I am not mad:  follow me.”  He then drew Diderot into a room, and proceeded to clear himself, by means of letters, of the charge of trying to make a breach between Saint Lambert and Madame d’Houdetot.  They were in fact letters that convicted him, as we know, of trying to persuade Madame d’Houdetot of the criminality of her relations with her lover, and at the same time to accept himself in the very same relation.  Of all this we have heard more than enough already.  He was stubborn in the face of Diderot’s remonstrance, and the latter left him in a state which he described in a letter to Grimm the same night.  “I throw myself into your arms, like one who has had a shock of fright:  that man intrudes into my work; he fills me with trouble, and I am as if I had a damned soul at my side.  May I never see him again; he would make me believe in devils and hell."[317] And thus the unhappy man who had began this episode in his life with confident ecstasy in the glories and clear music of spring, ended it looking out from a narrow chamber upon the sullen crimson of the wintry twilight and over fields silent in snow, with the haggard desperate gaze of a lost spirit.

FOOTNOTES: 

[254] Conf., ix. 247.

[255] Conf., ix. 230.  Madame d’Epinay (Mem., ii. 132) has given an account of the installation, with a slight discrepancy of date.  When Madame d’Epinay’s son-in-law emigrated at the Revolution, the Hermitage—­of which nothing now stands—­along with the rest of the estate became national property, and was bought after other purchasers by Robespierre, and afterwards by Gretry the composer, who paid 10,000 livres for it.

[256] Conf., ix. 255.

[257] Third letter to Malesherbes, 364-368.

[258] Conf., ix. 239.

[259] Conf., ix. 237, 238, and 263, etc.

[260] The extract from the Project for Perpetual Peace and the Polysynodia, together with Rousseau’s judgments on them, are found at the end of the volume containing the Social Contract.  The first, but without the judgment, was printed separately without Rousseau’s permission, in 1761, by Bastide, to whom he had sold it for twelve louis for publication in his journal only. Conf., xi. 107. Corr., ii. 110, 128.