but far the reverse, and in reading the tedious tale of his
quarrels with Grimm and Madame d'Epinay and Diderot--a tale of
labyrinthine nightmares--let us remember that we may even to this point
explain what happened, without recourse to the too facile theory of
insanity, unless one defines that misused term so widely as to make many
sane people very uncomfortable.

His own account was this: "In my quality of solitary, I am more
sensitive than another; if I am wrong with a friend who lives in the
world, he thinks of it for a moment, and then a thousand distractions
make him forget it for the rest of the day; but there is nothing to
distract me as to his wrong towards me; deprived of my sleep, I busy
myself with him all night long; solitary in my walks, I busy myself with
him from sunrise until sunset; my heart has not an instant's relief, and
the harshness of a friend gives me in one day years of anguish. In my
quality of invalid, I have a title to the considerateness that humanity
owes to the weakness or irritation of a man in agony. Who is the friend,
who is the good man, that ought not to dread to add affliction to an
unfortunate wretch tormented with a painful and incurable malady?"[289]
We need not accept this as an adequate extenuation of perversities, but
it explains them without recourse to the theory of uncontrollable
insanity. Insanity came later, the product of intellectual excitation,
public persecution, and moral reaction after prolonged tension.
Meanwhile he may well be judged by the standards of the sane; knowing
his temperament, his previous history, his circumstances, we have no
difficulty in accounting for his conduct. Least of all is there any need
for laying all the blame upon his friends. There are writers whom
enthusiasm for the principles of Jean Jacques has driven into fanatical
denigration of every one whom he called his enemy, that is to say,
nearly every one whom he ever knew.[290] Diderot said well, "Too many
honest people would be wrong, if Jean Jacques were right."

The first downright breach was with Grimm, but there were angry passages
during the year 1757, not only with him, but with Diderot and Madame
d'Epinay as well. Diderot, like many other men of energetic nature
unchastened by worldly wisdom, was too interested in everything that
attracted his attention to keep silence over the indiscretion of a
friend. He threw as much tenacity and zeal into a trifle, if it had once
struck him, a