hip that you have received at the
hands of that woman. If I could pardon you, I should think myself
unworthy of having a single friend. I will never see you again while I
live, and I shall think myself happy if I can banish the recollection of
your conduct from my mind."[312] A flash of manly anger like this is
very welcome to us, who have to thread a tedious way between morbid
egoistic irritation on the one hand, and sly pieces of equivocal
complaisance on the other. The effect on Rousseau was terrific. In a
paroxysm he sent Grimm's letter back to him, with three or four lines in
the same key. He wrote note after note to Madame d'Houdetot, in
shrieks. "Have I a single friend left, man or woman? One word, only one
word, and I can live." A day or two later: "Think of the state I am in.
I can bear to be abandoned by all the world, but you! You who know me so
well! Great God! am I a scoundrel? a scoundrel, I!"[313] And so on,
raving. It was to no purpose that Madame d'Houdetot wrote him soothing
letters, praying him to calm himself, to find something to busy himself
with, to remain at peace with Madame d'Epinay, "who had never appeared
other than the most thoughtful and warm-hearted friend to him."[314] He
was almost ready to quarrel with Madame d'Houdetot herself because she
paid the postage of her letters, which he counted an affront to his
poverty.[315] To Madame d'Epinay he had written in the midst of his
tormenting uncertainty as to the answer which Grimm would make to his
letter. It was an ungainly assertion that she was playing a game of
tyranny and intrigue at his cost. For the first time she replied with
spirit and warmth. "Your letter is hardly that of a man who, on the eve
of my departure, swore to me that he could never in his life repair the
wrongs he had done me." She then tersely remarks that it is not natural
to pass one's life in suspecting and insulting one's friends, and that
he abuses her patience. To this he answered with still greater terseness
that friendship was extinct between them, and that he meant to leave the
Hermitage, but as his friends desired him to remain there until the
spring he would with her permission follow their counsel. Then she, with
a final thrust of impatience, in which we perhaps see the hand of Grimm:
"Since you meant to leave the Hermitage, and felt you ought 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 n