of health, always had company, and lived
very agreeably, Diderot, not knowing what else to attribute to me as a
crime, construed my precaution into one, and discovered another in Madam
le Vasseur continuing to reside at the Hermitage, although this was by
her own choice; and though her going to Paris had depended, and still
depended upon herself, where she would continue to receive the same
succors from me as I gave her in my house.

This is the explanation of the first reproach in the letter of Diderot.
That of the second is in the letter which follows: "The learned man (a
name given in a joke by Grimm to the son of Madam d'Epinay) must have
informed you there were upon the rampart twenty poor persons who were
dying with cold and hunger, and waiting for the farthing you customarily
gave them. This is a specimen of our little babbling.....And if you
understand the rest it will amuse you perhap."

My answer to this terrible argument, of which Diderot seemed so proud,
was in the following words:

"I think I answered the learned man; that is, the farmer-general, that I
did not pity the poor whom he had seen upon the rampart, waiting for my
farthing; that he had probably amply made it up to them; that I appointed
him my substitute, that the poor of Paris would have no reason to
complain of the change; and that I should not easily find so good a one
for the poor of Montmorency, who were in much greater need of assistance.
Here is a good and respectable old man, who, after having worked hard all
his lifetime, no longer being able to continue his labors, is in 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 decisio