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.

Diderot in his turn found an avenger in the Abbe Morrellet, who wrote
against Palissot a little work, imitated from the 'Petit Prophete',
and entitled the Vision. In this production he very imprudently offended
Madam de Robeck, whose friends got him sent to the Bastile; though she,
not naturally vindictive, and at that time in a dying state, I am certain
had nothing to do with the affair.

D'Alembert, who was very intimately connected with Morrellet, wrote me a
letter, desiring I would beg of Madam de Luxembourg to solicit his
liberty, promising her in return encomiums in the 'Encyclopedie';
my answer to this letter was as follows:

"I did not wait the receipt of your letter before I expressed to Madam de
Luxembourg the pain the confinement of the Abbe Morrellet gave me. She
knows my concern, and shall