What a pitiful and wretched picture of society does all this present! People of refinement, of education, and genius,--Rousseau, a man so richly gifted with talent--Diderot, enthusiastic on the subject of every social duty--Grimm, a man of sense--madame d'Epinay, a woman of talent, whose disposition was injured by the state and opinions of society, but who was naturally generous, confiding, and friendly,--yet each and all acting with intolerance and bitterness. The passions were the sources of these dissensions,--Rousseau's for madame d'Houdetot--Grimm's for madame d'Epinay;--but why should not these feelings have inspired toleration and kindness? They were fostered unfortunately by temper and vanity. Each had microscopic eyes for the faults of the other--neither could perceive his own. Had they at once dismissed their mutual cavillings, reproaches, and explanations, and gone their own way in silence and toleration, they might have been unhappy,--for such must be the result of illicit love,--but they had not presented to all the world, and to posterity, so humbling a proof of the worthlessness of talent in directing the common concerns of life. Rousseau, of course, at once quitted the Hermitage. He had a horror of entering Paris: he was greatly embarrassed as to where to go, when M. Mathas, procureur-fiscal to the prince of Condé, hearing of his uncomfortable situation, offered him a small house in his garden of Mont Louis, at Montmorenci: he accepted it at once, and removed thither. But his soul was still in tumults; still passion convulsed his heart, which would not be at peace. He desired to establish a friendship between himself, St. Lambert, and madame d'Houdetot; but they drew back--from the alleged motive that "Rousseau's attachment was the talk of Paris, and that therefore she could not have any intercourse with him." It was likely enough that the old woman, le Vasseur, or twenty others, might have been the cause of this gossip; but Rousseau chose to fix the blame on Diderot, and to quarrel with him outright. Strange that these sensitive men should have so little real affection in their nature that, for the sake of personal offences, real or imagined, they could at once throw off those whom they had loved, as they pretended, so well and so long; showing how much more deeply rooted and engrossing was _self_, than the interests and intercourse of their friends. A few years after, Diderot sought to be reconciled to his former friend; he engaged a mutual acquaintance to mediate between them. Rousseau declined his advances. He replied:--"I do not see what M. Diderot, after seven years' silence, all at once demands of me. I ask nothing of him--I have no disavowal to make. I am far from wishing him ill--and am yet further from doing or saying aught to injure him. I know how to respect the ties of an even extinguished friendship to the end; but I never renew it--that is my inviolable maxim." Rousseau was in exile and misfortune