It is always a vexed point of morals to determine how far right can come out of wrong, how far a cause initially bad can be said to be good in its results. It must certainly be conceded in Grimm’s case that, having put himself into a false position and remaining there, he acted not only sensibly and discreetly, but even honestly and conscientiously. He found Madame d’Épinay silly, as are so many clever women, and he insisted on her behaving with judgment and discretion. One of his first acts was to demand that her old lover, Francueil, whom she still permitted to visit her as a friend, should be given his dismissal. With Duclos, man of letters, and of character rough, dissipated, and unscrupulous, he bade her break entirely. Then he turned to Rousseau. It has been justly said of Grimm that he never lost a friend save Jean Jacques. In 1756 Madame d’Épinay, acting on one of those excessively foolish impulses which she herself felt to be wholly fascinating, and which had already more than once shipwrecked her life, gave Rousseau the little Hermitage in the forest of Montmorency, close to her own country-house of La Chevrette. Grimm had not known Rousseau for six years without knowing his heart. He looked up suddenly from the ‘Correspondence.’ ‘You have done Rousseau a bad service,’ he told Madame d’Épinay sternly, ‘and yourself a worse.’ Still, it was done. In 1757, that _belle laide_, Madame d’Houdetot, also had a house close to La Chevrette, and there attracted the notice of Rousseau. After a brief summer day of delight, she grew tired of her vehement admirer, or her lover, Saint-Lambert, grew tired of him for her. At any rate, there burst over those three houses in the Montmorency forest a storm of fierce passions and scandalous recriminations. All Paris stood watching. Diderot plunged impulsively into that angry sea. Rousseau accused Madame d’Épinay, in terms which no self-respecting woman could have forgiven, of being the writer of a certain fatal anonymous letter; and she forgave him. Grimm had been appointed secretary to the Duke of Orleans, and was absent on duty in Westphalia. He did not spare his little mistress’s pusillanimous weakness. ‘Your excuses are feeble ... you have committed a very great fault,’ he wrote. Hurrying home, he dealt with Rousseau in terms of unmistakable plainness. He made Madame d’Épinay cast him off there, at once, and for ever, and carried her off to Geneva on the excuse, a just excuse in every sense, of her health.