He was living now in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. His love of music was still strong, and on young Mozart’s visits to Paris, Grimm was his kindest and most influential patron. The next few years saw the deaths of many old friends--of Voltaire, of Diderot, of Frederick the Great, of d’Holbach, and of Madame d’Épinay. For ever trying to conciliate all men, poor little volatile, self-deceived deceiver, under Grimm’s masterful influence the best qualities of her nature had come to the fore and the worst receded. She was to the last true to him as she had never been true to anyone else. Grimm adopted her grand-daughter and married her to the Comte de Bueil. So far, his own life had been singularly happy and successful. If he had loved unwisely, he had taken care that the affection should never be of that inordinate kind which is its own punishment. He had, too, one of the dearest solaces of declining life in seeing young people growing up about him. As to his career, he was not only attached to the royal house of Orleans, but he was by now Catherine’s Councillor of State, Minister Plenipotentiary to the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, and Baron of the Viennese Empire. He was a rich man, with a fine collection of books, pictures, and _vertu_. He should have died before 1789. In that year came the stunning fall of the Bastille. Of liberty, Grimm had talked easily enough, but he had also been shrewd enough to doubt its promises. He had at least nothing of the calm confidence of the fine ladies of the old _régime_ who drove out from modish Paris through the Faubourg Saint-Antoine to look at the ruins of the great prison, as at a sight prepared--for their amusement. To the wary German the destruction of the Bastille spelt the ruin of France. The Revolution sped on--Vengeance rushing through the night with a drawn sword in her hand. In 1790 came the great emigration of the nobles. Who should be suspect if not this correspondent of kings? Grimm fled to Frankfort; but in two months’ time he plunged again into the whirlpool of Paris, to rescue the Comtesse de Bueil, his dear adopted grandchild, then in sore straits. He took her to Aix-la-Chapelle; but in October 1791 he returned himself to the capital, to get the Empress’s letters out of France if he could. He found he had already been denounced in the committees as carrying on a correspondence with her ‘little favourable to the Revolution.’ His only chance of safety lay, he saw, in ‘extreme circumspection.’ He had that quality by nature to the full; but, none the less, stirred by a generous pity, history tells of an interview he had with the royal saint, Madame Elisabeth, in which he tried to assist both her and Marie Antoinette. He could do nothing; fate and the fatal Bourbon character were too strong for the Bourbons to be saved.