In 1792 Grimm, who had loved her long and owed her much, said farewell to Paris for ever, leaving behind him, as he said, the fruit of the wisdom of his whole life and his entire fortune, and finding himself as naked as when he came into the world. He and Madame de Bueil lodged over a chemist’s shop in Düsseldorf, and even had to sleep in the Natural History Museum of that town. Grimm’s whole income was Catherine’s pension of two thousand roubles; her generosity indeed often added to it, and in 1796 she made him Russian Minister at Hamburg. This was one of the last acts of her life. She died, and left her friend and servant yet the poorer for her loss. At Hamburg he had a disease of the eye which necessitated its removal. Then he retired to Gotha and lived with the Comtesse de Bueil in a house given him by the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, the munificent Duke providing furniture, linen, kitchen utensils--everything. The Countess’s two young daughters acted as Grimm’s secretaries. The music he had loved was still a resource to him, and he seems to have kept to the last something of his old power and mastery over others. Goethe found him, when he saw him in 1801, still an agreeable man of the world and rich in interest and experience, but unable to conceal a profound bitterness at the thought of his misfortunes. Under the Directory some of his confiscated property was restored to him. But it could hardly benefit him; he no longer lived, he only existed. He, who had been born when the Regent Orleans ruled France and the old order was at the supreme height of its magnificence and depravity, was roused from the dotage of his last days to hear the thunder of the cannon of Jena and Austerlitz, or the story of the peace concluded between Catherine’s grandson, Alexander, and Napoleon Bonaparte upon the raft at Tilsit. Grimm died on December 19, 1807, aged eighty-four. No unpleasing contrast, this ‘methodical, adroit, managing man,’ with his cold uprightness and steady prudence, to a reckless, out-at-elbows Diderot, or a mad, miserable Rousseau. Thriftiness and caution are unromantic virtues and even accounted selfish; but, after all, the world would have no beggars to relieve if every man laid by for himself. If it was the Encyclopædists’ mission to teach the people to reform their kings, it was Grimm’s to teach those kings to reform themselves--to be as careful and judicious as he was. He tried; but from long and close association with them he himself caught at last that disease epidemic among rulers--oblivion to unpleasant consequences and a relentless future--and never recovered from the fearful shock which opened his eyes at last. VII _HELVÉTIUS: THE CONTRADICTION_ Most of the reforming philosophers of the eighteenth century were better in word than deed.