It is not easy to decide which party, if either, was in the right; though the memoir writers in general take the part of Mademoiselle de L'Espinasse. Far from being made a homeless wanderer by the dismissal, she was immediately supplied with a house and furniture by her friends, who obtained for her a pension from the crown. On these means she founded a rival establishment of her own; and surrounded herself with an intellectual circle, which seems to have more than rivalled in brilliancy that from which she was dismissed. D'Alembert was told that if he countenanced the new idol, he must bid farewell to his former patroness. He at once joined the party of the young aspirant. He became dangerously ill, and Mademoiselle de L'Espinasse nursed him with the untiring affection of a wife or a daughter. The philosopher, whose humble dwelling was found to be on too sordid a scale to be consistent with health, thenceforth took up his abode with his young friend. Hume must have witnessed the rise of this new connexion, for it was during his residence in Paris that D'Alembert's illness took place, and it is the object of occasional anxious allusion by his Parisian acquaintance.[216:1] Though the circumstances in which he passed his earlier days were not likely to nourish such a taste, no man seems to have been more dependant on the presence of an educated and intellectual female than the secretary of the Academy. There is little doubt that the new attachment was of a Platonic character; but it boded evil to both parties. The lady, if she had some portion of the purer affections of the soul to bestow upon the sage, had warmer feelings for likelier objects; and her frame sunk before the consuming fires of more than one passion.[218:1] She was carried to an early grave, and the mortifications, caused by her alienation, followed by grief for her death, broke the spirit, and imbittered and enfeebled the latter days of the philosopher. Hume seems to have established a closer friendship with D'Alembert than with any of his other contemporaries in France; and he left a memorial of his regard for the encyclopediast in his will. Unlike, in many respects, they had some features in common. D'Alembert's personal character, and the habits of his life, had, like his philosophy, the dignity of simplicity. His figure, and still more his voice, were the objects of much malicious sarcasm; but cruel jests could not make his fragile body less the tenement of a noble spirit; or his shrill puny voice less the instrument of great and bold thoughts. His mind stands forth in strong relief from the frippery of that age; while his writings contain no marks of that reckless infidelity which distinguishes the productions of his fellow labourers. In some of those follies, so prevalent that a man utterly free of them, must have courted the charge of eccentricity, if not of insanity, he partook; but moderately and reluctantly, as one suited for