Beneath that veneer of German emotionalism he was, perhaps, something cold and selfish, stern and reserved. But if he was never ardent, he was always faithful; if he was not generous, he was just. He occupied in his life many positions of great trust and responsibility, and came out of them all with honour. One can love a Diderot, but one must needs respect a Grimm. He had plenty of work to do in Paris. Besides the impossible task of keeping Frisen in order, he had his own way and fortune to make and his own friends to cultivate. His passion for Mademoiselle Fel was not his only introduction to Parisian society. Jean Jacques Rousseau (then a brilliant pauper copying music for his support and dreaming masterpieces of which he had not yet written a line) introduced him to d’Holbach and to Madame d’Épinay. He soon became fast friends with Madame Geoffrin (to whose tranquil common-sense his judicious and well-ordered mind particularly appealed), with Helvétius, and with Marmontel; he began a life-long friendship with Diderot, and once a week at Frisen’s house, in the Faubourg St. Honoré, he gave the most delightful bachelor dinner to his friends, played exquisitely on the clavecin for their benefit, took their amusement at his German-French in perfectly good part, and was entirely witty and agreeable, while keeping always a certain reserve and remaining entirely master of the situation. In a very short time the poor German tutor was one of the most sought after persons in Paris, fêted and petted by all the great people, and minded to live no longer as bear-leader to boys, but by his own head and pen. His taste for music gave him a golden opportunity. Shall we have French music at the opera, or Italian? Paris was as hotly divided on the question, said Rousseau, as if the affair had been one of religion. The French side had all the money, the fashion, and the women, and the Italian side a very little party of real connoisseurs. Grimm joined the Italians and wrote on their behalf, in 1753, a pamphlet called ‘The Little Prophet of Boehmischbroda,’ in which the style is profanely imitated from the prophets of the Old Testament. As Madame de Pompadour was on the French side, which she protected by force and by summarily dismissing the Italian singers on the spot, the pamphlet did no harm to French music; but it made Grimm famous. Voltaire read it, and asked how this Bohemian dares to have more wit than We have? And this Bohemian, having made so successful a literary venture in a small part, now looked round with his clever eyes for a larger one. In 1754, he travelled for a time with d’Holbach, who had just lost his wife; and in the following year Frisen, whom Grimm’s guardianship had not been able to save from the fatal consequences of his depravity, died, and left his mentor a free man. In 1755 he began what was to be the work of his life and is his true title to glory, the ‘Literary Correspondence.’