So the woman I esteem most in the world is, to my knowledge, so infamous as to divide her heart and her person between two lovers, and I am so despicable as to be one of these two creatures! If I knew that you had really believed this of us for so much as a single moment, I should hate you to my dying day. But it is with having said it, and not with having thought it that I tax you. I do not understand which of us three you intended to injure by such conduct. But if you value your peace of mind you should be afraid that you might be so unlucky as to succeed. I have concealed neither from you nor from her how badly I think of certain relationships. But I would have them brought to an end in as honourable a way as they began. I would have an illicit love change into an eternal friendship. Would I who never injured anyone be the innocent means of harming my friends? No, I should never forgive you. I should become your irreconcilable enemy. But your secrets shall always be respected; for I shall never break my word.
I do not suppose that my present uncertainties will last long. I shall very soon know if I am mistaken. In that case I shall perhaps have a great wrong to repair, and never in all my life shall I do anything with greater goodwill. But do you know how I shall atone for my errors in the short time I have still to spend near you? By doing what no one else will do; by frankly telling you what the world thinks of you, and what breaches you have to repair in your reputation. Notwithstanding all the self-styled friends who surround you, when you see me depart you can say farewell to truth. You will never find anyone else who will tell it to you.
Third Letter from the same
(Packet A, No. 46)
I did not understand your letter of this morning; I told you so because it was the truth. I do understand this evening’s. Have no fear that I shall ever answer it. I am too anxious to forget it. And although I feel pity for you I have not been able to hold back the bitterness with which it fills my heart. I resort to tricks and cunning against you! I to be accused of the blackest infamy! Farewell, I am sorry that you have… Farewell, I do not know what I am saying…. Farewell, I shall be only too glad to forgive you. You may come when you please, and you will get a better reception than your suspicions deserve. But do not trouble to be concerned for my reputation. It matters little to me what it may be. My behaviour is virtuous, and that is enough for me. Moreover, I have absolutely no idea what has happened to those two people, whom I love as much as you do.
This last letter relieved me of one terrible embarrassment, and plunged me into another almost as great. Although all these letters and answers had been exchanged in the course of one day at lightning speed, that lapse of time had been enough to interrupt my raging fury and allow me to reflect upon the enormity of my rashness. Mme d’Houdetot had impressed upon me, above all things, the necessity of remaining calm and of leaving it to her to get out of her difficulties herself; also of avoiding, especially at that moment, any break or explosion. And now by the most open and atrocious insults I was deliberately enraging a woman only too prone to violent emotion. The only answer that I could expect from her would be so haughty, so disdainful, and so contemptuous that unless I were to behave with despicable cowardice I should have to leave her house on the spot. Fortunately her cunning was greater than my fury, and by the tone of her reply she avoided reducing me to that extremity. But I had either to leave, or to go and see her immediately; the choice was unavoidable. I chose the latter alternative, though greatly puzzled as to what attitude I should adopt to the explanation which I could foresee. For how could I extricate myself without compromising either Mme d’Houdetot or Thérèse? And woe to whichever of them I named! There was nothing that I did not fear for the victim of that implacable and intriguing woman’s vengeance. To ward off such a disaster I had written only of my suspicions, wishing to avoid the necessity of producing my proofs. It is true that this made my outbursts the more inexcusable, for no mere suspicions could justify my treating a woman, and moreover a friend, as I had just treated Mme d’Épinay. But here begins the great and noble task which I have worthily fulfilled, of atoning for my faults and weaknesses by taking the blame for even greater faults of which I was incapable and which I never committed.
I did not have to undergo the attack I had feared; I got off with a fright. As I approached, Mme d’Épinay threw her arms round my neck and burst into tears. This unexpected reception on the part of my old friend moved me greatly. I wept freely as well. I said a few words which had very little meaning; she replied with a few that meant even less, and it all ended there. The meal was served; we went to table where, apprehending an explanation which I supposed was only deferred till after supper, I cut a poor figure. For I am so overpowered by the least disturbance that may affect me that I cannot hide it from anyone of any perspicacity. My air of embarrassment should have given her courage. However she did not risk an encounter, and there was no more explanation after supper than before. Nor was there one the next day; and our silent tête-à-têtes were filled only by indifferent matters, or by a few polite remarks from me in which I observed that I could not yet say anything about the basis of my suspicions, and protested with real sincerity that if they proved ill-founded my whole life would be devoted to repairing my injustice. She did not reveal the slightest curiosity as to the precise nature of these suspicions, or as to how they had come to me; and all our reconciliation, both from her side and mine, consisted in the embrace of our first meeting. Since she alone was the offended party, at least formally, I did not think that it was my business to seek an explanation that she did not seek herself, and I returned home as I had come. Continuing in other respects on the same terms with her as before, I soon almost entirely forgot our quariel, and foolishly supposed that she had forgotten it herself, for she appeared no longer to remember it.
This, as will soon be seen, was not the only annoyance brought upon me by my weakness. I suffered others no less painful, which I had not brought upon myself, but which arose from other people’s attempts so to torment me in my solitude as to drag* me from it.
These troubles originated from Diderot and the Holbach clique. Since I had established myself at the Hermitage Diderot had not ceased to bother me either himself or by way of Deleyre; and I soon saw, from the latter’s jokes about my woodland wanderings, what pleasure they took in travestying the hermit as an amorous shepherd. But this was not the subject of my encounters with Diderot; they had a more serious cause. After the publication of The Natural Son he had sent me a copy, which I had read with the interest and attention one gives to a friend’s work. On reading the sort of poetics in dialogue form that he had appended to it I was surprised, and even a little saddened, co find among a number of unkind but bearable observations concerning those who live a solitary life, the following bitter sentence, which was unrelieved in its harshness: Only the wicked man is alone. This is equivocal and presents two meanings, as it seems to me: one of them is true, the other most untrue. For it is quite impossible that a man who is and wishes to be alone can or would injure anybody; and consequently he cannot be a wicked man. The sentence in itself, therefore, required an explanation, and all the more so from a writer who, when he printed it, had a friend living in solitary retirement. It seemed to me shocking and dishonourable for him to have published that without remembering his friend or, if he had remembered him, not to have made, at least in general terms, the honourable and just exception which he owed not only to that friend, but to so many philosophers of reputation who in all ages have sought peace and calm in retirement: sages whom for the first time in the history of the world a writer has dared with one stroke of the pen to condemn indiscriminately as so many scoundrels.
I was warmly attached to Diderot. I valued him sincerely, and I counted with entire confidence on similar feelings in him. But exasperated by the tireless persistence with which he eternally opposed me in my tastes, my inclinations, and my manner of life – in all those matters, in fact, which concerned me and me alone – revolted by the spectacle of a man younger than myself obstinately tryin
g to manage me like a child; sick of his readiness to make promises and his negligence in keeping them; weary of so many appointments made and broken by him, and of his trick of always making fresh ones and breaking them too; tired of waiting in vain three or four times a month on days fixed by himself and of dining alone in the evening after having gone as far as Saint-Denis to meet him and waited for him all day, I found my heart already full of his manifold unkindnesses. But this last seemed to me graver still, and wounded me even more deeply. I wrote to him to complain, but so mildly, so affectionately that the letter was soaked with my tears, and should have been touching enough to have drawn tears from him. No one could ever guess the nature of his reply to my charges. Here it is, word for word (Packet A, No. 33):
I am very glad that my work pleased you and touched you. Our opinions about hermits differ. Say whatever good of them you will, you will be the only one in the world of whom I shall think it true. There would be a great deal to say on the subject if it were possible to speak to you without annoying you. A woman of eighty! etc. I have been told of a phrase from a letter from Mme d’Épinay’s son which must have hurt you greatly, or else I do not know your intimate thoughts.
The last two phrases of this letter require an explanation. At the beginning of my stay at the Hermitage Mme Le Vasseur seemed to dislike the place and to find it too solitary. Her remarks on the subject were repeated to me, and I offered to send her back to Paris if she preferred it, to pay her rent and take the same care of her there as if she were still with me. She refused my offer, protesting that she was very happy at the Hermitage and that the country air was good for her. It was easy to see that this was true, for she seemed to be growing younger and was in much better health than in Paris. Thérèse even assured me that her mother would really have been very sorry if we had left the Hermitage, which was a truly delightful place to live, since she loved to potter about the garden and the orchard, of which she had the handling; and that she had only said what she had been told to say for the purpose of inducing me to return to Paris.
When this attempt did not succeed, they tried to obtain from my conscience what my naturally obliging nature had failed to give them, and declared that I was committing a crime in keeping that old lady there, far from the assistance which she might need at her age. It did not occur to them that she and many other old people whose life was prolonged by the excellent country air could obtain that assistance from Montmorency, which lay at my door. It was as if there were no old people except in Paris, and as if they were incapable of living anywhere else. Mme Le Vasseur, who ate a great deal and most voraciously, was subject to bilious attacks and to violent bouts of diarrhoea which lasted several days and acted as a corrective. At Paris she never did anything for them and let Nature take her course. She acted in the same way at the Hermitage, knowing very well that she could do nothing better. No matter: because there were no doctors or chemists in the country, to leave her there was to condemn her to death, although she enjoyed very good health there. Diderot ought to have fixed the age at which it is no longer permissible, under pain of trial for murder, to allow old people to live away from Paris.
This was one of the two grievous accusations which prevented his making any exception for my benefit in his pronouncement that only a wicked man is ever alone; and this was the meaning of his pathetic exclamation and of the etc. that he had so sweetly added to it. A woman of eighty, etc.
I could think of no better way of replying to his reproaches than by referring to Mme Le Vasseur herself. I asked her to express her feelings quite naturally to Mme d’Épinay. To put her more at her ease, I did not ask to see her letter, and I showed her the following that I had written to Mme d’Épinay on the subject of a reply that I had decided to make to a still harsher letter from Diderot, a reply which she had prevented me from sending.
Thursday
Mme Le Vasseur owes you a letter, my dear friend, and I have asked her to tell you frankly what she thinks. So that she may feel under no constraint, I have told her that I do not wish to see her letter, and I ask you not to tell me anything about its contents.
I will not send off my letter since you are against it. But as I feel deeply insulted, to agree that I am in the wrong would be to act with a baseness and falsehood which I could never consent to. Certainly the Gospel orders him who receives a blow to turn the other cheek, but not to ask for pardon. Do you remember the man in the play who exclaims as he gives another character a beating: ‘Now I am acting like a philosopher’?
Do not imagine that you can stop him from coming in the present bad weather. His anger will give him the time and strength that friendship fails to provide, and for the first time in his life he will arrive on the day he promised. He will strain himself to come and repeat with his own tongue the insults he has poured on me in his letters; I shall endure them with the utmost patience. He will return to Paris and fall ill and I shall be, as ever, a much hated man. What can I do? I must put up with it.
But do you not admire the wisdom of this man who one day proposed to fetch me to dinner at Saint-Denis in a coach, and to bring me back in the same way, and who a week later (Packet A, No. 34) finds that his finances only allow him to come to the Hermitage on foot? It is absolutely impossible that – to speak his language – this can be the expression of sincerity. For in that case his fortunes must have sustained some strange variations during that week.
I join in your grief at your mother’s illness. But, as you see, your sorrows are nothing like mine. It is less painful to see the people one loves stricken with illness than to find them unjust and cruel.
Good-bye, my dear friend, this is the last time that I shall speak to you of this wretched affair. You talk of going to Paris with a coolness that would rejoice me at any other time.
I told Diderot by letter, at Mme d’Épinay’s own suggestion, of what I had done in the matter of Mme Le Vasseur; and Mme Le Vasseur having chosen, as may be imagined, to stay at the Hermitage, where she enjoyed very good health, where she had always company and where she led a very pleasant life, Diderot no longer knew what crime to charge me with. So he construed this very precaution of mine into one, and did not fail to treat as yet another Mme Le Vasseur’s continued residence at the Hermitage, although she stayed entirely of her own free will, and although it had only rested with her, and still rested with her, to return and live in Paris, with the same assistance from me that she received when living with me.
This is the explanation of Diderot’s first reproach in his letter No. 33. The explanation of the second is in his letter No. 34:
The Man of Letters* must have written and told you that there were twenty poor men on the ramparts dying of hunger and cold, and waiting for the pittance you used to give them. That is a specimen of our small talk… and if you were to hear the rest you would be equally amused.
Here is my reply to this formidable argument of which Diderot seemed so proud:
I believe that I replied to the Man of Letters – who is the son of a farmer general – that I did not pity the poor whom he had seen on the ramparts waiting for my pittance; that he had apparently amply compensated them for its loss; that I appointed him my substitute; that the poor of Paris had no reason to complain of this substitution; and that I should not find it so easy to discover as good a one for the poor of Montmorency, who are in far greater need of one. There is a respectable old man here who, after labouring all his life, can now work no longer and is dying of hunger in his old age. My conscience is more gratified by the penny I give him every Monday than if I had distributed half a crown among all the beggars on the ramparts. You philosophers amuse me when you consider the inhabitants of cities the only people with whom you are in duty bound to concern yourselves. It is in the country that one learns to love and serve humanity; in the cities all one learns is to despise it.
Such were the strange scruples on the strength of which a man of intelligence was so foolish as seriously to turn my absence from Paris into a crim
e, and which made him try to prove to me by my own example that no one could live away from the capital without being a criminal. I do not understand to-day how I could have been so stupid as to answer him and to get annoyed, instead of merely laughing in his face. However Mme d’Épinay’s opinion and the clamouring of the Holbach clique had so hypnotized people in his favour that I was generally considered to be in the wrong in this matter; so much so that Mme d’Houdetot herself, who was a great admirer of Diderot, asked me to go and see him in Paris and make all the overtures for a reconciliation which, sincere and whole-hearted as it was on my side, was of short duration. The argument with which she conquered my heart was that Diderot, at that moment, was in distress. In addition to the storm aroused against the Encyclopaedia he was at that time the object of another most violent attack on the subject of his play which, despite the little note with which he had introduced it, he was accused of having taken complete from Goldoni. Diderot was even more sensitive to criticism than Voltaire, and this overwhelmed him. Mme de Graffigny had been so malicious as to circulate the rumour that I had seized this opportunity to break with him. It seemed to me only just and generous publicly to demonstrate the contrary, and I went to spend two days not only in his company but at his house. This was my second trip to Paris since I had settled at the Hermitage. My first had been to hurry to poor Gauffecourt who had had an apoplectic stroke, from which he never wholly recovered; during which time I never left his bedside until he was out of danger.
Diderot welcomed me cordially. How many wrongs can be wiped out by a friend’s embrace! After that, what resentment can remain in the heart? We did not enter into many explanations. There is no need of them when there have been insults on both sides. There is only one thing to do, to forget them. There had been no underhand plotting, at least so far as I was aware; it was not the same as with Mme d’Épinay. He showed me the plan of The Father of the Family* ‘There,’ I said, ‘is the best defence for The Natural Son. Keep silent, and work this piece over carefully. Then make your reply by just flinging it suddenly in your enemies’ faces.’ That is what he did, and it was most satisfactory. Almost six months before I had sent him the first two parts of Julie for his opinion. He had not read them yet. We read a portion of it together. He found it ‘inflated’ – that was his term, by which he meant repetitive and over-wordy. I had already felt this myself; but it was a delirious babbling. I have never been able to correct it. The last parts are not like that. The fourth, especially, and the sixth are masterpieces of language.