The Confessions

  A thousand incidents of the kind recurred to me; but one observation, which I was surprised to have been so long in making, struck me more forcibly still. I had introduced all my friends to Grimm, without exception; they had all become his. I had grown so inseparable from him that I should scarcely have wished to remain on visiting terms at any house where he was not accepted. There was only Mme de Créqui who refused to admit him, and her I almost gave up visiting from that moment. Grimm, for his part, made other friends, both on his own account and through the Count de Friése. Of all those friends not a single one ever became mine; he never even said a word to suggest that I should so much as make their acquaintance; and of all those people whom I met at times in his rooms not a single one ever showed me the least goodwill, not even the Count de Friése, in whose house he lived, and with whom it would consequently have been very pleasant for me to form some connexion, nor the Count de Schomberg, a relation of his, with whom Grimm was on still more intimate terms.

  Furthermore, my own friends, whom I made his, and who had all been devotedly attached to me before knowing him, perceptibly changed their behaviour to me after that. He never introduced me to any of his friends. I introduced him to all mine, and finally he took them all away from me. If such is the fruits of friendship, what can be the fruits of hate?

  Even Diderot, at the outset, several times warned me that though I placed so much confidence in Grimm he was not my friend. Subsequently he changed his tone, when he had ceased to be a friend of mine also.

  The means by which I had disposed of my children had required no one’s assistance. I had, however, informed my friends of it, simply so that they should be informed, and that I should not appear in their eyes a better man than I was. These friends were three in number: Diderot, Grimm, and Mme d’Épinay. Duclos, who most deserved my confidence, was the only one to whom I did not give it. He knew nevertheless; I do not know who told him. It is hardly probable that Mme d’Épinay was guilty of this breach of confidence, for she knew that if I were to be equally disloyal – had I been capable of such action – I was in a position to take cruel revenge on her. There remained Grimm and Diderot, then so closely united in so many ways, especially against me, that the crime was more than likely a collaboration between them. I would wager that Duclos, to whom I did not tell my secret and who consequently was under no obligation to keep it, was the only one who did.

  When Grimm and Diderot were planning to detach my womenfolk from me they had tried to make him join in their schemes; but he had always scornfully refused. It was only subsequently that I learnt from him what had passed between them on this subject. But I learned sufficient at the time from Thérèse to see that there was some secret plan behind all this, and that they wanted to make arrangements for me if not against my wishes, certainly without my knowledge; or at least that they wanted to use Thérèse and her mother as instruments for some hidden purpose. All this was assuredly far from honest, and Duclos’s opposition proves the point beyond controversy. Let anyone who will, believe that this was friendship.

  Their alleged friendship was as disastrous to me abroad as at home. Their long and frequent conversations with Mme Le Vasseur lasting over several years had sensibly altered that lady’s feelings for me, and this change was certainly not in my favour. What were they discussing then at their strange meetings? Why this deep mystery? Was this old woman’s conversation agreeable enough to win her such great favour, and important enough to be made so great a secret of? Throughout the three or four years that these meetings had lasted, they had seemed quite ludicrous to me. But when I thought over them, I began to feel some astonishment. This astonishment would have turned to apprehension if I had known at the time what that woman was preparing against me.

  In spite of Grimm’s pretended zeal on my behalf, of which he made a public boast, though it was difficult to reconcile with the tone he adopted towards me when we were together, I gained nothing from it in any direction; and the sympathy which he pretended to feel for me tended rather to humiliate me than to assist me. He even deprived me, in so far as he could, of the resource I found in my chosen trade, by decrying me as a poor copyist; and I admit that here he was speaking the truth. But it was not his business to do so. He demonstrated that this was no joke by making use of another copyist himself and depriving me of every one of my customers whom he could. It might have been said that his plan was to make me depend on him and on his backing for my subsistence, and to cut off my means of support until I was reduced to that condition.

  When I had considered all this, my reason at last silenced my old prejudice in his favour, which was still vocal. I came to the conclusion that his character was at least very suspicious and, as for his friendship, I decided that it was a lie. Then, having resolved to see him no more, I advised Mme d’Épinay of my decision, which I supported by several incontrovertible facts, which I have now forgotten.

  She strongly opposed this decision, though she did not quite know how to answer the arguments on which I based it. She had not yet gone into league with him; but next day, instead of giving me a verbal explanation she sent me a very clever letter which they had composed together, and in which she made my suspecting him of treachery towards a friend into a crime, and urged me to make it up with him. That letter staggered me. In a conversation which we had later on, at which I found her better prepared than she had been on the first occasion, I allowed myself to be overcome and persuaded myself that my judgement might have been false; in which case I had really committed a grave injustice towards a friend, which I ought to remedy. In short, I did what I had already done several times with Diderot and with Baron d’Holbach; half of my own volition and half out of weakness, I made all the advances which I had the right to demand from him. I went to Grimm, like another George Dandin,* to offer him apologies for the wrongs he had done to me, trusting once more in the false belief, which has caused me to humiliate myself a thousand times before my self-styled friends – the belief that there is no hatred that cannot be disarmed by gentleness and honest behaviour. Whereas, on the contrary, the hatred of wicked men is only increased by the impossibility of finding any justification for it; and the feeling of their own injustice is only an additional grievance against the object of their dislike. Without straying from my own story, I can adduce a very strong proof of this axiom in the cases of Grimm and Tronchin, who had become my two most implacable enemies entirely of their own volition, for the pleasure of it, and out of sheer caprice, though unable to adduce any wrong of any kind that I had ever done to either of them.* Yet their savagery grows from day to day, like that of tigers, from the ease with which they are able to satiate it.

  I expected Grimm to be put out by my condescension and my advances, and to receive me with open arms and the friendliest affection. He greeted me like a Roman emperor, with a haughtiness that I have never seen in anyone else. I was not at all prepared for this welcome. When in my embarrassment at playing a part so ill-suited to me, I had sheepishly explained the purpose of my visit in very few words, before receiving me back into favour he most majestically treated me to a long harangue which he had prepared, and which included the lengthy enumeration of his rare virtues, chief of which was his capacity for friendship. He dwelt for some time on one point which at first struck me forcibly: that, as was well known, he always kept his friends. While he was talking I muttered to myself that it would be very unkind of me to make myself the only exception to this rule, and he returned to it so often and with such emphasis that I ended by thinking that, if in this he was merely obeying the promptings of his heart he would be less struck by the idea, and that he was merely using it as a device which he considered useful for his purposes of self-advancement. Up to that time I had been in the same situation, I had always kept all my friends; since my tenderest childhood I had never lost a single one, except by death, and yet I had not hitherto reflected on the subject. It was not a rule that I had prescribed for myself. Since this was an advantage which we posse
ssed in common, why did he then boast of it as his alone, unless he was looking forward to robbing me of the right to make such a claim? He then proceeded to humiliate me by proving how much our common friends preferred him to me. I was as well aware of this preference as he. The question was by what right it had been won, whether through merit or skill, by raising himself or trying to push me down. In the end, when he had placed all the distance he could wish between himself and me, and quite sufficient to enhance the value of the favour he was about to grant me, he gave me the kiss of peace with a light embrace rather like the accolade conferred by the King on new-made knights. I was flabbergasted, I did not know what to say, I could not utter a word. The whole scene reminded me of a schoolmaster’s reprimand to a pupil whom he is letting off a flogging. I never think of it without feeling how misleading are all judgements based on appearances, to which the vulgar attach such weight, and how often boldness and pride accompany guilt, while shame and embarrassment are the attributes of innocence. We were reconciled; and this at least was a relief to my feelings, which are always plunged into mortal anguish by quarrels. It will be obvious that a reconciliation of that kind did not change his behaviour; it merely deprived me of the right to complain of it. Therefore I made up my mind to endure everything and say no more.

  So many distresses, one after another, threw me into a state of depression which hardly left me sufficient strength to regain my self-control. With no reply from Saint-Lambert, neglected by Mme d’Houdetot, and without the courage to take anyone else into my confidence, I began to fear that by making friendship the idol of my heart I had wasted my life in sacrifices to a chimera. The proof of it was that, out of all my friends I had only two men left who still possessed my full esteem, and in whom my heart could trust: Duclos, of whom I had lost sight since I had settled at the Hermitage, and Saint-Lambert. I felt that my only way of atoning for the wrongs I had done the latter would be by opening my heart to him unreservedly; and I resolved to make him a full confession of everything in so far as it did not compromise his mistress. I have no doubt that this decision was yet another trap set me by my infatuation in order to keep me closer to her. But I certainly should have thrown myself unreservedly into her lover’s arms, have submitted myself wholly to his guidance, and have carried my frankness to the greatest possible extreme. Indeed I was on the point of writing him a second letter, to which I am sure he would have replied, when I learnt the sad cause of his failure to answer the first. He had been unable to withstand the rigours of that campaign to the end. Mme d’Épinay informed me that he had just had a paralytic stroke; and Mme d’Houdetot, who had herself become ill with grief and was not in a fit state to write to me at the moment, sent me a message two or three days afterwards from Paris, where she had gone, to the effect that he was going to be moved to Aix-la-Chapelle to take the baths. I will not say that this news distressed me as it did her, but I wonder whether the weight I felt on my heart was less painful than her grief and tears. Sorrow at the news of his sad condition, aggravated by the fear that disquietude might have contributed to it, affected me more than anything that had happened to me till then, and I was cruelly conscious of my inability to find in my own self-esteem the fortitude necessary to withstand such a grief. Happily this generous friend did not leave me long in my depression; despite his seizure he did not forget me, and I very soon learnt that I had misjudged both his feelings and his condition. But it is time to come to the great revolution in my destiny, to the catastrophe which divided my life into two such different parts, and which from a trivial cause produced such terrible effects.

  One day when I was least expecting it, Mme d’Épinay sent for me. As I went in, I saw in her eyes and in her whole face an uneasy expression, which particularly struck me since it was unusual in her. For no one in the world knew better than she how to control her face and her movements. ‘My friend,’ she said, ‘I am leaving for Geneva. My chest is in a bad state, and my health is deteriorating so rapidly that I must abandon everything, and go to consult Tronchin.’ This decision, so rapidly made and at the beginning of the bad weather, considerably astonished me because there had been no question of this when I had left her thirty-six hours before. I asked her whom she would take with her. She said, her son and M. de Linant, and then added carelessly: ‘And you, my dear bear, won’t you come too?’ As I did not think she was speaking seriously, since she knew that in the approaching season of the year I was scarcely in a state to leave my room, I made some joke about the advantages of one sick person s company to another. She did not herself seem to have meant the proposal seriously, and no more was said about it. All we spoke about were the preparations for her journey, into which she entered with lively interest, having made up her mind to leave in a fortnight.

  I did not need much penetration to realize that there was a hidden purpose in this journey, which was being kept from me. The secret, which was a secret for no one in the house but me, was discovered the very next day by Thérèse, to whom it was revealed by Tessier the steward, who had it from the lady’s maid. Although I do not owe it to Mme d’Épinay to keep this secret, since I did not learn it from her, it is too closely connected with those that she did tell me for me to make a distinction; so I shall preserve silence on this head. But these secrets, which have never escaped, and will never escape, from my mouth or pen, have become known to so many people that no one in Mme d’Épinay’s circle can possibly be ignorant of them.

  When I heard the real purpose of this journey I should have recognized the secret workings of some enemy’s hand in this attempt to make me into Mme d’Épinay’s escort. But as she had made so little effort to persuade me, I persisted in regarding her suggestion as no serious one, and merely laughed at the fine figure I should have cut if I had been so foolish as to undertake the errand. Besides, she gained considerably by my refusal, for she succeeded in persuading her husband himself to go with her.

  Several days later I received from Diderot a note which I shall now transcribe. This note, which was simply folded in two, in such a way that all its contents could be read without difficulty, was addressed to me at Mme d’Épinay’s and entrusted to M. de Linant, the son’s tutor and the mother s confidant.

  Diderot’s Letter

  (Packet A, No. 52)

  I was fated to love you and to bring you trouble. I learn that Mme d’Épinay is going to Geneva, and I have not heard that you are to accompany her. My friend, if you feel warmly towards Mme d’Épinay, you must go with her, and if you do not you must go even more readily. If you are weighed down by your obligations towards her, here is a chance of partly discharging them and relieving your mind. Will you find any other occasion in your life for showing her your gratitude? She is going to a place where she will be like a stranger dropped from the clouds. She is ill; she will need amusement and distractions. And it is winter too. Just think, my friend. Your health may be a stronger objection than I suppose. But are you any worse to-day than you were a month ago, or than you will be at the beginning of spring? Will you make the journey in three months’ time with any greater ease than to-day? For myself, I must say that if I could not bear a carriage I would take up a stick and follow her. And then are you not afraid that your behaviour may be misinterpreted? You will be suspected of ingratitude or of some other secret motive. I know that, whatever you do, the testimony of your conscience will always speak in your favour. But is that testimony alone sufficient? Is it permissible entirely to ignore the opinion of others? I am writing this letter to fulfil an obligation towards you and towards myself. If it displeases you throw it in the fire, and pay no more attention to it than if it had never been written. Farewell, I love you and I embrace you.

  I trembled with such rage and was so utterly astounded as I read this letter, that I could hardly get to the end. But this did not prevent me from observing the skill with which Diderot affected a milder, more affectionate, and franker tone than in any of his other letters, in which he simply addressed me as ‘my dear’,
without condescending to call me ‘friend’. I easily saw the indirect procedure by which this letter had reached me; its signature, its style, and the hands through which it had passed betrayed their underhand method clumsily enough. For we generally wrote to one another by the post or by the Montmorency messenger, and this was the first and only time he had used this channel.