The latter had but lately said to Madame d'Epinay "I see in Rousseau nothing but pride concealed everywhere about him; you will do him a very sorry service in giving him a home at the Hermitage, but you will do yourself a still more sorry one.

Solitude will complete the blackening of his imagination; he will fancy all his friends unjust, ungrateful, and you first of all, if you once refuse to be at his beck and call; he will accuse you of having bothered him to live under your roof and of having prevented him from yielding to the wishes of his country.

I already see the germ of these accusations in the turn of the letters you have shown me." Rousseau quarrelled with Madame d'Epinay, and shortly afterwards with all the philosophical circle: Grimm, Helvetius, D'Holbach, Diderot; his quarrels with the last were already of old date, they had made some noise.

"Good God!" said the Duke of Castries in astonishment, "wherever I go I hear of nothing but this Rousseau and this Diderot! Did anybody ever?
Fellows who are nobody, fellows who have no house, who lodge on a third floor! Positively, one can't stand that sort of thing!" The rupture was at last complete, it extended to Grimm as well as to Diderot.
"Nobody can put himself in my place," wrote Rousseau, "and nobody will see that I am a being apart, who has not the character, the maxims, the resources of the rest of them, and who must not be judged by their rules." Rousseau was right; he was a being apart; and the philosophers could not forgive him for his independence.

His merits as well as his defects annoyed them equally: his "Lettre contre les Spectacles" had exasperated Voltaire, the stage at Deuces as in danger.