The great Encyclop?dia of Diderot and d’Alembert was to bring light to the people; the ‘Literary Correspondence’ of Melchior Grimm was to bring light to kings. The Encyclop?dia was the conception of those who knew that they were preparing mighty changes, but who did not live to see them; the ‘Literary Correspondence’ was the work of a man whose shrewd eyes foresaw little, but who lived to see all. The Encyclop?dia is dead, as a great man dies, having finished his work. The ‘Correspondence’—which could not cure those royal maladies, blindness, ignorance, and hardness of heart—still lives a gay little life as the most perfect contemporary record of any literary epoch in history.

 

In 1753, the sensibilities of sentimental Paris were most agreeably touched by the pathetic story of a young gentleman who, having had his suit rejected by a charming opera-dancer, Mademoiselle
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FRéDéRIC-MELCHIOR GRIMM.

From an Engraving, after Carmontelle, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

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Fel, straightway took to his bed and to a trance in which he passed whole nights and days, ‘without speaking, hearing, or answering, as if he were dead.’ The Abbé Raynal and Jean Jacques Rousseau constituted themselves his nurses. They were both too romantic, and too much the children of their time, to try the common-sense expedient of leaving the rejected lover severely alone, or of throwing a bucket of cold water over him. But when Rousseau saw a smile on the doctor’s face as he left the patient’s room, his heart began to harden a little. And, sure enough, one fine morning up gets the invalid, dresses, resumes his ordinary course of life and never again mentions his malady to his nurses—even to thank them.

Frédéric Melchior Grimm was, however, no sentimental fool. He was, indeed, one of the most keen-witted of his great nation, though, like many other children of the Fatherland, he had on the surface of his worldly wisdom a fine layer of Teutonic sentimentality. If the Briton finds the sentiment mawkish, not so the Frenchman. Grimm’s extraordinary disease became his passport into the most exclusive circles in Paris.

Born at Ratisbon on September 26, 1723, with a poor Lutheran pastor for a father, he had always known that he must make his own way in life, and{152} had always made it. At school he found a useful friend in one of Baron Schomberg’s sons, and continued the friendship at the University of Leipzig. When he was still a student there, he wrote a play, ‘Banise,’ which, before he left, he was a sufficiently just and astute critic to find ‘pitiable.’ On leaving Leipzig he went to live in the Schombergs’ house, as tutor to his friend’s younger brother. Frederick the Great had already made the French language the fashion; and as at the Schombergs’ Grimm heard nothing else, he soon learnt to speak and read it. In 1748 came the first opportunity of his life; he took his pupil to Paris, and remained there after the boy had returned to his family.

To say that Grimm throughout his existence always fell on his feet, would be a misleading idiom. He always fell on his head. The moment he found himself thrown into a new set of circumstances, his calm judgment skilfully arranged them to the very best advantage. At this time he was twenty-five years old, rather tall and imposing looking, something of a dandy in his dress (his enemies declared that he powdered his face and scented himself like a woman), with very little money in hand, no prospects, and a retrospect of that dismal failure ‘Banise,’ and that ‘thin travelling tutorship.’ In a very short time he got{153} himself appointed as reader to the Duke of Saxe-Gotha. The salary was thin enough here too; but the Duke was a great person, and the Duchess was the friend and the correspondent of Voltaire, and to be, for the rest of her life, the friend and correspondent of Melchior Grimm as well. He was not long in finding a situation much more lucrative and responsible.

In 1749, he became secretary, guide, and friend to a certain dissipated young dog of a Comte de Frise, or Frisen, who was always borrowing money of his famous uncle, Marshal Saxe, and certainly needed a prudent Grimm to look after him.

If Grimm was only, or principally, honest because honesty is the best policy, if he did his duty because in the long run duty is the surest road to happiness, yet the facts remain that he did act uprightly, and that he had settled principles, a strict course of conduct and a strong line of action, in an age when no motives, good, bad, or indifferent, produced such happy results in his friends.

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{154} 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{155} 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.{156}

In 1755 he began what was to be the work of his life and is his true title to glory, the ‘Literary Correspondence.’

The idea of communicating to the sovereigns of Europe by letter, news of the literature, science, and philosophy of Paris, that centre of the world’s cultivation, was not a new one. In limiting the freedom of the press, sovereigns had limited their own freedom. Newspapers were official bulletins, not daring to utter unacceptable truths or unpalatable opinions on any truths. Kings, as well as their subjects, yawned over journals of this kind. So King Frederick the Great originated the idea of paying an intelligent man in Paris to write him direct the news and the gossip of the capital. Theriot, Voltaire’s friend, filled the post very unsuccessfully, and Frederick complained bitterly that Theriot never had a cold in his head without scribbling four pages of rodomontade to tell him about it. La Harpe occupied the same position to the Czarevitch Paul, and Suard and the Abbé Raynal, Grimm’s nurse and friend, to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha.

The idea was good, but it had been badly worked out. As Diderot and d’Alembert quickened into mighty life the little Encyclop?dia of Chambers, so Grimm breathed vitality into the languishing ‘Literary Correspondence.’ He saw in it, first of{157} all, the germ of a great career; but he saw in it, too, an influence which, by informing the minds of kings, might change the destiny of kingdoms. To teach the people was difficult in those days; to teach their rulers was well nigh impossible. Here, then, was a chance, the one splendid chance, of showing them the progress of the world, the ominous advance of knowledge and of the old order towards the new. Raynal handed over to Grimm the correspondence he had established with the Courts of the north and south of Germany; and with this small connection Grimm began his work.

The ‘Literary Correspondence’ remains to-day the only literary review which has survived the passage of time, and is still not merely a great name, but a great living work. The ‘Spectator’ and the ‘Tatler’ of Addison and Steele are kept eternally fresh by an exquisite charm of style; but they rarely aspired to serious criticism, and are mainly a record of modes and manners, not of literature or of science. The ‘Literary Correspondence’ is as much to-day as on the day it was written, the guide-book to the letters, the art, and the drama of the eighteenth century; the open door to its society and to the mind of cultivated Paris; a book which is equally indispensable to the scholar or to the novelist writing of its period,{158} and which is certainly both the most instructive and the most amusing literary compilation extant.

Of no settled length and in manuscript, it was despatched to its subscribers twice a month. It had no fixed price, its readers paying as much as they chose for it, or as much as Grimm could make them pay. His old friend the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha was, as has been seen, one of his first subscribers. The Landgrave of Hesse, the Queen of Sweden, and Catherine the Great of Russia soon joined his select and limited clientèle. Stanislas Augustus, King of Poland, the Margrave of Anspach, and the Grand Duke of Tuscany joined later. Frederick the Great, after his unlucky experience with Theriot, was extremely dilatory and vacillating in having anything to do with it; when he did add his name to the list of subscribers he never paid his subscription and harried Grimm to insert the scandals and the on dits of the cafés and the Court, which Grimm declined to do.

For greater security, the sheets did not go through the post, but through the legations of the various countries. The thing was, in fact, a secret, and a well-kept secret, for more than half a century, and never knew the danger of print until it was published in 1812, under the Empire, with many cautious Napoleonic omissions. In the meantime, its secrecy and the limited number of{159} its readers gave the discreet Grimm, who declared that the most enlightened reasoning was not worth a night in the Bastille, and who was cautious to the very fibre of his bones, the opportunity of being at once candid, impartial, and safe.

He set forth a flaming prospectus, promising an ‘unlimited truthfulness.’ The sheets shall be ‘dedicated to confidence and frankness!’ They were. To those distant Courts and Kings there went forth every fortnight the inimitable criticisms of the most bold, just, and cool critic who ever breathed. He not only analysed, with extraordinary brilliancy and fairness, the writings of Voltaire, of friend Rousseau, and of Buffon, but he sat in discerning judgment on the works of English novelists and poets. He criticised books which have not lived, in criticisms which are undying. As to the value and the longevity of the productions, he was sometimes, naturally and inevitably, mistaken; but as a rule his opinions have been confirmed by posterity and have weathered the test of time.

He also described to his readers the condition of the drama, the plots of the plays, the art of the players. Of course he was clever enough if the season was rather a dull one, to fill out his pages with extracts from a tragedy or from a novel; sometimes, it is said, the ingenious man gave{160} quotations from works which had never been written.

He dealt with medical questions, and did not think it beneath his dignity to examine the merits of a mouth-wash. He wrote many pages on Tronchin, the great physician, and on inoculation. Here, surely, was one of the chances to enlighten kings—kings who, more than any other class of men, suffered and died from the ignorant tyranny of their physicians, and who had to wait eighteen centuries before any man told them that fresh air was a valuable property, and health a kingdom to be taken by temperance, soberness, and chastity.

If there was a scientific marvel in the air, such as ventriloquism, why, of course, Grimm must tell his correspondents about that; and the music, French or Italian, of the capital, must also receive its comment. Then there was the news of the day, and of Academical disputes, and, though Grimm had declared he would not report them, occasional piquant anecdotes with a sufficient spice of scandal in them to have pleased King Frederick.

He further drew pen-portraits of celebrities. Nothing could be more fair and shrewd than Grimm’s character-sketches. He solves in them the supreme difficulty—how to be at once honest and charitable.{161}

Next there is an epigram to be reported. While a charade that has amused a Parisian line lady is surely good enough for a German duchess!

Politics were supposed to be excluded, and they were excluded in the sense that there were no remarks on public events until those events had become so notorious that the ‘Correspondence’ did not add to its readers’ knowledge of them. But though, or because, he wrote for governors, Grimm adduced his theories on government, he himself believing in the divine rights neither of the ‘Social Contract’ nor of kings. To his views on tolerance, finance, and education, he gave utterance soberly, thoughtfully, and at length. He had a subscription list in his paper for Voltaire’s unfortunate protégés, the Calas; and if his pen was to flow freely, as he had promised, how could he stay his indignation against the trial and the sacrifice of the Chevalier de la Barre?

To the friend and intimate of the philosophers, the most ordinary event suggested philosophical reflections. His religious views could hardly help appearing; but Grimm’s was a quiet agnosticism, and had nothing in common with the excited certainties of Diderot’s unbelief. He had, of course, his theories on women, on art, and on languages; and he aired them all. He brought out, in the same tantalising fashion in which serials are now{162} produced in weekly illustrated newspapers, Diderot’s two novels.

He was himself not only the first critic of his day, but he was thinker as well as chronicler, worldling and scholar, reporter and savant. Foreigner though he was, he had learnt to write the French language in a style inimitably clear, supple, and forcible. His command of irony alone should have been a fortune to him. Add to this, his singularly wise, calm head, and his unrivalled position as the friend of the women of the salons and the nobility of Paris as well as of its writers and politicians. Further, this critic of music was himself a musician, this judge of authors himself an author. He lived in one of the most momentous and thrilling periods in the history of this earth, and in one of the most stimulating of her cities, and was able to write wholly without fear of consequence for readers of whose intelligent interest he was sure, while he had ever before him the magnificent hope of so opening the hearts and feeding the knowledge of those readers that they might turn and do good unto their people and be a blessing, and not a curse, to their lands.

Consider all this, and it is not marvellous that Grimm remains the first journalist and the ‘Literary Correspondence’ the first newspaper in the world.{163}

It is hardly necessary to say that it gave its editor an enormous amount of work. Chaise de paille, his friends called him in allusion to his diligence; later, when he began to travel, Grimm suggested the nickname should be altered to chaise de poste. He had many secretaries working under him. One, Meister, was attached to him all his life, and benefited largely under his will. When he was away from Paris the good-natured Diderot made a brilliant substitute; and Madame d’épinay took up a delicate pen to become the first, and surely the most charming, of women journalists.

Only a few months after his arrival in Paris Grimm had been introduced to this little black-eyed, bright-witted, and all too seductive wife of a worthless husband. In 1752, at Frisen’s table, he had heard her name insulted, and had fought a duel for its honour. By 1755, on his return from his journey with d’Holbach, he became a familiar figure in her salon. First her wise and masterful friend, he was soon her despotic lover.

It is always a vexed point of morals to determine how far right can come out of wrong, how far a cause initially bad can be said to be good in its results. It must certainly be conceded in Grimm’s case that, having put himself into a false position and remaining there, he acted not only sensibly and discreetly, but even honestly and{164} conscientiously. He found Madame d’épinay silly, as are so many clever women, and he insisted on her behaving with judgment and discretion. One of his first acts was to demand that her old lover, Francueil, whom she still permitted to visit her as a friend, should be given his dismissal. With Duclos, man of letters, and of character rough, dissipated, and unscrupulous, he bade her break entirely. Then he turned to Rousseau.

It has been justly said of Grimm that he never lost a friend save Jean Jacques. In 1756 Madame d’épinay, acting on one of those excessively foolish impulses which she herself felt to be wholly fascinating, and which had already more than once shipwrecked her life, gave Rousseau the little Hermitage in the forest of Montmorency, close to her own country-house of La Chevrette.

Grimm had not known Rousseau for six years without knowing his heart. He looked up suddenly from the ‘Correspondence.’ ‘You have done Rousseau a bad service,’ he told Madame d’épinay sternly, ‘and yourself a worse.’ Still, it was done. In 1757, that belle laide, Madame d’Houdetot, also had a house close to La Chevrette, and there attracted the notice of Rousseau. After a brief summer day of delight, she grew tired of her vehement admirer, or her lover, Saint-Lambert,{165} grew tired of him for her. At any rate, there burst over those three houses in the Montmorency forest a storm of fierce passions and scandalous recriminations. All Paris stood watching. Diderot plunged impulsively into that angry sea. Rousseau accused Madame d’épinay, in terms which no self-respecting woman could have forgiven, of being the writer of a certain fatal anonymous letter; and she forgave him. Grimm had been appointed secretary to the Duke of Orleans, and was absent on duty in Westphalia. He did not spare his little mistress’s pusillanimous weakness. ‘Your excuses are feeble ... you have committed a very great fault,’ he wrote. Hurrying home, he dealt with Rousseau in terms of unmistakable plainness. He made Madame d’épinay cast him off there, at once, and for ever, and carried her off to Geneva on the excuse, a just excuse in every sense, of her health.

But the consequences of her folly were not ended. Rousseau defamed her character in the ‘Confessions,’ and in that unique masterpiece of scurrility he speaks of Grimm as ‘a tiger whose fury increases daily.’ Diderot declared that Jean Jacques made him believe in the existence of the devil and of hell. But Grimm wrote an obituary notice of Rousseau in his ‘Correspondence’ of admirable justice and moderation, and spoke of{166} him as ‘embittered by sorrows which were of his own making but not the less real,’ and as ‘a soul at once too weak and too strong to bear quietly the burden of life.’ It must be allowed that Grimm could be magnanimous.

Having saved Madame d’épinay from her friends, it remained to him to save her from herself. At Geneva he put her under the care of the great and good Tronchin, and made her write for the ‘Correspondence.’ He helped her to manage the miserable remains of the fortune her husband’s mad extravagance had left her, supervised the education of her children, and even showed her the harm she did them by speaking disrespectfully of their father. His love was not fervent, perhaps, but it corrected her follies and her weakness, and made her do and be her best. It had at least some of the tokens of a good and honourable feeling.

These visits to Geneva were undoubtedly the happiest time in her life. On this first one, which lasted eight months, from February to October 1759, she and Grimm often saw and talked with Voltaire; and Grimm greatly appreciated the society of the solid and sensible Genevans and the cultivated Tronchins. Mademoiselle Fel came to stay with Voltaire at Les Délices, and when Grimm saw her there he proved convincingly the truth that ‘the man’s love, once gone, never returns.{167}’ But his real passion was not even for Madame d’épinay. His dominant taste was his ambition; his dearest mistress, his career.

Already secretary to the Duke of Orleans, on the last evening of his stay at Geneva, he heard the satisfactory news that he was made Envoy for Frankfort at the Court of France. True, M. l’Ambassadeur, as Diderot called him, soon lost his post by joking in a despatch at the expense of an official person; but none the less he was rising in the world. Presently he was busy settling M. d’épinay’s bankruptcy and helping Madame to arrange a satisfactory marriage for her daughter. Tyran le Blanc he was called by her and her circle. But, after all, no woman is happy till she has met her master. Well for her if she find one as judicious and upright as Melchior Grimm.

He was less with her as the years went by, though not in any sense less faithful. In 1762 the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha appointed him her chargé d’affaires; and when she died her husband made him Councillor of Legation, with a pension.

He met Frederick the Great when he was travelling in Germany in 1769; and Frederick, forgetting his grievance that Grimm would not turn the ‘Correspondence’ into a scandalous society newspaper, fell under the spell of his fellow-countryman’s encyclop?dical knowledge{168} and dignified affability. Grimm, said Meister, had the rare talent of living with great people without losing any of the freedom and independence of his character.

When he was nearly fifty years old, in 1771, he resumed an employment of his youth, and, at a very large salary, consented to be tutor to the Hereditary Prince of Hesse, a boy about nineteen. The pair went to England and were well received at its ultra-German Court. Grimm was delighted with ‘the simplicity, the naturalness, and the good sense’ of the English character. The Landgravine, young Hesse’s mother, sold her diamonds that her son might prolong his visit in so delightful a country. And then Grimm brought him back to Paris and formed his mind and manners in the society of d’Holbach and Diderot, of Madame Necker and Madame Geoffrin.

In 1773, tutor and pupil went to St. Petersburg to attend the marriage of Wilhelmina, the Prince of Hesse’s sister, with the Czarevitch Paul. In a very short time the skilful Grimm had gained the great Catherine’s interest and consideration. Even Diderot’s warm heart and glowing genius (he was staying at the Russian Court when Grimm arrived there) did not win her so well as the German’s delicate tact and keen perceptions. Herself before all things a great statesman, how should she not{169} respect the shrewd judgment, the strength, and the determination of a Grimm? It is so rare to be clever and wise! It was most rare in the eighteenth century. Two or three times a week Grimm dined with her Majesty en petit comité—those dinners at which all men were equal, and at which no servants appeared to hamper the conversation. Afterwards she talked alone with him by the hour together. He told Madame Geoffrin how, when he left her, he would pace his room all night with the splendid ideas she had suggested coursing through his sleepless brain: ‘The winter of 1773-74 passed for me,’ he said, ‘en ivresse continuelle.’ But when Catherine would have permanently attached him to her service, his stern good sense helped him to refuse. There is no such dead-weight on genius as a post at Court—be it the Court of a Catherine or a Frederick—and Grimm knew it. ‘I have never seen you hesitate about anything,’ Madame d’épinay had once written to him; ‘when you have once decided with your just, strong mind, it is for ever.’

His refusal was unalterable, and he returned to Paris. He was sure enough of his firmness to visit his royal friend again, two years later, in 1776. He had been acting tutor once more, to the two Counts Romanzoff this time. He had taken them to Naples to embrace Galiani, to Ferney to see{170} Voltaire, and to Berlin to see Frederick. They arrived in Petersburg in time for the second marriage of the Czarevitch, of whose first marriage, with Wilhelmina of Hesse, Grimm had been the principal promoter. Catherine received him with the same flattering interest and offers, but he was as deaf to them as before. Then she gave him the title of Colonel—to the intense amusement of King Frederick—and appointed him her general agent in Paris at a salary of ten thousand livres.

After his return to the capital this appointment formed a very large occupation in his life.

His frequent absences had naturally not been the best thing in the world for the ‘Literary Correspondence,’ but it would have been a much worse thing if Diderot—Grimm’s ‘patient milch-cow whom he can milk an essay from or a volume from when he lists’—had not been there to do his work. The ‘Correspondence’ rightly appears with Diderot’s name as well as Grimm’s on its title-page. In these latter years, indeed, its readers often had to be content, not with Diderot, but with a mere Meister; and when Grimm did write himself it was sometimes carelessly and in a hurry. Not quite the first, or the last, perhaps, to commit that literary enormity, he occasionally reviewed books he had not taken the trouble to read.{171}

His letters to and from Catherine, after the first few years, were not conveyed through the post, but by special messenger, and are therefore delightfully outspoken. Grimm’s contain indeed a good deal of flattery and exaggeration; but Catherine’s are spontaneous enough. She used to say she was as ‘frankly an original as the most determined Englishman.’ The pair wrote sometimes in French and sometimes in German. They had nicknames for most of the crowned heads in Europe. Of ‘Brother George of England’ Catherine had always spoken with contempt, and considered his loss of the American colonies as ‘a State treason.’ But much of the correspondence was devoted to mere homely details. As her agent, Grimm bought the imperial rouge for the imperial cheeks, pictures, books, and bon-bons. He took long journeys in her interest: he supplied her with architects when she caught a fever for building; and presently, having been discreet matchmaker for the Hesses and the Czarevitch, he was commissioned to play the same delicate part for the Czarevitch’s daughters.

He was living now in the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. His love of music was still strong, and on young Mozart’s visits to Paris, Grimm was his kindest and most influential patron. The next few years saw the deaths of many old friends{172}—of Voltaire, of Diderot, of Frederick the Great, of d’Holbach, and of Madame d’épinay. For ever trying to conciliate all men, poor little volatile, self-deceived deceiver, under Grimm’s masterful influence the best qualities of her nature had come to the fore and the worst receded. She was to the last true to him as she had never been true to anyone else. Grimm adopted her grand-daughter and married her to the Comte de Bueil.

So far, his own life had been singularly happy and successful. If he had loved unwisely, he had taken care that the affection should never be of that inordinate kind which is its own punishment. He had, too, one of the dearest solaces of declining life in seeing young people growing up about him. As to his career, he was not only attached to the royal house of Orleans, but he was by now Catherine’s Councillor of State, Minister Plenipotentiary to the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, and Baron of the Viennese Empire. He was a rich man, with a fine collection of books, pictures, and vertu. He should have died before 1789.

In that year came the stunning fall of the Bastille. Of liberty, Grimm had talked easily enough, but he had also been shrewd enough to doubt its promises. He had at least nothing of the calm confidence of the fine ladies of the old régime who drove out from modish Paris through{173} the Faubourg Saint-Antoine to look at the ruins of the great prison, as at a sight prepared—for their amusement. To the wary German the destruction of the Bastille spelt the ruin of France. The Revolution sped on—Vengeance rushing through the night with a drawn sword in her hand.

In 1790 came the great emigration of the nobles. Who should be suspect if not this correspondent of kings? Grimm fled to Frankfort; but in two months’ time he plunged again into the whirlpool of Paris, to rescue the Comtesse de Bueil, his dear adopted grandchild, then in sore straits. He took her to Aix-la-Chapelle; but in October 1791 he returned himself to the capital, to get the Empress’s letters out of France if he could. He found he had already been denounced in the committees as carrying on a correspondence with her ‘little favourable to the Revolution.’ His only chance of safety lay, he saw, in ‘extreme circumspection.’ He had that quality by nature to the full; but, none the less, stirred by a generous pity, history tells of an interview he had with the royal saint, Madame Elisabeth, in which he tried to assist both her and Marie Antoinette. He could do nothing; fate and the fatal Bourbon character were too strong for the Bourbons to be saved.

In 1792 Grimm, who had loved her long and owed her much, said farewell to Paris for ever,{174} leaving behind him, as he said, the fruit of the wisdom of his whole life and his entire fortune, and finding himself as naked as when he came into the world. He and Madame de Bueil lodged over a chemist’s shop in Düsseldorf, and even had to sleep in the Natural History Museum of that town. Grimm’s whole income was Catherine’s pension of two thousand roubles; her generosity indeed often added to it, and in 1796 she made him Russian Minister at Hamburg. This was one of the last acts of her life. She died, and left her friend and servant yet the poorer for her loss.

At Hamburg he had a disease of the eye which necessitated its removal. Then he retired to Gotha and lived with the Comtesse de Bueil in a house given him by the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, the munificent Duke providing furniture, linen, kitchen utensils—everything. The Countess’s two young daughters acted as Grimm’s secretaries. The music he had loved was still a resource to him, and he seems to have kept to the last something of his old power and mastery over others. Goethe found him, when he saw him in 1801, still an agreeable man of the world and rich in interest and experience, but unable to conceal a profound bitterness at the thought of his misfortunes. Under the Directory some of his confiscated property was restored to him. But it could hardly benefit him; he no{175} longer lived, he only existed. He, who had been born when the Regent Orleans ruled France and the old order was at the supreme height of its magnificence and depravity, was roused from the dotage of his last days to hear the thunder of the cannon of Jena and Austerlitz, or the story of the peace concluded between Catherine’s grandson, Alexander, and Napoleon Bonaparte upon the raft at Tilsit.

Grimm died on December 19, 1807, aged eighty-four.

No unpleasing contrast, this ‘methodical, adroit, managing man,’ with his cold uprightness and steady prudence, to a reckless, out-at-elbows Diderot, or a mad, miserable Rousseau. Thriftiness and caution are unromantic virtues and even accounted selfish; but, after all, the world would have no beggars to relieve if every man laid by for himself.

If it was the Encyclop?dists’ mission to teach the people to reform their kings, it was Grimm’s to teach those kings to reform themselves—to be as careful and judicious as he was. He tried; but from long and close association with them he himself caught at last that disease epidemic among rulers—oblivion to unpleasant consequences and a relentless future—and never recovered from the fearful shock which opened his eyes at last.