Then came a blow for the coterie at La | forgave me for having been given to him inChevrette. A witty letter to Mallet du stead of chosen by himself.. What puts Pan, at Geneva, wherein Grimm criticised me at my ease is the fact that the king has the tactics of the Comte de Broglie, the never accorded me any remuneration, and court policy, and the general conduct of truly having refused me the reward I cared most for his approval-all king though he the war, was intercepted. De Broglie be, he has no means of paying me. did not like his nickname of Capitaine ing me to the utmost for the last three years, After tryTempesta, Choiseul was aggrieved at I have just received an order, couched in the comments equally pungent. Grimm was most complimentary terms, to leave off senddenounced as a traitor and a spy, and all ing him my budget. . . . A heavy burden off that the Duc d'Orléans could obtain in my shoulders, and the king will find it easier favor of his protégé was the permission to to add Bohemia and Moravia to his possesremain in France. But Grimm had to sions than to repay me so much as my exresign his diplomatic functions as repre- penses. sentative of the city of Frankfort. A few months later, during the Westphalian campaign in 1762, the Marquis de Castries was grievously wounded. Grimm hastened to his friend's succor. "Always the same," wrote Diderot," he left at two o'clock in the morning, without farewells, without servants, without attempting to order his affairs, conscious of nothing but his friend's peril." While abroad, Grimm visited the duchess Louise of SaxeGotha (henceforward one of his most constant correspondents), and on his return to France, Louise Dorothea suc.

ceeded in persuading the king of Prussia to receive the "Correspondance," but not in making it welcome to him. Grimm's pen distilled too much of the "sensibility current in his set at Paris, and lacked the saving grace that should temper judicious flattery. Frederick did not like the incense that was burnt under his nose in the first number of Grimm's journal that reached him. "Qu'il daigne m'épargner un peu," wrote the king to the duchess: "A man of no experience may find sublimity where it does not exist, a philosopher... should know better." The succeeding numbers continued to bore the king.

Grimm declared to the duchess that he could never make up his mind to narrate "the little tales, the little intrigues, the petty chronicles that his predecessors picked up in the cafés." "I know that the king affects these trifles, which is natural enough in a man who needs relaxation after whole days spent in statecraft. . . . I know also that if I bore a French name, it would be child's play to please him." Three years later :

My passion for him [Frederick] had made me too eager for the honor of supplying him with my news. He did not like to say no to the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, but he never

To the household of whose son he had been attached in 1748, after young Schoemberg left Paris and until he went to live at the Hôtel de Frise.

arrived in Paris, Grimm, who, to quote In 1763, when the Mozart family first Sainte-Beuve, had the rare merit of being the first to make up his mind in matters the first patrons of Wolfgang, aged seven. of art, had the pleasure of being among

the child took

...

I wrote him a minuet,* his pen, and without approaching the piano, wrote the bass to my treble.† A lady asked him if he would accompany an Italian cavatina, that she would sing, by ear. She began to sing; the child attempted a bass that was not quite correct, because it is impossible fore you have heard it. But when the air was to construct the accompaniment of a song befinished, he begged the lady to sing it again, and this time not only played the whole air with his right hand, but played a perfect bass. He asked her to begin again, until she had sung it ten times, each time changing the character of his accompaniment. this child will turn my head. me feel that a prodigy might unsettle it.

.. I think He makes

The wonderful child had not grown much, Two years later, the same enthusiasm. but he had progressed prodigiously in music. "Two years ago he was already a composer, and the author of sonatas; he has published six in England, and six in Holland, besides symphonies for orchesapplauded here." Mozart's father wrote tra that have been performed and much from Paris that he owed all their financial and social success to his good friend "Herr Grimm, secretary to the Duc d'Orléans, a man of heart and learning. All my, other letters would have availed me fort merchant had given me a letter, has nothing; Herr Grimm, to whom a Frankdone everything. It is he who presented us at court." In 1778 Mozart returned to Paris with his mother, whom he had the grief of losing there. "I write you," runs

↑ Grimm was not only a musical critic, he was an excellent and even scholarly musician. Correspondance Littéraire, edition Maurice Tour

neux.

IV.

a letter from young Mozart to his father, "from the house of Madame d'Epinay and of Baron Grimm, where I am staying; IT was in 1769 that Grimm made the I have a pretty little room, with a pleasant personal acquaintance of Frederick the view, and am as well as my state permits." Great, who deigned to welcome him by This was the house in the Chaussée declaiming verses from his own " Banise," d'Antin in which Madame d'Epinay, after and to dismiss him with many compliseveral changes, necessitated by her hus-ments and a gold snuff-box. From a letter band's extravagance, installed herself in to Madame Necker, Grimm appears to 1771. She inhabited the first and second have been particularly touched that the floors, with her granddaughter Emilie, for king should on this occasion have deigned whom the "Conversations were written, to call one of his "chamber hussars" to and whom she had adopted; and Grimm, light him, as any other mortal might have since 1779, lived on the third. done. "I swear to you," he added, “that you can hardly realize that you are dealing with a co-partitioner " (of Poland).

Curious, for more than one reason [opines M. d'Haussonville of this correspondence].

From it we may learn how easily the proud philosophers of the eighteenth century could adapt themselves to the courtier's part. Now he [Grimm] dons a shepherd's garb with a crook and an apple-green coat to attend a pastoral fête given by Prince Henry of Anon he accompanies the King of Prussia to Prussia, at his castle of Rheinsberg. a review, with a zeal that he averred had edified that monarch. His is not less punctual in his attendance at plays, operas, and illuminations.†

To return to the year 1765, in which Grimm's letters to the Duchess of SaxeGotha, that only grazed politics, while they treated of art, literature, and even descended to the discussion of wigs, paniers, and considérations, an adornment defined by Grimm as "a sort of small panier that had succeeded the large ones, and that supported the skirt without giving women the appearance of wearing any such adjunct." Gradually these letters became, after the termination of the Seven Years' War, of more weighty import. After certain unofficial communications volunteered by him to Choiseul, Grimm appears to have been authorized to open negotiations, through the Duchess of Saxe-Gotha, for a better understanding between Prussia and France. The duchess lent herself with a right good-will to the furtherance of this project, yet it was not until 1768 that Frederick made sufficiently definite overtures for the negotiations to culminate in the simultaneous appointments of ministers from Russia to Paris and from France to Berlin. "I am too good a Frenchman," wrote Grimm to the duch-guish himself in the war against the ess," and have too many good reasons for being one, not to wish that Frederick should have some acquaintance besides the philosopher D'Alembert and myself in this country." But while Grimm used his influence with the duchess in the ser

vice of France, he did not neglect her interests, he strained every nerve to obtain for Saxe-Gotha the war indemnities due to

her from France.

Some reminiscences of the edifying feelings attributed in the letter to Madame lian Frederick of Prussia" may have Necker to "Marcus Aurelius Trajan Juinspired the king's pleasantries on the subject of the honorary colonelcy of a regiment conferred on him some years later by Catherine of Russia. "M. de la Grimmalière," wrote his Majesty to this newly fledged warrior, "could not fail to distin

the head of a victorious army, and it would Turks." He would take Constantinople at be he, Frederick, who would celebrate his Grimm between those of Alexander and deeds of valor, and place the name of

of Cæsar.

Grimm was the Landgräfin Caroline of One of the earliest correspondents of ries as die grosse Landgräfin, rather in Hesse, known among her contemporarecognition of her force of character and interesting personality, than that she was particularly associated with any stirring

event.

Sexu femina ingenio vir ran the epitaph composed for her by Frederick the Great. For this princess Grimm pro

The coffers of the French treasury were too empty for him to succeed, yet two years after the death of Louise Dorothea, in 1767, the duke rewarded Grimm's services by creating him a counsellor of legation with a salary of sixteen hundred francs, and his son who succeeded him in Le Salon de Madame Necker, par le Cte. d'Haus1778 raised him from counsellor to minis-sonville. ter plenipotentiary to Paris, a post he held until the Revolution obliged him to leave France.

↑ Le Salon de Madame Necker, par M. d'Hausson

ville.

Names applied to Frederick by Grimm on the occasion of the birth of the king's great-nephew.

Frenchwoman. She is like a grand and beau- | for the first time at Gotha, under the di• tiful statue, whose fine lines have, without rection of Klüpfel (Consistorial-präsident, deteriorating, acquired the kind of polish de- and ex-tutor to the young prince, in whose rived by certain masterpieces of antiquity from household Grimm had passed a part of his the soil in which they have been imbedded by first year in Paris), with the co-operation barbarous hands. She has, in the highest of Grimm. He started for Italy with the degree, the art that demands kindness as well as wit, of softening and yet telling you that two Counts Romanzof, and spent January which might otherwise wound you. She has in Naples with Galiani, February in the art, too, of turning aside a question that Rome, and May in Venice. The travelshe does not wish to answer. To all the fas-lers stopped at Ferney to visit Voltaire, cinations of a charming woman she unites the and arrived at St. Petersburg in Septempride of a Roman. She maintains her ber, in time for the second marriage of presence of mind in moments of danger; in a the czarewitch. For poor Wilhelmine word, were she but a private individual in was dead, her mother, the great LandParis, she would have had a Saint-Ouen of

her own,* where she would be surrounded by gräfin, was dead too, and Louise of Würcharming women and learned men. temburg had replaced the pretty child for whom Grimm and her mother schemed so long and so successfully.*

"Ce Denis a auprès de Sa Majesté le succès le plus complet," averred Grimm in a letter to Count Nesselrode. But it was on himself that her greatest favors were bestowed. "I am so overwhelmed as to be unhappy at the favors lavished on me by the empress; my shop will go to the deuce, and I shall lose all my customers; and one year will have ruined a workmanlike reputation of twenty years' standing." Ill, suffering from his eyes, a prey to fever, his happiness still intoxicated him.

I am ready to prove on the first opportunity that a knave of a prophet who dines two or three times a week with the Empress of Russia, who, lounging in a good armchair, converses with her Majesty two or three times a week for two hours at a stretch . . is one of the most extraordinary phenomena of this age, so fecund in wonders; 'tis a pity that his intestines warn him from time to time that he will shortly disappear.

The empress wished Grimm to establish himself in Russia, offering him the choice of a position with an unlimited income. But when the winter was over, and his health no better, he longed to be back in Paris with his friends, and "could not see in what manner he could serve her Majesty," who proposed that he should aid her in public instruction. He left St. Petersburg in April, 1774, after promising

to return.

Grimm's failing health obliged him to travel by easy stages, visiting Stanislaus Augustus at Warsaw, making a third stay at Berlin, and passing two months at Carlsbad, where he recovered, and whence he returned to Paris in September. In 1775 a French literary publication, entitled Nouveau Mercure de France, appeared

Madame Necker's country house near Paris. See Le Salon de Madame Necker.

Catherine still wished to associate Grimm with her efforts for public instruction. She renewed the offers that were made to him in 1773, but in vain; Grimm would not give up old friends for new ones, and vowed that he could be more useful to his "august protectress in Paris than in St. Petersburg." He agreed to give up the "Correspondance Littéraire" to Meister for good and all, and to return to Paris as Catherine's agent for the purchase of works of art, and for all sorts of confidential missions and commissions.

This was the origin of the correspondence compiled by M. Grot, and published by the Société Impériale de Russie, 1878-80, which sheds so full a light on the frank and yet enigmatic character of Catherine. Her letters are so attractive, so interesting, so original, so daring, and yet so womanly, at once so feminine and so virile, that they better justify even Grimm's enthusiasm than do his panegyrics of the empress written when he thought that, under the auspices of this "great and charming princess, he was investigating the crucibles, the laboratories and all the chemical processes by which a nation is remade without being conscious of its transformation."†

V.

IN 1778, the year in which Mozart's father wrote to his son in Paris "urgently to entreat him to merit, or rather to retain the favor, affection, and friendship of Baron Grimm," Voltaire, then in his eighty-fifth year, arrived there. This miraculous event caused a lull in the rumors of war, the intrigues of all parties, and even in the great quarrel of the Glückists

Letters of the Abbé Galiani to Madame d'Epinay. ↑ Letter of Grimm to Madame Necker in 1773.