gloomy jealousy, became, under the mask of friendship, my most cruel
calumniator. This man is to me a cipher; the other will always be my old
friend.

My very bowels yearned at the sight of this odious piece: the reading of
it was insupportable to me, and, without going through the whole, I
returned the copy to Duchesne with the following letter:

MONTMORENCY, 21st, May, 1760.

"In casting my eyes over the piece you sent me, I trembled at seeing
myself well spoken of in it. I do not accept the horrid present. I am
persuaded that in sending it me, you did not intend an insult; but you do
not know, or have forgotten, that I have the honor to be the friend of a
respectable man, who is shamefully defamed and calumniated in this
libel."

Duchense showed the letter. Diderot, upon whom it ought to have had an
effect quite contrary, was vexed at it. His pride could not forgive me
the superiority of a generous action, and I was informed his wife
everywhere inveighed against me with a bitterness with which I was not in
the least affected, as I knew she was known to everybody to be a noisy
babbler.

Diderot in his turn found an avenger in the Abbe Morrellet, who wrote
against Palissot a little work, imitated from the 'Petit Prophete',
and entitled the Vision. In this production he very imprudently offended
Madam de Robeck, whose friends got him sent to the Bastile; though she,
not naturally vindictive, and at that time in a dying state, I am certain
had nothing to do with the affair.