CHAPTER VII.
State of French Society in 1765.—Walpole at Paris.—The Royal Family and the Bête du Gévaudan.—French Ladies of Quality.—Madame du Deffand.—A Letter from Madame de Sévigné.—Rousseau and the King of Prussia.—The Hume-Rousseau Quarrel.—Returns to England, and hears Wesley at Bath.—Paris again.—Madame du Deffand's Vitality.—Her Character.—Minor Literary Efforts.—The Historic Doubts.—The Mysterious Mother.—Tragedy in England.—Doings of the Strawberry Press.—Walpole and Chatterton.
When, towards the close of 1765, Walpole made the first of several visits to Paris, the society of the French capital, and indeed French society as a whole, was showing signs of that coming culbute générale which was not to be long deferred. The upper classes were shamelessly immoral, and, from the King downwards, liaisons of the most open character excited neither censure nor comment. It was the era of Voltaire and the Encyclopædists; it was the era of Rousseau and the Sentimentalists; it was also the era of confirmed Anglomania. While we, on our side, were beginning to copy the comédies larmoyantes of La Chaussée and Diderot, the French in their turn were acting Romeo and Juliet, and raving over Richardson. Richardson's chief rival in their eyes was Hume, then a chargé d'affaires, and, in spite of his plain face and bad French, the idol of the freethinkers. He 'is treated here,' writes Walpole, 'with perfect veneration;' and we learn from other sources that no lady's toilette was complete without his attendance. 'At the Opera,'—says Lord Charlemont,—'his broad, unmeaning face was usually seen entre deux jolis minois; the ladies in France gave the ton, and the ton was Deism.' Apart from literature, irreligion, and philosophy, the chief occupation was cards. 'Whisk and Richardson' is Walpole's later definition of French society; 'Whisk and disputes,' that of Hume. According to Walpole, a kind of pedantry and solemnity was the characteristic of conversation, and 'laughing was as much out of fashion as pantins or bilboquets. Good folks, they have no time to laugh. There is God and the King to be pulled down first; and men and women, one and all, are devoutly employed in the demolition.' How that enterprise eventuated, history has recorded.
It is needless, however, to rehearse the origins of the French Revolution, in order to make a background for the visit of an English gentleman to Paris in 1765. Walpole had been meditating this journey for two or three years; but the state of his health, among other things (he suffered much from gout), had from time to time postponed it. In 1763, he had been going next spring;[102] but when next spring came he talked of the beginning of 1765. Nevertheless, in March of that year, Gilly Williams writes to Selwyn: 'Horry Walpole has now postponed his journey till May,' and then he goes on to speak of the Castle of Otranto in a way which shows that all the author's friends were not equally enthusiastic respecting that ingenious romance. 'How do you think he has employed that leisure which his political frenzy has allowed of? In writing a novel, ... and such a novel that no boarding-school miss of thirteen could get through without yawning. It consists of ghosts and enchantments; pictures walk out of their frames, and are good company for half an hour together; helmets drop from the moon, and cover half a family. He says it was a dream, and I fancy one when he had some feverish disposition in him.'[103] May, however, had arrived and passed, and the Castle of Otranto was in its second edition, before Walpole at last set out, on Monday, the 9th September, 1765. After a seven hours' passage, he reached Calais from Dover. Near Amiens he was refreshed by a sight of one of his favourites, Lady Mary Coke,[104] 'in pea-green and silver;' at Chantilly he was robbed of his portmanteau. By the time he reached Paris, on the 13th, he had already 'fallen in love with twenty things, and in hate with forty.' The dirt of Paris, the narrowness of the streets, the 'trees clipped to resemble brooms, and planted on pedestals of chalk,' disgust him. But he is enraptured with the treillage and fountains, 'and will prove it at Strawberry.' He detests the French opera, though he loves the French opéra-comique, with its Italian comedy and his passion,—'his dear favourite harlequin.' Upon the whole, in these first impressions he is disappointed. Society is duller than he expected, and with the staple topics of its conversation,—philosophy, literature, and freethinking,—he is (or says he is) out of sympathy. 'Freethinking is for one's self, surely not for society.... I dined to-day with half-a-dozen savans, and though all the servants were waiting, the conversation was much more unrestrained, even on the Old Testament, than I would suffer at my own table in England if a single footman was present. For literature, it is very amusing when one has nothing else to do. I think it rather pedantic in society; tiresome when displayed professedly; and, besides, in this country one is sure it is only the fashion of the day.' And then he goes on to say that the reigning fashion is Richardson and Hume.[105]
One of his earliest experiences was his presentation at Versailles to the royal family,—a ceremony which luckily involved but one operation instead of several, as in England, where the Princess Dowager of Wales, the Duke of Cumberland, and the Princess Amelia had all their different levees. He gives an account of this to Lady Hervey; but repeats it on the same day with much greater detail in a letter to Chute. 'You perceive [he says] that I have been presented. The Queen took great notice of me [for which reason, in imitation of Madame de Sévigné, he tells Lady Hervey that she is le plus grand roi du monde]; none of the rest said a syllable. You are let into the King's bedchamber just as he has put on his shirt; he dresses, and talks good-humouredly to a few, glares at strangers, goes to mass, to dinner, and a-hunting. The good old Queen, who is like Lady Primrose in the face, and Queen Caroline in the immensity of her cap, is at her dressing-table, attended by two or three old ladies.... Thence you go to the Dauphin, for all is done in an hour. He scarce stays a minute; indeed, poor creature, he is a ghost, and cannot possibly last three months. [He died, in fact, within this time, on the 20th December.] The Dauphiness is in her bed-chamber, but dressed and standing; looks cross, is not civil, and has the true Westphalian grace and accents. The four Mesdames [these were the Graille, Chiffe, Coche, and Loque of history], who are clumsy, plump old wenches, with a bad likeness to their father, stand in a bedchamber in a row, with black cloaks and knotting-bags, looking good-humoured, [and] not knowing what to say.... This ceremony is very short; then you are carried to the Dauphin's three boys, who, you may be sure, only bow and stare. The Duke of Berry [afterwards Louis XVI.] looks weak and weak-eyed; the Count de Provence [Louis XVIII.] is a fine boy; the Count d'Artois [Charles X.] well enough. The whole concludes with seeing the Dauphin's little girl dine, who is as round and as fat as a pudding.'[106] Such is Walpole's account of the royal family of France on exhibition. In the Queen's ante-chamber he was treated to a sight of the famous bête du Gévaudan, a hugeous wolf, of which a highly sensational representation had been given in the St. James's Chronicle for June 6-8. It had just been shot, after a prosperous but nefarious career, and was exhibited by two chasseurs 'with as much parade as if it was Mr. Pitt.'[107]
When he had been at Paris little less than a month, he was laid up with the gout in both feet. He was visited during his illness by Wilkes, for whom he expresses no admiration. From another letter it appears that Sterne and Foote were also staying in the French capital at this time. In November he is still limping about, and it is evident that confinement in 'a bedchamber in a hôtel garni, ... when the court is at Fontainebleau,' has not been without its effect upon his views of things in general. In writing to Gray (who replies with all sorts of kindly remedies), he says, 'The charms of Paris have not the least attraction for me, nor would keep me an hour on their own account. For the city itself, I cannot conceive where my eyes were: it is the ugliest, beastliest town in the universe. I have not seen a mouthful of verdure out of it, nor have they anything green but their treillage and window shutters.... Their boasted knowledge of society is reduced to talking of their suppers, and every malady they have about them, or know of.' A day or two later his gout and his stick have left him, and his good humour is coming back. Before the month ends, he is growing reconciled to his environment; and by January 'France is so agreeable, and England so much the reverse,'—he tells Lady Hervey,—'that he does not know when he shall return.' The great ladies, too, Madame de Brionne, Madame d'Aiguillon, Marshal Richelieu's daughter, Madame d'Egmont (with whom he could fall in love if it would break anybody's heart in England), begin to flatter and caress him. His 'last new passion' is the Duchess de Choiseul, who is so charming that 'you would take her for the queen of an allegory.' 'One dreads its finishing, as much as a lover, if she would admit one, would wish it should finish.' There is also a beautiful Countess de Forcalquier, the 'broken music' of whose imperfect English stirs him into heroics too Arcadian for the matter-of-fact meridian of London, where Lady Hervey is cautioned not to exhibit them to the profane.[108]
In a letter of later date to Gray, he describes some more of these graceful and witty leaders of fashion, whose 'douceur' he seems to have greatly preferred to the pompous and arrogant fatuity of the men. 'They have taken up gravity,'—he says of these latter,—'thinking it was philosophy and English, and so have acquired nothing in the room of their natural levity and cheerfulness.' But with the women the case is different. He knows six or seven 'with very superior understandings; some of them with wit, or with softness, or very good sense.' His first portrait is of the famous Madame Geoffrin, to whom he had been recommended by Lady Hervey, and who had visited him when imprisoned in his chambre garni. He lays stress upon her knowledge of character, her tact and good sense, and the happy mingling of freedom and severity by which she preserved her position as 'an epitome of empire, subsisting by rewards and punishments.' Then there is the Maréchale de Mirepoix, a courtier and an intrigante of the first order. 'She is false, artful, and insinuating beyond measure when it is her interest, but indolent and a coward,' says Walpole, who does not measure his words even when speaking of a beauty and a Princess of Lorraine. Others are the savante, Madame de Boufflers, who visited England and Johnson, and whom the writer hits off neatly by saying that you would think she was always sitting for her picture to her biographer; a second savante, Madame de Rochfort, 'the decent friend' of Walpole's former guest at Strawberry, the Duc de Nivernais;[109] the already mentioned Duchess de Choiseul, and Madame la Maréchale de Luxembourg, whose youth had been stormy, but who was now softening down into a kind of twilight melancholy which made her rather attractive. This last, with one exception, completes his list.
The one exception is a figure which henceforth played no inconsiderable part in Walpole's correspondence,—that of the brilliant and witty Madame du Deffand. As Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, she had been married at one-and-twenty to the nobleman whose name she bore, and had followed the custom of her day by speedily choosing a lover, who had many successors. For a brief space she had captivated the Regent himself, and at this date, being nearly seventy and hopelessly blind, was continuing, from mere force of habit, a 'decent friendship' with the deaf President Hénault. At first Walpole was not impressed with her, and speaks of her, disrespectfully, as 'an old blind debauchee of wit.' A little later, although he still refers to her as the 'old lady of the house,' he says she is very agreeable. Later still, she has completed her conquest by telling him he has le fou mocquer; and in the letter to Gray above quoted, it is plain that she has become an object of absorbing interest to him, not unmingled with a nervous apprehension of her undisguised partiality for his society. In spite of her affliction (he says) she 'retains all her vivacity, wit, memory, judgment, passions, and agreeableness. She goes to Operas, Plays, suppers, and Versailles; gives suppers twice a week; has every thing new read to her; makes new songs and epigrams, ay, admirably,[110] and remembers every one that has been made these fourscore years. She corresponds with Voltaire, dictates charming letters to him, contradicts him, is no bigot to him or anybody, and laughs both at the clergy and the philosophers. In a dispute, into which she easily falls, she is very warm, and yet scarce ever in the wrong; her judgment on every subject is as just as possible; on every point of conduct as wrong as possible: for she is all love and hatred, passionate for her friends to enthusiasm, still anxious to be loved, I don't mean by lovers, and a vehement enemy, but openly. As she can have no amusement but conversation, the least solitude and ennui are insupportable to her, and put her into the power of several worthless people, who eat her suppers when they can eat nobody's of higher rank; wink to one another and laugh at her; hate her because she has forty times more parts, and venture to hate her because she is not rich.'[111] In another letter, to Mr. James Crawford of Auchinames (Hume's Fish Crawford), who was also one of Madame du Deffand's admirers, he says, in repeating some of the above details, that he is not 'ashamed of interesting himself exceedingly about her. To say nothing of her extraordinary parts, she is certainly the most generous, friendly being upon earth.' Upon her side, Madame du Deffand seems to have been equally attracted by the strange mixture of independence and effeminacy which went to make up Walpole's character. Her attachment to him rapidly grew into a kind of infatuation. He had no sooner quitted Paris, which he did on the 17th April, than she began to correspond with him; and thenceforward, until her death in 1780, her letters, dictated to her faithful secretary, Wiart, continued, except when Walpole was actually visiting her (and she sometimes wrote to him even then), to reach him regularly. Not long after his return to England, she made him the victim of a charming hoax. He had, when in Paris, admired a snuff-box which bore a portrait of Madame de Sévigné, for whom he professed an extravagant admiration. Madame du Deffand procured a similar box, had the portrait copied, and sent it to him with a letter, purporting to come from the dateless Elysian Fields and 'Notre Dame de Livry' herself, in which he was enjoined to use his present always, and to bring it often to France and the Faubourg St. Germain. Walpole was completely taken in, and imagined that the box had come from Madame de Choiseul; but he should have known at first that no one living but his blind friend could have written 'that most charming of all letters.' The box itself, the memento of so much old-world ingenuity, was sold (with the pseudo-Sévigné epistle) at the Strawberry Hill sale for £28 7s. When witty Mrs. Clive heard of the last addition to Walpole's list of favourites, she delivered herself of a good-humoured bon mot. There was a new resident at Twickenham,—the first Earl of Shelburne's widow. 'If the new Countess is but lame,' quoth Clive (referring to the fact that Lady Suffolk was deaf, and Madame du Deffand blind), 'I shall have no chance of ever seeing you.' But there is nothing to show that he ever relaxed in his attentions to the delightful actress, whom he somewhere styles dimidium animæ meæ.[112]