One of the other illustrious visitors to Paris during Walpole's stay there was Rousseau. Being no longer safe in his Swiss asylum, where the curate of Motiers had excited the mob against him, that extraordinary self-tormentor, clad in his Armenian costume, had arrived in December at the French capital, and shortly afterwards left for England, under the safe-conduct of Hume, who had undertaken to procure him a fresh resting-place. He reached London on the 14th January, 1766. Walpole had, to use his own phrase, 'a hearty contempt' for the fugitive sentimentalist and his grievances; and not long before Rousseau's advent in Paris, taking for his pretext an offer made by the King of Prussia, he had woven some of the light mockery at Madame Geoffrin's into a sham letter from Frederick to Jean-Jacques, couched in the true Walpolean spirit of persiflage. It is difficult to summarize, and may be reproduced here as its author transcribed it on the 12th January, for the benefit of Conway:—
Le Roi de Prusse à Monsieur Rousseau.
Mon cher Jean-Jacques,—Vous avez renoncé à Génève votre patrie; vous vous êtes fait chasser de la Suisse, pays tant vanté dans vos écrits; la France vous a décrété. Venez donc chez moi; j'admire vos talens; je m'amuse de vos rêveries, qui (soit dit en passant) vous occupent trop, et trop longtems. Il faut à la fin être sage et heureux. Vous avez fait assez parler de vous par des singularités peu convenables à un véritable grand homme. Démontrez à vos ennemis que vous pouvez avoir quelquefois le sens commun: cela les fachera, sans vous faire tort. Mes états vous offrent une retraite paisible; je vous veux du bien, et je vous en ferai, si vous le trouvez bon. Mais si vous vous obstiniez à rejetter mon secours, attendez-vous que je ne le dirai à personne. Si vous persistez à vous creuser l'esprit pour trouver de nouveaux malheurs, choisissez les tels que vous voudrez. Je suis roi, je puis vous en procurer au gré de vos souhaits: et ce qui sûrement ne vous arrivera pas vis à vis de vos ennemis, je cesserai de vous persécuter quand vous cesserez de mettre votre gloire à l'être.
Votre bon ami,
Frédéric.
This composition, the French of which was touched up by Helvétius, Hénault, and the Duc de Nivernais, gave extreme satisfaction to all the anti-Rousseau party.[113] While Hume and his protégé were still in Paris, Walpole, out of delicacy to Hume, managed to keep the matter a secret; and he also abstained from making any overtures to Rousseau, whom, as he truly said, he could scarcely have visited cordially, with a letter in his pocket written to ridicule him. But Hume had no sooner departed than Frederick's sham invitation went the round, ultimately finding its way across the Channel, where it was printed in the St. James's Chronicle. Rousseau, always on the alert to pose as the victim of plots and conspiracies, was naturally furious, and wrote angrily from his retreat at Mr. Davenport's in Derbyshire to denounce the fabrication. The worst of it was, that his morbid nature immediately suspected the innocent Hume of participating in the trick. 'What rends and afflicts my heart [is],' he told the Chronicle, 'that the impostor hath his accomplices in England;' and this delusion became one of the main elements in that 'twice-told tale,'—the quarrel of Hume and Rousseau. Walpole was called upon to clear Hume from having any hand in the letter, and several communications, all of which are printed at length in the fourth volume of his works, followed upon the same subject. Their discussion would occupy too large a space in this limited memoir.[114] It is, however, worth noticing that Walpole's instinct appears to have foreseen the trouble that fell upon Hume. 'I wish,' he wrote to Lady Hervey, in a letter which Hume carried to England when he accompanied his untunable protégé thither, 'I wish he may not repent having engaged with Rousseau, who contradicts and quarrels with all mankind, in order to obtain their admiration.'[115] He certainly, upon the present occasion, did not belie this uncomplimentary character.
Before the last stages of the Hume-Rousseau controversy had been reached, Hume was back again in Paris, and Walpole had returned to London. Upon the whole, he told Mann, he liked France so well that he should certainly go there again. In September, 1766, he was once more attacked with gout, and at the beginning of October went to Bath, whose Avon (as compared with his favourite Thames) he considers 'paltry enough to be the Seine or Tyber.' Nothing pleases him much at Bath, although it contained such notabilities as Lord Chatham, Lord Northington, and Lord Camden; but he goes to hear Wesley, of whom he writes rather flippantly to Chute. He describes him as 'a lean, elderly man, fresh-coloured, his hair smoothly combed, but with a soupçon of curl at the ends.' 'Wondrous clean,' he adds, 'but as evidently an actor as Garrick. He spoke his sermon, but so fast, and with so little accent, that I am sure he has often uttered it, for it was like a lesson. There were parts and eloquence in it; but towards the end he exalted his voice, and acted very ugly enthusiasm; decried learning, and told stories, like Latimer, of the fool of his college, who said, 'I thanks God for everything.'[116] He returned to Strawberry Hill in October. In August of the next year he again went to Paris, going almost straight to Madame du Deffand's, where he finds Mademoiselle Clairon (who had quitted the stage) invited to declaim Corneille in his honour, and he sups in a distinguished company. His visit lasted two months; but his letters for this period contain few interesting particulars, while those of the lady cease altogether, to be resumed again on the 9th October, a few hours after his departure. Two years later he travels once more to Paris and his blind friend, whom he finds in better health than ever, and with spirits so increased that he tells her she will go mad with age. 'When they ask her how old she is, she answers, "J'ai soixante et mille ans."' Her septuagenarian activity might well have wearied a younger man. 'She and I,' he says, 'went to the Boulevard last night after supper, and drove about there till two in the morning. We are going to sup in the country this evening, and are to go to-morrow night at eleven to the puppet-show.' In a letter to George Montagu, which adds some details to her portrait, he writes: 'I have heard her dispute with all sorts of people, on all sorts of subjects, and never knew her in the wrong.[117] She humbles the learned, sets right their disciples, and finds conversation for everybody. Affectionate as Madame de Sévigné, she has none of her prejudices, but a more universal taste; and, with the most delicate frame, her spirits hurry her through a life of fatigue that would kill me, if I was to continue here.... I had great difficulty last night to persuade her, though she was not well, not to sit up till between two and three for the comet; for which purpose she had appointed an astronomer to bring his telescopes to the President Hénault's, as she thought it would amuse me. In short, her goodness to me is so excessive that I feel unashamed at producing my withered person in a round of diversions, which I have quitted at home.'[118] One of the other amusements which she procured for him was the entrée of the famous convent of St. Cyr, of which he gives an interesting account. He inspects the pensioners, and the numerous portraits of the foundress, Madame de Maintenon. In one class-room he hears the young ladies sing the choruses in Athalie; in another sees them dance minuets to the violin of a nun who is not precisely St. Cecilia. In the third room they act proverbes, or conversations. Finally, he is enabled to enrich the archives of Strawberry with a piece of paper containing a few sentences of Madame de Maintenon's handwriting.
Walpole's literary productions for this date (in addition to the letter from the King of Prussia to Rousseau) are scheduled in the Short Notes with his usual minuteness. In June, 1766, shortly after his return from Paris, he wrote a squib upon Captain Byron's description of the Patagonians, entitled, An Account of the Giants lately discovered, which was published on the 25th August. On 18 August he began his Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third; and, in 1767, the detection of a work published at Paris in two volumes under the title of the Testament du Chevalier Robert Walpole, and 'stamped in that mint of forgeries, Holland.' This, which is printed in the second volume of his works, remained unpublished during his lifetime, as no English translation of the Testament was ever made. His next deliverance was a letter, subsequently printed in the St. James's Chronicle for 28 May, in which he announced to the Corporation of Lynn, in the person of their Mayor, Mr. Langley, that he did not intend to offer himself again as the representative in Parliament of that town. A wish to retire from all public business, and the declining state of his health, are assigned as the reasons for his thus breaking his Parliamentary connection, which had now lasted for five-and-twenty years. Following upon this comes the already mentioned account of his action in the Hume and Rousseau quarrel, and a couple of letters on Political Abuse in Newspapers. These appeared in the Public Advertiser. But the chief results of his leisure in 1766-8 are to be found in two efforts more ambitious than any of those above indicated,—the Historic Doubts on Richard the Third, and the tragedy of The Mysterious Mother. The Historic Doubts was begun in the winter of 1767, and published in February, 1768; the tragedy in December, 1766, and published in March, 1768.
The Historic Doubts was an attempt to vindicate Richard III. from his traditional character, which Walpole considered had been intentionally blackened in order to whiten that of Henry VII. 'Vous seriez un excellent attornei général,'—wrote Voltaire to him,—'vous pesez toutes les probabilités.' He might have added that they were all weighed on one side. Gray admits the clearness with which the principal part of the arguments was made out; but he remained unconvinced, especially as regards the murder of Henry VI. Other objectors speedily appeared, who were neither so friendly nor so gentle. The Critical Review attacked him for not having referred to Guthrie's History of England, which had in some respects anticipated him; and he was also criticised adversely by the London Chronicle. Of these attacks Walpole spoke and wrote very contemptuously; but he seems to have been considerably nettled by the conduct of a Swiss named Deyverdun, who, giving an account of the book in a work called Mémoires Littéraires de la Grande Bretagne for 1768, declared his preference for the views which Hume had expressed in certain notes to the said account. Deyverdun's action appears to have stung Walpole into a supplementary defence of his theories, in which he dealt with his critics generally. This he did not print, but set aside to appear as a postscript in his works. In 1770, however, his arguments were contested by Dr. Milles, Dean of Exeter, to whom he replied; and later still, another antiquary, the Rev. Mr. Masters, came forward. The last two assailants were members of the Society of Antiquaries, from which body Walpole, in consequence, withdrew. But he practically abandoned his theories in a final postscript, written in February, 1793, which is to be found in the second volume of his works.