As a fervid preacher finds hearers, so the traveller induces some of his friends to share his mania. The infection spreads in spite of ridicule:
"Would you believe, when you this monsieur see,
That his whole body should speake French, not he?
That he, untravell'd, should be French so much,
As Frenchmen in his company should seem Dutch?...
Or is it some French statue? No: 't doth move,
And stoope, and cringe...."[108]
The most frequent symptom of gallomania in early, as in recent times, is to use French words in everyday conversation. So Sir Thomas More laughed at the fop who affected to pronounce English as French but whose French sounded strangely like English.[109]
In the sixteenth century, as in the Middle Ages, French was as generally used as Latin. "In England," wrote Peletier, "at least among princes and in their courts, all their discourses are in French."[110] A few years later, Burghley advised his son Thomas, then travelling on the Continent, to write in Latin or in French.[111] In schools, French was taught with great zeal, and, according to Sylvester, the future translator of Du Bartas, it was forbidden to speak English, however trivial the matter, under penalty of wearing the foolscap.
In spite of these stringent methods of education, backward pupils were not lacking. They were sent to France, but even this desperate remedy was sometimes unavailing; witness Beaumont and Fletcher's youth whose mother, asking him on his return to speak French, was shocked at hearing only a few broken words of abuse.[112]
Yet it was imperative to speak French correctly at Queen Henrietta's Court. Of course the ladies succeeded. In Blount's Preface to Lyly's plays we read that "the beautie in court which could not parley euphuisme, was as litle regarded, as shee which now there, speakes not French."[113]
A COQUETTE AT HER TOILET-TABLE
What was the distinctive mark of a good education under Charles i., was equally so under Charles ii. "All the persons of quality in England could speak French." The Queen, the Duchess of York spoke "marvellously well."[114] There was no need to know English at Whitehall: few French gentlemen troubled to learn it, but the English unfortunate enough not to know French had to conceal the defect. These would repeat the same foreign words or phrases; "to smatter French" being "meritorious."[115] "Can there be," exclaims Shadwell, "any conversation well drest without French in the first place to lard it!"[116] In an amusing scene, Dryden shows a coquette rehearsing a polite conversation: "Are you not a most precious damsel," she says to her teacher, "to retard all my visits for want of language, when you know you are paid so well for furnishing me with new words for my daily conversation? Let me die, if I have not run the risque already to speak like one of the vulgar; and if I have one phrase left in all my store that is not threadbare and usé, and fit for nothing but to be thrown to peasants."[117]