The salon and English letters

by Chauncey Brewster Tinker

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 augré 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.[79]

This letter, which had been touched up by Helvétius and the Duc de Nivernois, circulated in the salons, and at last found its way to England, where it was printed by various newspapers in April 1766. The quarrel between Rousseau and Hume, which had been threatening for some weeks, now burst in fury; for Rousseau believed that Hume was in league with Walpole to disgrace him.

Every one now plunged into controversy and correspondence. Mlle. de Lespinasse attempts to soothe feelings. D’Alembert outlines Hume’s campaign. Baron d’Holbach condoles. Walpole explains. Madame de Boufflers fears for the renown of philosophy. Madame du Deffand, who hated everybody concerned, except Walpole, and whom d’Alembert accused of having stirred up all the trouble, finally did as much as any one to put an end to it.[80] Nothing having been accomplished, and the vanity of all having been fully displayed, the matter subsided, leaving a general conviction in the mind of each that all the others had conducted themselves very foolishly.

Hume never returned to the salons, though Mlle. de Lespinasse implored and Madame de Boufflers protested. It was to the latter that he wrote the tranquil letter from his death-bed ‘without any anxiety or regret’[81] which elicited the admiration even of Madame du Deffand[82] and delighted the salons by showing that their favourite could die like a philosopher.[83]

Hume’s acceptance of the salon and its ideals is in striking contrast to the fussy dissatisfaction of Horace Walpole. ‘I was expressing my aversion,’ he writes, ‘to disputes: Mr. Hume, who very gratefully admires the tone of Paris, having never known any other tone, said with great surprise, “Why, what do you like if you hate both disputes and whisk?”’ Walpole’s reply is not recorded. Certainly he did not like les philosophes and their conversation which he found ‘solemn, pedantic, and seldom animated but by a dispute.’[84] He hated authors by profession. He hated political talk (having practical knowledge and experience of politics). He hated savants, free thinkers, and beaux esprits, with their eternal dissertations on religion and government.[85] ‘I have never yet,’ he wrote[86] to Montagu, ‘seen or heard anything serious that was not ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopedistes, the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Russia, and the mountebank of history Mr. Pitt, all are to me but impostors in their various ways.’ He is ‘sick of visions and systems that shove one another aside and come over again like the figures in a moving picture.’ Yet like all scoffers, he has nothing to set up in the place of all this. He could not give his heart to the new system, but he was equally incapable of being loyal to the old. Dissatisfied with both, he laughed at both, and was nettled because he could find none in Paris to laugh with him. Laughing was not fashionable in the salons.[87] He despised the prevalent devotion to cards. He was scornfully amused at the popularity of the English in Paris—and even at his own popularity. ‘Vous n’observez,’ said Madame du Deffand, ‘que pour vous moquer; vous ne tenez à rien, vous vous passez de tout; enfin, enfin, rien ne vous est nécessaire.’[88] But there was one thing necessary to Walpole, and it was the thing he professed to despise—the salon. Without knowing the salons he could not ridicule them. No satirist can be a hermit. So Walpole frequented the salons, and vastly enjoyed, not the salons themselves, but his own superiority to them. It was at Madame Geoffrin’s that his career began. He brought a note of introduction from Lady Hervey, met Madame Geoffrin, and discovered to his surprise—and the reader’s—that he liked her. She had sense, ‘more common sense than he almost ever met with.’[89] He notes her quickness in penetrating character, her protection of artists, her services to them, and her ‘thousand little arts and offices of friendship,’ of which latter she was presently to give him a specimen. When he had an attack of gout, she took him under her care. On October 13, 1765, he writes of her to Lady Hervey:

Madame Geoffrin came and sat two hours last night by my bedside:[90] I could have sworn it had been my lady Hervey, she was so good to me. It was with so much sense, information, instruction, and correction! The manner of the latter charms me. I never saw anybody in my days that catches one’s faults and vanities and impositions so quick, that explains them to one so clearly, and convinces one so easily. I never liked to be set right before! You cannot imagine how I taste it! I make her both my confessor and director, and begin to think I shall be a reasonable creature at last, which I had never intended to be. The next time I see her, I believe I shall say, ‘Oh! Common Sense,[91] sit down: I have been thinking so and so; is it not absurd?’—for t’other sense and wisdom, I never liked them; I shall now hate them for her sake. If it was worth her while, I assure your Ladyship she might govern me like a child.

The attention which he received was not without its effect, and at last he was obliged to admit himself pleased.[92] He does not know when he will return to England; and he dwells with delight on the honours and distinctions he receives.

He became one of the most prominent men in Parisian society, and for a time eclipsed the reputation of Hume himself. The latter had been worshipped as a philosopher; Walpole reigned as a wit. The letter to Rousseau, which has been described above, captivated the salons, and probably even made them laugh. The jeu d’esprit, which had first occurred to him at Madame Geoffrin’s, so pleased him that he cast it into more elaborate form, displayed the forged letter in the salons, and became famous at once. ‘The copies,’ he writes to Conway, ‘have spread like wildfire; et me voici à la mode.’[93] It was long before Walpole heard the last of his jest; for, as we have seen, it involved him in the controversy between Hume and Rousseau, and Walpole hated controversy as much as he loved wit. But for the moment it served to draw the eyes of the French world upon him.

Meanwhile, he had become intimate with Madame Geoffrin’s great rival, the blind Madame du Deffand, now in her sixty-ninth year, who rapidly displaced Madame Geoffrin in his affections. By December 1765, he was supping with her twice a week, and in January he wrote Gray his famous description of her:[94]