But though Walpole could not respond, he did not break with her, or care to break. When, in 1775, he visited her, for the third time, she showered him with so many engagements that he needed ‘the activity of a squirrel and the strength of a Hercules’ to go through with them.[109] He was pleased. He asserted that Madame du Deffand was a star in the East well worth coming to adore.[110] With a literary friendship that displayed itself in salons, in dedications of books, and in temperate letters, he could be well content. At her death he wrote of her with true affection, gratitude, and grief. But she had longed in vain for the expression of these, and of more than these, during the desolation of her latter months.
The effect upon Walpole of this acquaintance with Madame du Deffand and her salon was to fix in him certain characteristics not always attractive. She had been able to show him the salon in the one aspect which could appeal to him; where persiflage had not yielded to the pedantry of the new philosophy. In his association with her and with the group whose inspiration she was, he acquired that amused tolerance with which he viewed the attempts of the bluestockings in England to rival the salons which he had known in France.
Among Madame du Deffand’s visitors was the man to whom she referred as ‘the famous Mr. Burke.’ His visit to Paris was of less than a month’s duration. Madame du Deffand met him on February 9, 1773;[111] and he left France, apparently on the first day of March.[112] Burke had not come to Paris to enjoy the fruits of his fame—though his reputation in the salons as the author of the Junius letters[113] would have given him a career—or to study the philosophical and political principles of the day. He had placed his son Richard at Auxerre to learn French; but before returning to England he glanced at the French court and at the salons. His attitude towards the latter was unique. ‘It was,’ says Morley,[114] ‘almost as though the solemn hierophant of some mystic Egyptian temple should have found himself amid the brilliant chatter of a band of reckless, keen-tongued disputants of the garden or the porch at Athens.’ Yet any seriousness of manner which he may have displayed exalted him in the eyes of the philosophers. Madame du Deffand, though she afterwards learned to despise his writing as verbose, diffuse, obscure, and affected,[115] liked him at once. ‘Il me paraît avoir infiniment d’esprit,’ she writes,[116] and again, ‘Il est très aimable.’ She gave a supper for him, and exerted herself to assemble the most distinguished and clever members of her circle.[117] She had him invited to Madame de Luxembourg’s, where he heard La Harpe read a new tragedy in verse, Les Barmécides.[118] He also talked with Madame du Deffand of a new book, Essai Générale de Tactique[119] by the Count de Guibert, dealing with the state of politics and military science in Europe. This elaborate and enthusiastic treatise, which contained an attack on idle sovereigns and corrupt courts, appealed to Burke; and, at Madame du Deffand’s request, he carried a copy of it to Walpole. Burke knew the same author’s tragedy, Le Connétable de Bourbon,[120] a fact worth mention as indicating an acquaintance with the salon of Mlle. de Lespinasse, whose lover the author was. Burke must have heard Guibert read this play aloud, for it had not yet been acted or published, and the reading may well have occurred at Mlle. de Lespinasse’s. Again, it may have been in that salon that Burke attacked the philosophy of Hume,[121] and defended Beattie against the sneers of the free thinkers—a course that must have taxed his abundant ingenuity as much as his defective French.
It would be interesting to know the conversation that passed between Burke and Walpole after the former’s return to England. They met, and it would seem that Burke expressed strong opinions on the growing atheism of France, and told of his attempt to defend the Christian system, for Walpole wrote[122] to the Countess of Upper Ossory: ‘Mr. Burke is returned from Paris, where he was so much the mode that, happening to dispute with the philosophers, it grew the fashion to be Christians. St. Patrick himself did not make more converts.’ But whatever effect Burke may have had upon the freethinkers of Paris, there can be no doubt of their effect upon him. The amazing downrush of principles, religious, philosophical, and political, which he witnessed in France confirmed him in that natural conservatism, that desire ‘never wholly or at once to depart from antiquity’ to which he was becoming more and more passionately devoted as the great French crisis drew on.
The spectacle of Burke converting the philosophers to Christianity sinks into pale insignificance beside Yorick Sterne’s conversion of Madame de Vence from the perils of deism—an incident familiar to every reader of The Sentimental Journey. It was in the winter of 1762 that Sterne made his entry into the salons, and discovered those guiding principles of compliment, flattery, and general philandering, which enabled him to win all the esprits, and, incidentally, to put an end to the deism of Madame de Vence. Seated on a sofa beside the lady, whose waning beauty should have made her a deist five years before, he revealed the dangers to which beauty, particularly in deists, was exposed, and dwelt on the defense provided by religious sentiments. ‘“We are not adamant,” said I, taking hold of her hand—“and there is need of all restraints, till age in her own time steals in and lays them on us—but, my dear lady,” said I, kissing her hand—“’tis too—too soon——” I declare I had the credit all over Paris of unperverting Madame de V——. She affirmed to Mons. D——[123] and the Abbe M——[124] that in one half-hour I had said more for revealed religion than all their Encyclopedia had said against it—I was lifted directly into Madame de V——’s Coterie—and she put off the epocha of deism for two years.’
Yorick learned, too, the importance of self-obliteration. ‘I had been misrepresented to Madame de Q—— as an esprit—Madame de Q—— was an esprit herself: she burnt with impatience to see me, and hear me talk. I had not taken my seat before I saw she did not care a sous whether I had any wit or no—I was let in, to be convinced she had.—I call heaven to witness I never once opened the door of my lips.’
Such anecdotes may not give us facts,[125] but they record something quite as useful, Sterne’s impression of the salon, and are a reliable indication of his general conduct there. The wits of Paris found the most perfect resemblance between Sterne and his books. Garat asserts[126] that between seeing the author and reading his works there was almost no difference at all. There are peculiarly Shandian touches in some of his letters to Garrick, as his mention[127] of the Baron d’Holbach, ‘one of the most learned men over here, the great protector of wits and the Sçavans who are no wits.’ Baron d’Holbach was the ‘maître d’hôtel’ of philosophy, friend of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, with a salon of his own, in which he presided over a school of physicists who held a new theory of nature. Four years later Walpole[128] eschewed this ‘pigeon-house’ of savants and their system of antediluvian deluges invented to prove the eternity of matter. Sterne, who was more affable than Walpole, though no less sharp-sighted, enjoyed himself there and became a friend of Diderot (to whom he presented a collection of English books).