It is probable that Sterne made a pretty complete tour of the salons, and there is good reason for assuming that at Madame Geoffrin’s[129] he made the acquaintance of Mlle. de Lespinasse. This young woman, who was about to become one of the most brilliant hostesses in Paris,[130] was eagerly appreciative of the emotional aspect of Sterne’s work. Compact of passion and nerves, a disciple of Rousseau, a ‘daughter of the Sun,’[131] and a sort of female counterpart of Byron, she ate her heart out, was consumed with hopeless love for three men at once, and attempted suicide, quite in the familiar manner of a later school. To love and pain, to heaven and hell, she determined to devote herself.[132] Loathing the world where ‘fools and automatons abound,’ she must construct the world of romance for herself.
Shandyism won her by its frank display of emotion. There were aspects of it which she could never have appreciated, its wayward humour and insincerity, its sprightliness and its dirt; but the tears and the tenderness she understood by instinct. The loves of Yorick and Eliza, never very popular in England, appealed to her as after the order of nature, and no doubt reminded her of her own relations with d’Alembert.
After the appearance of the Sentimental Journey, Mlle. de Lespinasse wrote two chapters[133] in imitation of that work which, though reproducing only such features of Sterne’s manner as she understood, are of great importance as showing the influence of Sterne in the salons. In these the French sentimentalist has adopted the Englishman’s manner in order to pay court to her benefactor, Madame Geoffrin. The chapters record two examples[134] of the elder woman’s charity. The first of these, the incident of the broken vase, is attributed to Sterne himself. Yorick is represented as discovering that a vase which he has recently purchased has a broken lid. The workmen who have just delivered the treasure implore him to have mercy upon their fellow who broke it, whose accident has so alarmed him that he has not dared to appear. He is now fairly in the road to ruin. Pleased with the sympathetic distress of the brother artisans, Yorick inquires into the case, and is able, through La Fleur, to relieve the poor fellow’s misery. He ministers to the needs of a wife and four children, and rewards the kindly friends with a generous pourboire.
The scene of the second chapter is Madame Geoffrin’s salon. Here Sterne is represented as hearing that lady tell the story of her milk-woman. The pathetic death of a cow (sole prop of the milk-woman’s family) recalls the incidents of the dead ass, and of Maria de Moulines and her goat in the Sentimental Journey; but there are serious deficiencies. Sterne, like Mlle. de Lespinasse, would have dwelt on the sentimental pleasure of presenting the milk-woman with two consolatory cows, but he would not have missed the humour in the fact that the cream afterwards delivered to Madame Geoffrin was not fit to drink. Mlle. de Lespinasse shows her appreciation of Sterne’s sentimentalism and her ignorance of his Shandyism.
This imitation of Sterne seems to be the chief record in French of Yorick’s impression on the salon. If it is a reliable view—and there seems to be no good reason for rejecting it—it is clear that Sterne preferred to appear in the drawing-room of Paris without his cap and bells. He realized perhaps that the way to win the hearts of French ladies was with his warm heart and his tearful eye, and not by the sudden caprice of his humour. It was Sterne the emotional epicure, the professed philanderer, and not Yorick the jester, who was known to the salons; and in thus exploiting his sentimentalism, he continued and emphasized one aspect of the work of Rousseau, and, with Richardson, became one of the chief foreign influences exerted upon the romantic movement in France.
But it was not till the time of Gibbon that any English author duplicated the success of Hume in the Parisian salon, for none had so nearly satisfied the conditions required of an esprit fort. Gibbon was the destroyer of ancient superstitions, who had attacked ecclesiastical tyranny with a new weapon. The scepticism out of which Hume had made a philosophy became in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall a new historical method as deadly as it was disguised. For Gibbon, as for Hume, the salon was a sort of Valhalla, at once a reward and an arena, in which, surrounded by his peers, he was to continue his slaughterous career. Success came at once. He was more popular than Hume, for he did not have the social defects which had, after a time, somewhat dimmed the lustre of Hume’s success. He had, for example, no difficulty with the French language, a tongue which he had spoken from his youth.[135] Madame du Deffand found him as French as her closest friends,[136] and Madame Necker rebuked him for allowing a Frenchman to translate his History when he could have done it better himself.[137] Moreover, though he was an uglier duckling than Hume, his manners had a pomposity which did not encourage familiarity. ‘Il ne tombe pas dans les mêmes ridicules,’ said Madame du Deffand, who regarded it as no slight achievement to avoid becoming a fool when surrounded by fools.[138]
Something of Gibbon’s success was due to a period of preparation, as it were, an earlier career in the salons fourteen years before. He had received his training in 1763 when, at the age of twenty-six, he had come to Paris to meet the literary world, to membership in which he felt himself entitled by his Essai sur l’Étude de la Littérature, a work which had achieved the dignity of a second edition. Lady Hervey had furnished him with an introduction to Madame Geoffrin, and he found a place weekly at her famous Wednesday dinners. He visited other salons, notably those of Madame du Bocage and of the Baron d’Holbach, who had entertained Sterne the year before. Helvétius treated him like a friend.[139] It was a sufficient success for a young man. It was not to be expected that he should leave an impress upon Parisian society at this time, nor did he; but there is little doubt that that society contributed in some measure to his lucidity of vision and to the prevailing spirit of disillusion for which he was presently to be famous.
When he returned to Paris in 1777 he shone in no reflected light, for the publication of the first volume of his Decline and Fall in the preceding year had already made him a European reputation. The book was almost immediately translated into French. The spirit of the work, and in particular the famous explanation of the development of Christianity, appealed to the philosophers. The indignant but somewhat ineffectual attacks of pious English folk upon the rationalistic historian pleased them hardly less. Gibbon’s reception was all that he could desire. ‘I was introduced,’ he tells us in his Memoirs, ‘to the first names and characters of France, who distinguished me by such marks of civility and kindness as gratitude will not suffer me to forget and modesty will not allow me to enumerate.’ According to his own account,[140] he shone in disputes, and got his great victory over the Abbé Mably in the discussion concerning the republican form of government. But in general, the French were struck by his affability. Madame du Deffand could find no other fault in him than his abiding desire to please, and observed that beaux esprits had the same fascination for him that the weapons of Odysseus had for the disguised Achilles. At times he seemed servile, and she was on the point of telling him to comfort himself with the reflection that he deserved to be a Frenchman.[141]
But though he was much in the company of Madame du Deffand, that ‘agreeable young lady of eighty-two,’[142] to whom Walpole had given him a letter of introduction; though he found the best company in Paris in her salon, and made numerous visits with her (notably to the Marquise de Boufflers’); though he constantly took supper with her[143] when she happened to be supping at home, it was not with her that he was most intimate during his triumphant months in Paris. His name will ever be linked with that of Madame Necker. His relations with her had begun nearly a quarter of a century before, and may be read, in a somewhat ameliorated version, in his own Memoirs; the lady’s story is more fully set forth by the Vicomte d’Haussonville in Le Salon de Madame Necker. It will suffice to say here that, after being jilted by Gibbon, the ambitious young Suisse had married a man destined to be hardly less famous in his own time, had moved to Paris, studied, as it were, under Madame Geoffrin, and at length opened a salon of her own. Though less brilliantly gifted than other hostesses, she was perhaps even more ambitious than they. There is something modern about her passion for improvement. She was not unwilling to be a femme savante. She disputed with the philosophers and recorded philosophical platitudes, along with gossip and rules of grammar, in her commonplace-book. It may have been the literary ambition of this lady, it may have been her essential sweetness of character, it may have been some form of feminine pride, that led her to seek friendship with the man who had once refused her his love. During her visit to London in 1776, Hume was constant in his attentions to her and to her husband. In September, after her return to France, she wrote to him,[144] urging him to come to her: ‘C’est à Paris qu’il est agréable d’être un grand homme.’ When at length he came, she would no doubt have been glad to ‘plant’ him in her house, after the French custom; but Gibbon preferred his freedom: ‘The reception I have met with from them,’ he writes,[145] ‘very far surpassed my most sanguine expectations. I do not indeed lodge in their house (as it might excite the jealousy of the husband, and procure me a letter de cachet), but I live very much with them, dine and sup whenever they have company, which is almost every day, and whenever I like it, for they are not in the least exigeans.’ Their satisfaction was no less than Gibbon’s. His serious conversation delighted the serious soul of Madame Necker[146] by its union of interest in details with enthusiasm for great principles, and by the sundry graces which adorned it.