Various English women—Mrs. Cholmondeley, Mrs. Crewe, Lady Lucan, Lady Hervey, Mrs. Greville, Mrs. Catherine Macaulay—had studied the Parisian salon at first hand; but none of them were so familiar with it, none so intimately acquainted with various Parisian hostesses, as Mrs. Montagu. As early as 1750 Madame du Bocage visited her in London and took breakfast at her house in Hill Street. The two ladies paid elaborate court to each other. Montagu presented du Bocage with compliments and an edition of Milton, and du Bocage (who was a professed poet) replied with compliments and a string of riming couplets, setting forth the merits of Montagu.[228]
Again, when Madame Necker was in England, many years later, Mrs. Montagu saw much of her. The French lady, like every one, was pleased with her amiability, and, again like every one, amused at the stiffness of her conversation.[229] When, in 1775, Mrs. Montagu went to Paris, her associations with the Neckers became fairly intimate. She was presented to ‘all the beaux esprits,’ and was even taken to see Madame Geoffrin, whose glory now was waning. On the sixth of July 1776, she met Madame du Deffand at dinner, and found her gay and lively. Madame du Deffand’s comments on the bluestocking, in her letters to Walpole, are singularly indulgent, until corrected by Walpole. She is polite, thinks Madame du Deffand, but not over pedantic,[230] and ‘ennuyeuse, sans doute, mais bonne femme.’ Mrs. Montagu hired a house at Chaillot, where she gave suppers for Madame du Deffand and the rest. That she flattered them all, after the most approved Parisian fashion, no one who has read her letter to Madame du Deffand can doubt. It is one of the most skilful pieces of compliment which she ever devised, and was sent with a gift of two beautiful scent-boxes. Witness the following extract, and let the reader remember that Madame du Deffand was blind.
Il ne me reste qu’une ressource; c’est de vous adresser comme à une divinité et vous offrir simplement de l’encens; c’est le culte le plus pur et le moins téméraire. Je vous prie, madame, de me permettre de vous offrir deux cassolettes, où j’ai mis des aromatiques.[231]
In spite of the success of her Parisian visit, it may be questioned whether Mrs. Montagu was wholly satisfied with the spirit of the salons she visited. She had gone to Paris with the avowed intention of searching, among the provincial nobility, for ‘some who are more in the ton of Louis XIV’s court’[232] than the ladies of Versailles. It was, as one might have suspected, the Rambouillet tradition that attracted her, rather than the later salon with its freer thought and freer manners, and its constant change of favourites. She should have gone to Paris at least as early as the days of Madame de Lambert.
But it is certain that Mrs. Montagu never succeeded in attaining to the ease of the Parisian salon. Friends feared that she would come back more artificial than ever. Mrs. Boscawen wished that she might get by heart Mrs. Chapone’s chapter on Simplicity.[233] But there was no such thing as simplicity in Mrs. Montagu’s nature: all her instincts were for the elaborate, her methods in all things complicated, her manner grand, not easy. Her assemblies became even larger and more overpowering; the number of ‘the Great’ grew constantly larger.
Her salon was inevitably the reflection of her own character. She could be, as Mrs. Thrale witnessed, ‘brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgment, critical in talk’;[234] she could be, as Johnson freely admitted, ‘par pluribus ... variety in one.’[235] But there was a certain stiffness in her character that inevitably communicated itself to her assemblies. Mrs. Chapone, who had every reason to love her, wrote to Pepys that he would always find in her good nature, ‘though not accompanied with remarkable softness.’[236] Fanny Burney was from the first rather overwhelmed by her grand manner, and Mrs. Delany found at one of her assemblies ‘a formal, formidable circle,’ where she had only ‘a whisper with Mrs. Boscawen, another with Lady Bute, and a wink from the Duchess of Portland—poor diet for one who loves a plentiful meal of social friendship.’[237] Six years later she was so dazzled by the brilliancy of one of Mrs. Montagu’s assemblies that she fled incontinently.
Lady Louisa Stuart, who evidently did not like Mrs. Montagu, calls attention to another defect. ‘There was a deplorable lack ... of that art of kneading the mass well together, which I have known possessed by women far her inferiors. As her company came in, a heterogeneous medley, so they went out, each individual feeling himself single, isolated, and (to borrow a French phrase) embarrassed with his own person; which might be partly owing to the awkward position of the furniture, the mal-arrangement of tables and chairs. Everything in that house, as if under a spell, was sure to form itself into a circle or semicircle.’[238] But all this is as nothing compared with the testimony of Lord Lyttelton. Mrs. Montagu was destined to receive the unkindest thrust from her own familiar friend. At some time in the decade of the sixties, Lord Lyttelton wrote an elaborate letter to a friend in criticism of the modern wits, whom he proclaimed ‘not worth a beadsman’s rosary.’ The following passage[239] can refer only to Mrs. Montagu:
No one can take more pains than Mrs. M—— to be surrounded with men of wit; she bribes, she pensions, she flatters, gives excellent dinners, is herself a very sensible woman, and of very pleasing manners; not young, indeed, but that is out of the question;—and, in spite of all these encouragements, which, one would think, might make wits spring out of the ground, the conversations of her house are too often critical and pedantic,—something between the dullness and the pertness of learning. They are perfectly chaste, and generally instructive; but a cool and quiet observer would sometimes laugh to see how difficult a matter it is for la belle Présidente to give colour and life to her literary circles.