In the summer of 1776, Mrs. Montagu was to be seen in Paris, welcomed to the first circles as a happy sample of an accomplished English lady. Voltaire, then in his dotage, took the opportunity of her presence to send to the Academy a furious paper against Shakespeare. The lady had a seat of honour among the audience while the vituperative paper was read. When the reading came to an end, Suard remarked to her, “I think, madam, you must be rather sorry at what you have just heard!” The English lady, Voltaire’s old adversary, promptly replied, “I, sir! not at all. I am not one of M. Voltaire’s friends!” She subsequently wrote: “I felt the same indignation and scorn, at the reading of Voltaire’s paper, as I should have done if I had seen harlequin cutting capers and striking his wooden sword on the monument of a Cæsar or Alexander the Great.”
In October, after her return to Hill Street, she thus described to Garrick the influence exercised over her by French tragedy and French tragedians:
“... Mrs. M—— cannot help intimating that she never felt such pity and terror, which it is the business of tragedy to excite, as at the French theatre, where M. le Kain roars like a mad bull, and Molé rolls his eyes, and has all the appearance of a man in a phrensy ... persons of real taste seem convinced of the false taste prevalent in their tragedies.”
The “flutter of Paris” was almost more than her strength could bear. The idea of its being succeeded by the “racket of London” alarmed her. She avoided the “racket,” and recovered from the “flutter,” by spending a season of rest at Sandleford, where she dreamed over Voltaire’s address against Shakespeare, became a rural cottager, feeder of pigs, cultivator of potatoes, or pretended to be so, and “did idleness.” “There is as much an idleness to be done,” she wrote to Garrick, “as there is a darkness that may be visible, and is, like the other, a state and a condition, and a very pleasant and gentle one, when the working-day of bustle and hurry is over.... I came to do idleness, and it is not all done.”
The visit to Paris is alluded to among an “infinite deal” of other subjects, in a letter to her brother William, dated Sandleford, June 9, 1777.
“It would be with much greater pleasure I should take up my pen to tell you I am at Sandleford, if I could flatter myself with the hope of alluring you to it: you would find me in the character of a housewife. The meagre condition of the soil forbids me to live in the state of a shepherdess-queen, which I look upon as the highest rural dignity. The plough, the harrow, and the spade remind us that the golden age is past, and subsistence depends on labour; prosperity on industrious application. A little of the clay of which you complain, would do us a great deal of good. I should be glad to take my dominions here from the goddess Ceres to give them to the god Pan, and I think you will agree with me in that taste; for wherever he presides, there Nature’s republick is establish’d. The ox in his pasture is as free and as much at his ease as the proprietor of the soil, and the days of the first are not more shorten’d to feed the intemperance of others, than the rich landlord’s by the indulgence of his own. I look upon the goddess Ceres as a much less impartial and universally kind deity. The antients thought they did her honour by ascribing to her the invention of laws. We must consider her also as the mother of lawsuits and all the divisions, dissentions, and distinctions among mankind. Naturalists tell us all the oaks that have ever been, were contain’d in the first acorn. I believe we may affirm, by the same mode of reasoning, that all arts and sciences were contain’d in the first ear of corn. To possess lasting treasure and exclusive prosperity, has been the great business and aim of man. At Sandleford you will find us busy in the care of arable land. By two little purchases Mr. Montagu made here, my farm contains six hundred acres. As I now consider it an amazonian land, I affect to consider the women as capable of assisting in agriculture as much as the men. They weed my corn, hoe my turnips, and set my Pottatoes; and by these means promote the prosperity of their families. A landlord, where the droit du seigneur prevailed, would not expose the complexions of his female vassals to the sun. I must confess my amazons hardly deserve to be accounted of the fair sex; and they have not the resources of pearl-powder and rouge when the natural lilies and roses have faded.
“You are very polite in supposing my looks not so homely as I described them; but tho’ my health is good, the faded roses do not revive, and I assure you I am always of the colour of la feuille-morte. My complexion has long fallen into the sere and yellow leaf; and I assure you one is as much warned against using art, by seeing the ladies of Paris, as the Spartan youths by observing the effects of intoxicating liquors on the Helots. The vast quantity of rouge worn there by the fine ladies makes them hideous. As I always imagine one is less looked at by wearing the uniform of the society one lives in, I allowed my frizeuse to put on whatever rouge was usually worn. But a few years ago, I believe, my vanity could not have submitted to such a disfiguration. As soon as I got to Dover, I return’d to my former complexion. I own I think I could make that complexion a little better by putting on a little rouge; but at my age, any appearance of solicitude about complexion is absurd, and therefore I remain where age and former ill health have brought me; and rejoice that I enjoy the comforts of health, tho’ depriv’d of its pleasing looks.
“I allowed my frizeuse to put on whatever rouge was usually worn”
Photogravure after the painting by Girardet