'Come back to us when you are free. The moment of your leisure ought always to belong to her who has been your first love and your last. I cannot make up my mind which of these titles is the sweeter and the dearer to my heart.'
What are we to make of it all? Nothing, assuredly, that entitles us to cast a stone at Madame Necker, or to express for her husband a pity which he never felt for himself. Yet one imagines that after M. Necker, who kept such early hours, had retired to his well-earned repose, there must sometimes have been certain sentimental communings, in which the old note of persiflage was no longer to be heard. One listens in fancy to the regrets of these two who never forgot that they had once been lovers—regrets, no doubt, not openly expressed, but only coyly hinted—for the things that might have been.
The regrets, we may take it, were tempered by the lurking consciousness that things were really better as they were. The lovers must have known that, if they had married on nothing a year, the one would never have written his history and the other would never have had her salon, but they would have been two struggling nonentities whom the world would never have heard of. They must have felt, too, that the success in life which they had achieved separately, but could not possibly have achieved together, had meant much to them: that in winning it they had fulfilled their destinies; that their tempers would have soured if they had had to live without it. All this they must have admitted to themselves, and even in their most candid moments, to each other. And yet—and yet——
LA TOUR DE HALDIMAND, OUCHY, LAUSANNE
[CHAPTER IV]
MADAME DE MONTOLIEU—DR. TISSOT
To us, as we look backwards, Gibbon in Lausanne society figures as a Triton among the minnows, but to his contemporaries he probably seemed less important. He certainly did to his contemporaries in London. Boswell, as we all know, considered him the intellectual inferior of Dr. Johnson; and there is the story of the Duke of St. Albans accepting a presentation copy of his 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' with the genial remark, 'Hallo! Another two d——d thick volumes! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbon!' No one in Lausanne took quite such a Philistine tone as that, but it is doubtful whether even Lausanne would have voted him a higher position than that of Primus inter pares. Lausanne, after all, had its native notables, and was too near to its celebrities to see them in their true perspective. It had, among others, Madame de Montolieu.