‘It is easy to see that curiosity alone attracts foreigners, especially the English. The proof is that they never make a long stay among us. They come to see the First Consul, attend the parade and theatres, visit the museums and other curiosities; then they leave. Paris is thus for foreigners merely a huge inn, where they come to examine the consequences of the Revolution and admire the masterpieces stolen from Italy and Flanders.’[155]
This is corroborated by a Weimar magazine, London und Paris, which speaks of the wealthiest visitors as apparently resolved on economising, beating down shopkeepers and chiefly frequenting the museums and other gratuitous spectacles, or gaping from morning to night in the squares and on the bridges. Campe speaks of a fortnight as the average stay, and accepting the obviously exaggerated calculation of a Paris newspaper that there were 32,000 English arrivals a month, he estimated that each spent 30 guineas and that Paris was the richer by 960,000 guineas a month. Reichardt estimated 20 guineas as the cost of the journey and of ten days’ stay in Paris.
As for English impressions of France a few words will suffice. Most of the ‘chiels’ who took notes were struck with the liveliness of French society. The absence of roughness and hustling in the crowds at fireworks and regattas also then, as now, attracted notice. Eyre speaks of the readiness with which Parisian crowds made way for foreigners. On the other hand, the frequency of divorce and of liaisons excited comment. King speaks of obscenity, immorality, and profligacy as universal in Paris, a remark which we might attribute to British cant but for his statement that he also saw drunken Englishmen reeling in the Palais Royal arcades. The term monsieur had been generally revived, though in the public offices citoyen was still retained. Madame Récamier showed visitors of both sexes her sumptuously furnished bedroom. Pinkerton and Hughes were charmed with the affability and grace of Frenchwomen, and Williams wished France and England could bestow on each other the one gaiety the other seriousness, while Miss Plumptree vindicated the virtue of the great majority of Frenchwomen. Miss Edgeworth was struck by the absence of beggars on the coach-roads—in Paris, however, carriages were beset by them—and by the good manners of the lower orders. Forbes found the coachdrivers so polite as to stop and allow their fair passengers to sketch the landscape. Eyre was delighted with the Palais Royal, whereas Redhead Yorke styles it a den of iniquity, and Miss Plumptree considered its erection a greater sin of Égalité Orleans than even his Jacobinical delinquencies.
Holcroft, who had a French wife and had paid previous visits, tells us more than other writers of comparative manners. He himself was taught a lesson of politeness. He was leaning against the mantelpiece apparently monopolising the fire, when a girl came up and in lieu of saying ‘You are in my way,’ employed the delicate periphrasis of ‘I am in your way.’ He took the hint and moved, but this was not all. She touched a cup and saucer on the mantelpiece, expecting him to remove it. He did not perceive her meaning, whereupon she took the cup and saucer and handed it to him. Again when a friend was lolling in a chair with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out, a French lady remarked to Mrs. Holcroft, ‘Look at that Englishman, he is anything but squeamish.’ Yet Holcroft saw Frenchmen in similar attitudes, not to speak of their spitting on the floor or pulling out white handkerchiefs bedaubed with snuff. The French were scandalised at the appearance at the Tuileries of an officer in Highland costume; but Holcroft observed women in male attire in the streets and also at the theatres, where they thus evaded the regulation excluding women from the pit. He saw a married couple undistinguishable in point of dress, but he admits that the woman showed timidity and the utmost propriety. On another occasion, however, he sat behind a girl in male dress who, manifestly to attract his notice, pretended to be making love to a female friend by her side. Little girls, moreover, were frequently dressed as boys, while boys had all sorts of outlandish costumes. Naughty children were often threatened with being sent back to their nurses on the ground that they must be changelings, and putting children out to nurse was so universal that in eighteen months Holcroft, except among the poor, saw only two infants in arms in the streets. He found French politeness in several respects wanting. Shopkeepers were the reverse of obsequious, and when his heels were trodden upon or his coat soiled by a cane or umbrella carried under the arm he seldom received an apology. If, moreover, at a theatre a neighbour borrowed his copy of the play it would have been retained till the end of the performance if Holcroft had not asked for it back.
There were marriages and deaths among the visitors. Lady Catherine Beauclerk, daughter of the Duke of St. Albans, was married at the Embassy to the Rev. James Burgess, the Duchess of Cumberland being present; she died nine months afterwards at Florence. The Baroness Crofton’s daughter was married to St. George Caulfeild of the county Roscommon, probably the ex-Guardsman and man of fashion who on the 2nd February 1803 appeared at Covent Garden as Hamlet. He was ‘well-proportioned and genteel,’ but too laboured in his attitudes and gesticulations. Richard Trench married Miss St. George. Lady Isabel Style died at St. Omer in December 1802, Champion de Crespigny in Paris on New Year’s Day, 1803, and Luttrell in the same month. Sir Robert Chambers, ex-Chief Justice of Bengal, who had intended going south, died in Paris in May 1803, and was buried in the Temple Church, London. Mrs. Charles Ellis, granddaughter of the Earl of Bristol, Lady Mary Eyre, relict of Thomas Eyre and sister of the Earl of Uxbridge, Lady Anne Saltmarsh, and Colonel Alexander Malcolm also died in Paris or the provinces.
Before passing on to the renewal of the war, I may mention some of the return visits to London. These were sufficiently numerous for sheets of voting-papers on Napoleon’s life-consulate to be sent over to the French Embassy. Let us hope that one of these was not filled up by the most prominent visitor, Grégoire, Constitutional Bishop of Blois, who had sat in the Convention, but was happily absent in Savoy at the time of Louis XVI.’s trial. He was no doubt eagerly questioned on the events of the Revolution and on the horrors from which he had rather unaccountably escaped. He plumed himself on being the first Catholic prelate who since 1688 had promenaded in St. James’s Park in full costume, and he wittily remarked to Fulton, ‘The English are a magnanimous, hospitable, and kindly people, and the country would be enchanting if it had but pleased God to give it sunshine and French cookery.’ Sir Joseph Banks showed him the sights of London. Madame Récamier was welcomed at London and Bath. She was noticed by the Prince of Wales, and made or renewed acquaintance with the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Elizabeth Foster, the Marquis of Douglas, his sister the Duchess of Somerset, the Duke of Orleans (afterwards Louis Philippe), and his brothers. Her portrait was in great request, but she was mobbed in Kensington Gardens on account of her transparent French costume.[156] Her husband, the banker, joined her in London in May 1802. Madame Vigée-Lebrun, who had painted Marie Antoinette, went in April 1802 and stayed three years. The Prince of Wales and Lord Byron were among her sitters. Madame Tussaud, an artist of another order, settled permanently in London with her waxwork collections. Delille recited his verses, but was addicted to eating jellies meanwhile, which with his rapid pace made it difficult to understand him. He returned in August 1802, and had obtained or was about to obtain dispensation from deacon’s orders so as to marry his housekeeper. Garnerin, the aeronaut, made a long stay, and ascending at Ranelagh Gardens alighted at Colchester. He made another ascent at Bath. Félissent, the worthless second husband of the great singer Mrs. Billington, had to her surprise followed her from Italy to London; but the Government, doubtless out of friendliness to her, expelled him under the Alien Act. Was he anxious to share the 4000 guineas which she was earning that season, or was he jealous, and not without cause, of the Duke of Sussex? Talleyrand shamelessly gave his brother, Colonel Archambaud (afterwards Duc de Talleyrand), a letter to the Prime Minister, Addington, requesting him to procure the payment of a considerable sum due to him while commanding a regiment of émigrés in English pay. Archambaud returned with the money, but the London newspapers revealing his incognito mission, Napoleon banished him from Paris, as also another Bozon, who had likewise fought against France but had since cringed to Napoleon. Fiévée, the press censor, was sent to write letters on or rather against England in the Mercure de France,[157] as also Colonel Beauvoisin, who on his return was ordered by Napoleon to write against Pitt, Grenville, and the Court. He was sent on a second visit with directions not only to write letters to his paper (apparently the Débats), and to send all anti-French pamphlets, but to ‘find pretexts for traversing the whole coast from the Thames to beyond Plymouth, the Bristol Channel, Edinburgh and the Scotch coasts.’ He was to ‘have a fixed salary, and extra pay whenever he answers the expectations formed of his talents and fidelity.’[158] Beauvoisin, according to Goldsmith, was intimate with Despard, the conspirator. Bonnecarrère, Madame Bonneuil, who had previously had a mission to Russia, Madame Visconti, mistress of General Berthier, and Madame Gay, are also mentioned by Goldsmith as Napoleon’s emissaries. Military men were also appointed by him as consuls at London, Bristol, Hull, Glasgow, Dublin, Cork, and Jersey; but a letter from Talleyrand to Fauvelet at Dublin, instructing him to make plans of Irish harbours, was intercepted, whereupon the English Government insisted on the withdrawal of these spies, a demand the more easily made by it as it had not itself appointed any consuls to France. A more legitimate visitor was Coquebert, a scientist and diplomatist who was deputed to discuss a commercial treaty, but failed to effect an agreement.
Some of the visitors were of an undesirable class, for in September 1803, when a royal proclamation ordered a general expulsion, the Times said:—
‘What did France send to us? With the exception of a few persons who came on commercial speculations, she sent a multitude of adventurers, who were starving at home and hastened hither, impelled by the reports of our riches and the simplicity of our character; and in return for the wealth which our nobility and gentry carried over to their country, they came among us with no other possessions than their vices.’
Shall we reckon among French visitors Maurice Drummond, a descendant of the Jacobite Drummonds, who took over with him his wife, daughter of Lord Elphinstone, and his daughter Clementina, destined as Lady Clementina Davies to write Recollections of Society? She went at Edinburgh to a school kept by the sister of Professor Playfair, and her brother was born in 1807 on British soil. The latter, in 1841, proved his right to the French title of Duke of Melfort and Perth, while in 1853 an Act of Parliament, reversing the attainder, restored to him his ancestral British title of Earl of Perth and Melfort. He survived till 1902, when, his son and grandson having predeceased him, the earldom passed to Viscount Strathallan.
A less doubtful British immigrant was John Gamble, probably brother of the James Gamble who witnessed the Revolution. He had been in partnership as a paper-maker at Essonne with Jules Didot St. Léger, who had married his sister Maria.[159] Accompanied by Nicolas Louis Robert, the Essonne overseer, inventor of a machine for endless paper-making, he started paper-mills in 1804 at Frogmore, Herts, but these did not succeed. Didot himself, however, was more fortunate at Two Waters, Hemel Hempstead, where he remained from 1802 till 1816.