There was just one fly in the ointment. "I am impatient to hear good sense pronounced in my native tongue; having only heard my language out of the mouths of boys and governors for these five months" (she complained to Lady Pomfret). "Here are inundations of them broke in upon us this carnival, and my apartment must be their refuge; the greater part of them having kept an inviolable fidelity to the languages their nurses taught them; their whole business abroad (as far as I can perceive) being to buy new clothes, in which they shine in some obscure coffee-house, where they are sure of meeting only one another; and after the important conquest of some waiting gentlewoman of an opera queen, whom perhaps they remember as long as they live, return to England excellent judges of men and manners. I find the spirit of patriotism so strong in me every time I see them, that I look on them as the greatest blockheads in nature; and, to say truth, the compound of booby and petit maître makes up a very odd sort of animal."
It was not until the middle of August (1740) that Lady Mary left Venice, going first to Bologna, where she stayed a day or two "to prepare for the dreadful passage of the Apennines." On her way to Florence, she visited the monastery of La Trappe—her account of which may be given as a companion portrait to that of the nunnery printed in an earlier chapter.
"The monastery of La Trappe, is of French origin, and one of the most austere and self-denying orders I have met with. In this gloomy retreat it gave me pain to observe the infatuation of men, who have devoutly reduced themselves to a much worse condition than that of the beasts. Folly, you see, is the lot of humanity, whether it arises in the flowery paths of pleasure, or the thorny ones of an ill-judged devotion. But of the two sorts of fools, I shall always think that the merry one has the most eligible fate; and I cannot well form a notion of that spiritual and ecstatic joy, that is mixed with sighs, groans, hunger, and thirst, and the other complicated miseries of monastic discipline. It is a strange way of going to work for happiness to excite an enmity between soul and body, which Nature and Providence have designed to live together in union and friendship, and which we cannot separate like man and wife when they happen to disagree. The profound silence that is enjoined upon the monks of La Trappe is a singular circumstance of their unsociable and unnatural discipline, and were this injunction never to be dispensed with, it would be needless to visit them in any other character than as a collection of statues; but the superior of the convent suspended in our favour that rigorous law, and allowed one of the mutes to converse with me, and answer a few discreet questions. He told me that the monks of this order in France are still more austere than those of Italy, as they never taste wine, flesh, fish, or eggs; but live entirely upon vegetables. The story that is told of the institution of this order is remarkable, and is well attested, if my information is good. Its founder was a French nobleman whose name was Bouthillior de Rancé, a man of pleasure and gallantry, which were converted into the deepest gloom of devotion by the following incident. His affairs obliged him to absent himself, for some time, from a lady with whom he had lived in the most intimate and tender connexions of successful love. At his return to Paris he proposed to surprise her agreeably, and, at the same time, to satisfy his own impatient desire of seeing her, by going directly and without ceremony to her apartment by a back stair, which he was well acquainted with—but think of the spectacle that presented itself to him at his entrance into the chamber that had so often been the scene of love's highest raptures! his mistress dead—dead of the small-pox—disfigured beyond expression—a loathsome mass of putrified matter—and the surgeon separating the head from the body, because the coffin had been made too short! He stood for a moment motionless in amazement, and filled with horror—and then retired from the world, shut himself up in the convent of La Trappe, where he passed the remainder of his days in the most cruel and disconsolate devotion.—Let us quit this sad subject."
The news that Lady Mary was coming to Florence came to the ears of Horace Walpole, who was staying there. If he had not yet made her acquaintance, he certainly knew much about her. "On Wednesday we expect a third she-meteor," he wrote to Richard West, July 31, 1740. "Those learned luminaries the Ladies Pomfret and Walpole[9] are to be joined by the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. You have not been witness to the rhapsody of mystic nonsense which these two fair ones debate incessantly, and consequently cannot figure what must be the issue of this triple alliance: we have some idea of it. Only figure the coalition of prudery, debauchery, sentiment, history, Greek, Latin, French, Italian and metaphysics; all, except the second, understood by halves, by quarters, or not at all. You shall have the journals of this notable academy." Walpole sent, some seven weeks later, an account of the lady to the Hon. Henry Seymour Conway: "Did I tell you Lady Mary Wortley is here? She laughs at my Lady Walpole, scolds my Lady Pomfret, and is laughed at by the whole town. Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze any one that never heard her name. She wears a foul mob, that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled, mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat. Her face swollen violently on one side is partly covered with a plaister, and partly with white paint, which for cheapness she has bought so coarse, that you would not use it to wash a chimney."
[Footnote 9: The wife of the eldest son of Sir Robert Walpole, who in 1723 was created Baron Walpole. He later succeeded as (second) Earl of Orford.]
In another letter, to Richard West (October 2, 1740), Walpole gives an account of the "Academy." "But for the Academy, I am not of it; but frequently in company with it," he wrote. "Tis all disjointed. Madame ——,[10] who, though a learned lady, has not lost her modesty and character, is extremely scandalised with the two other dames, especially with Moll Worthless,[11] who knows no bounds. She is at rivalry with Lady W—— [12] for a certain Mr.——, whom perhaps you knew at Oxford…. He fell into sentiments with my Lady W., and was happy to catch her at platonic love; but as she seldom stops there, the poor man will be frightened out of his senses when she shall break the matter to him, for he never dreamt that her purposes were so naught. Lady Mary is so far gone that to get him from the mouth of her antagonist, she literally took him out to dance country dances at a formal ball, where there was no measure kept in laughing at her…. She played at Pharaoh two or three times at Princess Craon's, where she cheats horse and foot. She is really entertaining: I have been reading her works, which she lends out in manuscript; but they are too womanish: I like few of her performances."
[Footnote 10: Lady Pomfret.]
[Footnote 11: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.]
[Footnote 12: Lady Walpole.]
Lady Mary was, of course, entirely ignorant of Horace Walpole's feelings about her, of which naturally he showed no sign in social intercourse with her. "I saw him often both at Florence and Genoa, and you may believe I know him," she told her daughter. "I was well acquainted with Mr. Walpole at Florence, and indeed he was particularly civil to me," she wrote on another occasion. "I have great encouragement to ask favour of him, if I did not know that few people have so good memories to remember so many years backwards as have passed since I have seen him. If he has treated the character of Queen Elizabeth with disrespect [in A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England], all the women should tear him to pieces, for abusing the glory of their sex. Neither is it just to put her in the list of authors, having never published anything, though we have Mr. Camden's authority that she wrote many valuable pieces, chiefly Greek translations. I wish all monarchs would bestow their leisure hours on such studies: perhaps they would not be very useful to mankind; but it may be asserted, for a certain truth, their own minds could be more improved than by the amusements of quadrille or Cavagnole."
Lady Mary need not have feared that Walpole had forgotten her; he bore her much in mind to his dying day, and found never a kind thing to say about her. It may be presumed that his animosity arose from the fact that Lady Mary had championed Molly Skerritt against his mother, when Miss Skerritt was living openly as the mistress of Sir Robert Walpole. Yet, though he wrote so abusively about her, he concerned himself with a new edition of the Court Poems, though with what right has never transpired. "I have lately had Lady Mary Wortley's Ecloques published; but they don't please, though so excessively good," he wrote to Sir Horace Mann, November 24, 1747. "I say so confidently, for Mr. Chute agrees with me: he says, for the Epistle from Arthur Grey, scarce any woman could have written it, and no man; for a man who had had experience enough to paint such sentiments so well, would not have had warmth enough left. Do you know anything of Lady Mary? Her adventurous son is come in Parliament, but has not opened."
From Florence, Lady Mary repaired to Rome. There, she did not see the Chevalier de St. George, but she did see his two sons, Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, and Henry, Cardinal York. "The eldest seems thoughtless enough, and is really not unlike Mr. Lyttelton in his shape and air," she wrote to Montagu. "The youngest is very well made, dances finely, and has an ingenuous countenance; he is but fourteen years of age. The family live very splendidly, yet pay everybody, and (wherever they get it) are certainly in no want of money."