Two years after his tour to the Hebrides, Johnson went to France with Mr and Mrs Thrale. It was in the days before, though not long before, the Revolution; and Johnson, who saw Louis XVI and his queen, noted various little points about them—how the king fed himself with his left hand and how the queen, wearing a brown habit, rode 'aside' on a light grey horse.
He saw the sights of Paris and sometimes felt lonely in doing so:
"The sight of palaces, and other great buildings, leaves no very distinct images, unless to those who talk of them. As I entered [the Palais Bourbon], my wife was in my mind: she would have been pleased. Having now nobody to please, I am little pleased."
Besides Paris, which he found "not so fertile of novelty" as the Hebrides, he visited Rouen, Fontainebleau, Versailles, Chantilly, and Compiègne, and admired the cathedrals of Noyon and Cambrai.
People interested him more than places and he summed up a few of his impressions of the French to Boswell:
"The great in France live very magnificently, but the rest very miserably. There is no happy middle state as in England.... The French are an indelicate people; they will spit upon any place. At Madame ——'s, a literary lady of rank, the footman took the sugar in his fingers, and threw it into my coffee. I was going to put it aside; but hearing it was made on purpose for me, I e'en tasted Tom's fingers[32]. The same lady would needs make tea à l'Angloise. The spout of the tea-pot did not pour freely; she had the footman blow into it. France is worse than Scotland in everything but climate."
This was Johnson's only foreign tour. Though he often talked of expeditions to other countries of Europe, he was generally content with a post-chaise on an English road and a friend's house or a tavern at the end of it.
On March 19, 1776 he met Boswell at the Somerset coffee-house in the Strand, where they were taken up by the Oxford coach. In his old college his thoughts wandered back to his early days:
"We walked with Dr Adams into the master's garden, and into the common room. Johnson. (after a reverie of meditation,) 'Ay! Here I used to play at draughts with Phil. Jones and Fluyder. Jones loved beer, and did not get very forward in the church. Fluyder turned out a scoundrel, a Whig....' Boswell. 'Was he a scoundrel, Sir, in any other way than that of being a political scoundrel? Did he cheat at draughts?' Johnson. 'Sir, we never played for money.'"