Il voyage, il instruit sa raison lumineuse
Par des tableaux divers et des mœurs et des lois.
S'il s'arrête en ces lieux, séduit par notre hommage,
Heureux peuple Danois, n'en soyez par jaloux:
Le destin l'a formé pour regner parmi vous,
Notre art ne peut içi fixer que son image."[86]
It is really a painful task to dispel the favourable opinion expressed of Christian VII. in these verses, but I am bound to be impartial. Reverdil tells us bluntly that in France, in spite of the flattery employed, and the prejudice in the king's favour entertained by those who only caught a transient glance of him, such persons as were in daily intercourse with him, and were able to watch him closely, detected in him an incipience of mania, and heard him make extravagant remarks. They also noticed that in his moments of aberration, a glance from Holck recalled him to his senses.
After a stay of seven weeks, Christian quitted Paris on December 9, in order to return to his own states. At Metz he allowed himself to be detained for three days by all sorts of festivities offered him by Maréchal d'Armentières, and proceeded thence to Strasburg, where he arrived on the 16th, and accepted an invitation from the Elector Carl Theodore of the Palatinate to travel viâ Mannheim. On the 18th he arrived in the latter city, and was received with all imaginable ostentation. After visiting, on the following day, the Electoral Library, Academy of Sciences, Treasury, picture gallery, and cabinet of coins, and being presented by his host with a series of medals of the electors coined in Rhine gold, Christian continued his journey on the 28th to Hanau, in order to visit his two sisters.
After four days' stay here, the king travelled through Cassel and Brunswick, and reached Hamburg on New Year's Day, where he was received with a royal salute. On January 4 he arrived at Altona, the first city in his dominions, and was welcomed by all possible demonstrations of joy. The children of the Orphan Hospital and other charities were ranged in two lines, with wax tapers in their hands, as his Majesty passed to the palace. All the houses were illuminated, and a grand emblematical firework, inscribed optimo regi, was played off, which was followed by a grand masked ball. Here, too, Christian received his last heavy discharge of verse, in the shape of a panegyric, from one Madame Wildin of Glückstadt, in which the lady, with extensive view, surveys mankind from Copenhagen to London and Paris. Her account of the English is so droll that room must be made for it:—
"De près vous avez visité