CHAPTER IV
English Authors in Parisian Salons

The English visitor was a familiar figure in the Parisian salon. In an age when travellers were studying manners rather than mountains, and preferred the society of philosophers to the finest galleries in Europe, no visit to Paris was complete without a conversation with good Madame Geoffrin or an hour with the ‘blind sibyl,’ du Deffand of the bitter tongue. A stream of Englishmen from Prior to Gibbon poured through their drawing-rooms[49] and listened with interest or with alarm to the philosophes who were, to use Walpole’s words,[50] busily pulling down God and the King. Sometimes a returning traveller proved his acquaintance with this society by sacrificing his veracity. Thus Goldsmith asserted[51] that he was present ‘in a select company of wits of both sexes at Paris’ when Diderot, Fontenelle, and Voltaire disputed about the merits of English taste and learning. The interview, it has been repeatedly shown, could hardly have taken place, inasmuch as during the months when Goldsmith must have been in Paris, Voltaire was never once there. But the very lie is eloquent, for it shows the kind of experience in Paris which English authors sought and prized.

The cosmopolitan tone was contributed to the salon by the eighteenth century. It begins with Madame de Tencin. This brilliant woman, somewhat promiscuous in all her tastes, expanded the influence of her drawing-room, and thereby that of later salons, by welcoming distinguished men without respect of nationality; nor were foreigners slow to improve the opportunity of meeting a woman who was no less renowned for her social prestige than for the picturesque iniquity of her past. Her salon was in truth the atonement which she offered the world for the sins of her youth.

She had begun her career by running away from the convent where she had taken the veil. She used her secularized charms to win lovers, and used her lovers to advance her brother in the Church. She became mistress of the Regent, who snubbed her because she wished to talk business when his mind ran on love. The royal harlot then sank into a cheap adventuress; she gave birth to a son, destined to become famous as d’Alembert, and ‘exposed’ him on the steps of Saint Jean le Rond in the hope of making an end of him. At length when a maddened lover shot himself to death under her own roof, she was imprisoned in the Bastille, where she languished for some months. And then, after her release, as if to show that she had a head if not a heart, she abandoned her career of profligacy as lightly as she had formerly abandoned a lover or a child, and opened a drawing-room which, with the death of Madame de Lambert in 1733, became the most brilliant and influential in Paris. Here for twenty years she reigned over such retainers as Montesquieu and Fontenelle. Her success is easier to understand than her motives. Certain it is, however, as Professor Brunel has suggested,[52] that she attracted the men of letters because she gave them to understand that their respect was the one thing in the world for which she cared.

Madame de Tencin had become intimate with Englishmen even before the days of her fame. She was that ‘eloped nun who has supplanted the nut-brown maid’[53] in the affections of Matthew Prior, during his diplomatic service in Paris in the winter of 1712-13. She used him to bring the needs of her brother (whom Prior did not consider to be ‘worth hanging’[54]) before Lord Bolingbroke. He himself was presently avowing her his Queen, and himself her faithful and devoted subject ‘dans tous ses états.’[55] Leslie Stephen[56] considers that Bolingbroke made use of Madame de Tencin in his intrigues with the Regent; but however this may be, his intrigues with the Regent’s mistress became common gossip, and were published abroad by the ballad-singer in the streets.[57]

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But Bolingbroke was not the only English peer who paid court to the ‘nonne défroquée.’ Lord Chesterfield was introduced to her by Montesquieu, and, in 1741, passed some time in her salon, during its later glory. Here he enjoyed the society of authors whom he was always pleased to regard as superior to those of his own country and whose works, particularly Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois, Fontenelle’s Pluralité des Mondes, and the productions of Crébillon and Marivaux, he never tired of recommending to his son. Fontenelle, the placid death’s-head who had never laughed and who could lead a minuet at the age of ninety-seven, must have seemed to Chesterfield the pattern of a man. And yet he could assert, a few years later, that Fontenelle had sacrificed somewhat too much to the Graces.[58]

But what did he think of Madame? What did the great exemplar of the bel air, himself a patron of letters, think of the life and aims of the salon? It is not easy to say. He flattered Madame de Tencin outrageously, according to his professed theories; he praised the good taste of Frenchmen (of which Madame was at once ‘le soutien et l’ornement’), and denounced the brusqueness of his countrymen according to his wont. He boasted himself[59] the ‘ami, favori, et enfant de la maison’ of Madame de Tencin. But when he had occasion to describe the literary life of Paris to his son, he declared that the salons were filled with gossips who talked nonsense and philosophes whose works were metaphysical fustian, verba et voces et praeterea nihil.[60] It was an institution which young Stanhope must visit, where he was to talk epigrams, false sentiments, and philosophical nonsense, but to which he was to maintain a large superiority. Yet, in spite of this show of indifference, I cannot but feel that Chesterfield liked the salon. What else in heaven or earth was there for such a man to like? What could have been more to his taste than its courtly union of intrigue and elegance, of literature and wit, of free thought and easy morals? The salon certainly liked Chesterfield. ‘Let him come back to us,’ cried Montesquieu and the rest of them when Madame de Tencin had read his letter to the circle, and read it more than once. ‘He writes French better than we do,’ exclaimed Fontenelle, ‘qu’il se contente, s’il lui plaît, d’être le premier homme de sa nation, d’avoir les lumières et la profondeur de génie qui la caractérisent; et qu’il ne vienne point encore s’emparer de nos grâces et de nos gentillesses.’[61] When Madame de Tencin despatched this mass of flattery to Chesterfield, Fontenelle added a note begging the English lord not to draw down upon himself too much French jealousy.[62] Unless Chesterfield was, like Fontenelle, incapable of all human emotions, he was pleased by that. The Frenchmen had studied him well. They touched his vulnerable point, and posterity will not easily be persuaded that it was in vain.

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‘In future, then,’ said Fontenelle, after the death of Madame de Tencin, ‘I shall go to Madame Geoffrin’s.’ The change must have supplied the aged wit with many observations on the diversity of the female character; for though ‘la Geoffrin’ had studied the methods of her predecessor, there was no resemblance in character between the two. There is no suggestion of Madame de Tencin’s subtlety in the amiable bourgeoise who became a queen of society at fifty, but rather a rich simplicity of nature that is very winning. Her faults as well as her virtues are quite obvious. Her humour is for ever expressing itself in homely maxims[63] which suggest the lore of peasants. She made her way by the simplest means, a warm heart, abiding common sense, and a persistent will. Her keen intelligence, the gift of nature, not of books, enabled her to understand the philosophers at least as well as they understood themselves, to advise—almost lead—them, to be their ‘Mother,’ and to push them into the Academy. It is, at first blush, amazing that a woman without education, who, indeed, found grammar a mystery, could thus have become the empress of the wits. But living as she did in an ‘age of reason’ when the imagination was turning back to contemplate man in a ‘state of nature,’ unspoiled by the arts of a luxurious civilization, such a defect was not fatal. Shrewd, placid yet alert, simple and with the sweep of vision that is given only to the simple, she looked out fearlessly upon the society of her time, with all its elaborate systems and new philosophies—and understood. As she was without fear, so she was without contempt. She saw what was good in the new order and encouraged it, but without becoming its slave. Like Johnson (whom she would have understood), she contrived to ‘worship in the age of Voltaire,’ but this was with no surrender of her interest in Voltaire. She was intolerant of pretence. She adopted a manner of treating her friends which, in its combination of brusqueness and affection, is thoroughly parental. She scolds and pushes, punishes and rewards. She decides disputes with a word. She spends with open hand. Her great desire is to be of help to her children. D’Alembert writes[64] of her, ‘“Vous croyez,” disait elle à un des hommes qu’elle aimait le plus, “que c’est pour moi que je vois des grands et des ministres? Détrompez-vous; je les vois pour vous et pour vos semblables, qui pouvez en avoir besoin: si tous ceux que j’aime étaient heureux et sages, ma porte serait tous les jours fermée a neuf heures, excepté pour eux.”’ But she never forgot that, in her own house, she alone was mistress. Her charity, which she conducted on a heroic scale, implied a certain obedience in the recipients of it; but both charity and obedience were only devices for promoting their interests. ‘Elle ne respirait que pour faire le bien,’ said d’Alembert.[65] He and the other writers for the Cyclopædia profited by her charity, for without her patronage that great work could hardly have been carried to publication.

In the salon of Madame Geoffrin and her free-thinking friends, David Hume found, in 1763, a natural abiding-place. It had, indeed, a dual attraction for him in the person of its hostess and the character of her coterie. Madame Geoffrin must have found the Scotch philosopher a man after her own heart. She understood the broad-featured, simple man, whom she presently took to calling[66] her ‘coquin,’ her ‘gros drôle.’ Like her, he enjoyed the society of rationalists. He writes naïvely in his Autobiography: ‘Those who have not seen the strange effects of modes, will never imagine the strange reception I met with at Paris, from men and women of all ranks and stations. The more I resiled from their excessive civilities, the more I was loaded with them. There is, however, a real satisfaction in living at Paris from the great number of sensible, knowing, and polite company with which the city abounds above all places in the universe. I thought once of settling there for life.’ But he kept his head under the pelting flattery. He neither despised his social success nor exalted it as the summum bonum. Like Madame Geoffrin, he made no apologies for himself, and pretended to no social graces which he could not easily acquire. His French was wretched. Walpole protested[67] that it was ‘almost as unintelligible as his English.’ He had no bons mots. He did not even talk much. Grimm found[68] him heavy, and Madame du Deffand dubbed him ‘the peasant.’[69]

But to more serious souls he was even as the Spirit of the Age. He had voiced the new scepticism. He had given the death-blow to miracles. Before his coming to Paris, all his better-known work had been done, and the fame of it preceded him. Alexander Street wrote from Paris to Sir William Johnstone, on December 16, 1762: ‘When you have occasion to see our friend, David Hume, tell him that he is so much worshipped here that he must be void of all passions, if he does not immediately take post for Paris. In most houses where I am acquainted here, one of the first questions is, “Do you know M. Hume whom we all admire so much?” I dined yesterday at Helvétius’s, where this same M. Hume interrupted our conversation very much.’[70]

His influence was, in truth, greater in France than in England; for the temper of English literature never became openly rationalistic. Deism itself was living a subterranean existence; for the authority of such powerful men as Johnson and Burke ran directly counter to it. But in France all sails were set, and men’s faces turned towards ‘unpath’d waters, undreamed shores.’ To the ‘free’ thought that was becoming ever freer and now drifting towards all manner of negation, Hume came as a high priest, an acknowledged pontiff. He was the man whom the King delighted to honour, whose praises were lisped by the King’s children, who was approved by Voltaire, petted by all the women and revered by all the men. In less than two years, Walpole finds him[71] ‘the mode,’ ‘fashion itself’; he is ‘treated with perfect veneration,’ and his works held to be the ‘standards of writing.’ Hume himself writes to Fergusson[72] that he overheard an elderly gentleman, ‘esteemed one of the cleverest and most sensible’ of men, boasting that he had caught sight of Hume that day at court.[73] At last they pay him the compliment (Madame Geoffrin leading off, no doubt) of ‘bantering’ him and telling droll stories of him. He begins to fear that the great ladies are taking him too much from the society of d’Alembert, Buffon, Marmontel, Diderot, and the rest.[74]

Among the distinguished women in Paris who wooed him were Mlle. de Lespinasse, Madame du Bocage, who sent him her works, and the Marquise de Boufflers, who made no secret of her fondness for the British. This lady once cherished a ‘petite flamme’[75] for Beauclerk, Johnson’s gay friend, and even crossed the path of the Lexicographer himself; for it was she whom Johnson, like a squire of dames, gallantly escorted to her coach, and afterwards honoured with a letter. The sentimental homage which she paid to Hume incurred the contempt of Madame du Deffand, who sneered at her worship of false gods, and made her miserable by leading others to denounce her idol.[76]

Madame de Boufflers played a prominent part in the great quarrel between Hume and Rousseau, which involved many of the most prominent persons mentioned in this chapter. The story, which has been frequently told, may be briefly dismissed.[77] The union by which the sentimentalist gave himself in charge to the rationalist, might well have furnished a Hogarth with a subject for an allegorical group representing Scotch solidity and Gallic perversity. Hume, through Madame de Boufflers, had assured Rousseau that he could find in England appreciation, friends, and a true home; and the ill-assorted pair accordingly departed from Paris early in 1776. It was not long before wild letters reached the salons.[78] The two philosophers were hurling epithets at each other, scélérat! traître!

The most immediate cause of their rupture was a letter, written by Walpole, to amuse Madame Geoffrin’s coterie. It purported to be by the King of Prussia, and invited Rousseau to come to court and enjoy his fill of persecution. A brief extract will show the character of this sprightly epistle:

This letter, which had been touched up by Helvétius and the Duc de Nivernois, circulated in the salons, and at last found its way to England, where it was printed by various newspapers in April 1766. The quarrel between Rousseau and Hume, which had been threatening for some weeks, now burst in fury; for Rousseau believed that Hume was in league with Walpole to disgrace him.

Every one now plunged into controversy and correspondence. Mlle. de Lespinasse attempts to soothe feelings. D’Alembert outlines Hume’s campaign. Baron d’Holbach condoles. Walpole explains. Madame de Boufflers fears for the renown of philosophy. Madame du Deffand, who hated everybody concerned, except Walpole, and whom d’Alembert accused of having stirred up all the trouble, finally did as much as any one to put an end to it.[80] Nothing having been accomplished, and the vanity of all having been fully displayed, the matter subsided, leaving a general conviction in the mind of each that all the others had conducted themselves very foolishly.

Hume never returned to the salons, though Mlle. de Lespinasse implored and Madame de Boufflers protested. It was to the latter that he wrote the tranquil letter from his death-bed ‘without any anxiety or regret’[81] which elicited the admiration even of Madame du Deffand[82] and delighted the salons by showing that their favourite could die like a philosopher.[83]

Hume’s acceptance of the salon and its ideals is in striking contrast to the fussy dissatisfaction of Horace Walpole. ‘I was expressing my aversion,’ he writes, ‘to disputes: Mr. Hume, who very gratefully admires the tone of Paris, having never known any other tone, said with great surprise, “Why, what do you like if you hate both disputes and whisk?”’ Walpole’s reply is not recorded. Certainly he did not like les philosophes and their conversation which he found ‘solemn, pedantic, and seldom animated but by a dispute.’[84] He hated authors by profession. He hated political talk (having practical knowledge and experience of politics). He hated savants, free thinkers, and beaux esprits, with their eternal dissertations on religion and government.[85] ‘I have never yet,’ he wrote[86] to Montagu, ‘seen or heard anything serious that was not ridiculous. Jesuits, Methodists, philosophers, politicians, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the encyclopedistes, the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Russia, and the mountebank of history Mr. Pitt, all are to me but impostors in their various ways.’ He is ‘sick of visions and systems that shove one another aside and come over again like the figures in a moving picture.’ Yet like all scoffers, he has nothing to set up in the place of all this. He could not give his heart to the new system, but he was equally incapable of being loyal to the old. Dissatisfied with both, he laughed at both, and was nettled because he could find none in Paris to laugh with him. Laughing was not fashionable in the salons.[87] He despised the prevalent devotion to cards. He was scornfully amused at the popularity of the English in Paris—and even at his own popularity. ‘Vous n’observez,’ said Madame du Deffand, ‘que pour vous moquer; vous ne tenez à rien, vous vous passez de tout; enfin, enfin, rien ne vous est nécessaire.’[88] But there was one thing necessary to Walpole, and it was the thing he professed to despise—the salon. Without knowing the salons he could not ridicule them. No satirist can be a hermit. So Walpole frequented the salons, and vastly enjoyed, not the salons themselves, but his own superiority to them. It was at Madame Geoffrin’s that his career began. He brought a note of introduction from Lady Hervey, met Madame Geoffrin, and discovered to his surprise—and the reader’s—that he liked her. She had sense, ‘more common sense than he almost ever met with.’[89] He notes her quickness in penetrating character, her protection of artists, her services to them, and her ‘thousand little arts and offices of friendship,’ of which latter she was presently to give him a specimen. When he had an attack of gout, she took him under her care. On October 13, 1765, he writes of her to Lady Hervey:

The attention which he received was not without its effect, and at last he was obliged to admit himself pleased.[92] He does not know when he will return to England; and he dwells with delight on the honours and distinctions he receives.

He became one of the most prominent men in Parisian society, and for a time eclipsed the reputation of Hume himself. The latter had been worshipped as a philosopher; Walpole reigned as a wit. The letter to Rousseau, which has been described above, captivated the salons, and probably even made them laugh. The jeu d’esprit, which had first occurred to him at Madame Geoffrin’s, so pleased him that he cast it into more elaborate form, displayed the forged letter in the salons, and became famous at once. ‘The copies,’ he writes to Conway, ‘have spread like wildfire; et me voici à la mode.’[93] It was long before Walpole heard the last of his jest; for, as we have seen, it involved him in the controversy between Hume and Rousseau, and Walpole hated controversy as much as he loved wit. But for the moment it served to draw the eyes of the French world upon him.

Meanwhile, he had become intimate with Madame Geoffrin’s great rival, the blind Madame du Deffand, now in her sixty-ninth year, who rapidly displaced Madame Geoffrin in his affections. By December 1765, he was supping with her twice a week, and in January he wrote Gray his famous description of her:[94]

It was natural that Walpole should prefer her society to Madame Geoffrin’s. Being Horace Walpole, it was inevitable that he should come to regard Madame Geoffrin’s coterie with disdain, to complain that it was made up of ‘pretended beaux esprits’ and faux savants, and that they were ‘very impertinent and dogmatic.’[96] Madame herself had offended him by calling him[97] ‘the new Richelieu’ in reference to his numerous conquests. Walpole grew suddenly afraid of the Geoffrin’s intimacy, and feared that he was becoming an object of ridicule. But in Madame du Deffand he found one of his own sort, a woman used to the society of the great but with no illusions about it, a woman who ruled her circle by despising almost every one who came into it, who had no faith in any one, and least of all in the authors and diplomats who surrounded her, and whose society she endured only because she found it less intolerable than her dark solitude.

In a beautiful letter to her on her blindness, which had become total about a dozen years before the period when we encounter her, Montesquieu reminded[98] her that they were both ‘small rebel spirits condemned to darkness.’ There is in truth something suggestive of the powers of darkness in Madame du Deffand’s pride and perversity. She was of a will never to submit or yield. Pride in the reputation she had made, a passionate delight in conversation, and, above all, the horror of her lonely hours of introspection determined her to continue her salon in spite of all. She did not fail. But a blow hardly less grievous had yet to fall. Mlle. de Lespinasse, on whose assistance she had leaned, had caught the secret of her success, and was forming a coterie of her own, an inner circle within Madame du Deffand’s. When the blind woman learned of her assistant’s treachery, she broke with her, and Mlle. de Lespinasse departed, carrying with her d’Alembert, adored of Madame du Deffand, and his friends, the flower of the flock.

Even then the dauntless old woman would not give up. The aged sibyl in her ‘tonneau’[99] at the Convent Saint Joseph could still attract the curious and the clever. Blind as she was, her ‘portraits’ of character were better than Madame Geoffrin’s,—who excelled in portraits,—and the clarity of her vision was surpassed only by the crispness of her phrasing. At sixty-eight, she had an eager curiosity about her own times[100] that was a stimulus to youth. To speak with her was to witness the triumph of mind.

But her heart was as dust and ashes within her. About her she could feel only duplicity and hatred;[101] she had no faith in man or in God. She considered her friends as those who would not kill but would look on while others killed.[102] The springs of happiness and hope had gone dry. And always the spectre of Ennui steals behind her, and casts its shadow over her withered soul. Literature no longer interests or amuses; she finds philosophy poisoned by affectation;[103] she is bored by all historians, and is glad when she can lay down the first volume of Gibbon.[104] She hears Gluck’s Orphée, and is bored. She hears The Barber of Seville, and is bored.[105] She reads the Iliad, and is bored.[106] There is nothing in her life that does not feel this blight.

And then, in the late evening of her days, a miracle occurred. The dry branch budded and bloomed. In the person of Walpole, with his chill though delicate cynicism (so like her own), romance burst into her life, and she knew love and the pain of love. Her passion for the Englishman twenty years her junior transcends all comparison. It has in it the tenderness of age without its resignation, and the insistence of youth without its joy. It wreaks itself in protestations, reproaches, and demands which it knows must be futile. In Madame du Deffand’s letters to Walpole, recently published in their entirety,[107] there is a strong undercurrent which moves relentlessly to tragedy—tragedy that is no less poignant because its protagonist is an old woman and its theme the progress of a slow despair.

To Walpole all this was a source of great uneasiness. Like most superior folk, he feared the world. He feared that letters might be intercepted, that Madame du Deffand might talk; that the story might become public; that he might become an object of ridicule—and ridicule was to him a hell. He urged upon Madame du Deffand the necessity of reticence. He was crushingly persistent. The aged woman did her best to smother her feelings, but she could not altogether smother her resentment:

Walpole’s letters to Madame du Deffand are fortunately not preserved; but one imagines that he was bored by this strain. To him Madame du Deffand was an aristocratic French woman, a match for him in wit, frankness, and cynicism, who could provide him with that social life which, like her, he affected to despise but could not abandon. He had admired her capacity for disillusion, and now she was the victim of an illusion, and he was the object of it. The situation was unusual.

But though Walpole could not respond, he did not break with her, or care to break. When, in 1775, he visited her, for the third time, she showered him with so many engagements that he needed ‘the activity of a squirrel and the strength of a Hercules’ to go through with them.[109] He was pleased. He asserted that Madame du Deffand was a star in the East well worth coming to adore.[110] With a literary friendship that displayed itself in salons, in dedications of books, and in temperate letters, he could be well content. At her death he wrote of her with true affection, gratitude, and grief. But she had longed in vain for the expression of these, and of more than these, during the desolation of her latter months.

The effect upon Walpole of this acquaintance with Madame du Deffand and her salon was to fix in him certain characteristics not always attractive. She had been able to show him the salon in the one aspect which could appeal to him; where persiflage had not yielded to the pedantry of the new philosophy. In his association with her and with the group whose inspiration she was, he acquired that amused tolerance with which he viewed the attempts of the bluestockings in England to rival the salons which he had known in France.

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Among Madame du Deffand’s visitors was the man to whom she referred as ‘the famous Mr. Burke.’ His visit to Paris was of less than a month’s duration. Madame du Deffand met him on February 9, 1773;[111] and he left France, apparently on the first day of March.[112] Burke had not come to Paris to enjoy the fruits of his fame—though his reputation in the salons as the author of the Junius letters[113] would have given him a career—or to study the philosophical and political principles of the day. He had placed his son Richard at Auxerre to learn French; but before returning to England he glanced at the French court and at the salons. His attitude towards the latter was unique. ‘It was,’ says Morley,[114] ‘almost as though the solemn hierophant of some mystic Egyptian temple should have found himself amid the brilliant chatter of a band of reckless, keen-tongued disputants of the garden or the porch at Athens.’ Yet any seriousness of manner which he may have displayed exalted him in the eyes of the philosophers. Madame du Deffand, though she afterwards learned to despise his writing as verbose, diffuse, obscure, and affected,[115] liked him at once. ‘Il me paraît avoir infiniment d’esprit,’ she writes,[116] and again, ‘Il est très aimable.’ She gave a supper for him, and exerted herself to assemble the most distinguished and clever members of her circle.[117] She had him invited to Madame de Luxembourg’s, where he heard La Harpe read a new tragedy in verse, Les Barmécides.[118] He also talked with Madame du Deffand of a new book, Essai Générale de Tactique[119] by the Count de Guibert, dealing with the state of politics and military science in Europe. This elaborate and enthusiastic treatise, which contained an attack on idle sovereigns and corrupt courts, appealed to Burke; and, at Madame du Deffand’s request, he carried a copy of it to Walpole. Burke knew the same author’s tragedy, Le Connétable de Bourbon,[120] a fact worth mention as indicating an acquaintance with the salon of Mlle. de Lespinasse, whose lover the author was. Burke must have heard Guibert read this play aloud, for it had not yet been acted or published, and the reading may well have occurred at Mlle. de Lespinasse’s. Again, it may have been in that salon that Burke attacked the philosophy of Hume,[121] and defended Beattie against the sneers of the free thinkers—a course that must have taxed his abundant ingenuity as much as his defective French.

It would be interesting to know the conversation that passed between Burke and Walpole after the former’s return to England. They met, and it would seem that Burke expressed strong opinions on the growing atheism of France, and told of his attempt to defend the Christian system, for Walpole wrote[122] to the Countess of Upper Ossory: ‘Mr. Burke is returned from Paris, where he was so much the mode that, happening to dispute with the philosophers, it grew the fashion to be Christians. St. Patrick himself did not make more converts.’ But whatever effect Burke may have had upon the freethinkers of Paris, there can be no doubt of their effect upon him. The amazing downrush of principles, religious, philosophical, and political, which he witnessed in France confirmed him in that natural conservatism, that desire ‘never wholly or at once to depart from antiquity’ to which he was becoming more and more passionately devoted as the great French crisis drew on.

The spectacle of Burke converting the philosophers to Christianity sinks into pale insignificance beside Yorick Sterne’s conversion of Madame de Vence from the perils of deism—an incident familiar to every reader of The Sentimental Journey. It was in the winter of 1762 that Sterne made his entry into the salons, and discovered those guiding principles of compliment, flattery, and general philandering, which enabled him to win all the esprits, and, incidentally, to put an end to the deism of Madame de Vence. Seated on a sofa beside the lady, whose waning beauty should have made her a deist five years before, he revealed the dangers to which beauty, particularly in deists, was exposed, and dwelt on the defense provided by religious sentiments. ‘“We are not adamant,” said I, taking hold of her hand—“and there is need of all restraints, till age in her own time steals in and lays them on us—but, my dear lady,” said I, kissing her hand—“’tis too—too soon——” I declare I had the credit all over Paris of unperverting Madame de V——. She affirmed to Mons. D——[123] and the Abbe M——[124] that in one half-hour I had said more for revealed religion than all their Encyclopedia had said against it—I was lifted directly into Madame de V——’s Coterie—and she put off the epocha of deism for two years.’

Yorick learned, too, the importance of self-obliteration. ‘I had been misrepresented to Madame de Q—— as an esprit—Madame de Q—— was an esprit herself: she burnt with impatience to see me, and hear me talk. I had not taken my seat before I saw she did not care a sous whether I had any wit or no—I was let in, to be convinced she had.—I call heaven to witness I never once opened the door of my lips.’

Such anecdotes may not give us facts,[125] but they record something quite as useful, Sterne’s impression of the salon, and are a reliable indication of his general conduct there. The wits of Paris found the most perfect resemblance between Sterne and his books. Garat asserts[126] that between seeing the author and reading his works there was almost no difference at all. There are peculiarly Shandian touches in some of his letters to Garrick, as his mention[127] of the Baron d’Holbach, ‘one of the most learned men over here, the great protector of wits and the Sçavans who are no wits.’ Baron d’Holbach was the ‘maître d’hôtel’ of philosophy, friend of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot, with a salon of his own, in which he presided over a school of physicists who held a new theory of nature. Four years later Walpole[128] eschewed this ‘pigeon-house’ of savants and their system of antediluvian deluges invented to prove the eternity of matter. Sterne, who was more affable than Walpole, though no less sharp-sighted, enjoyed himself there and became a friend of Diderot (to whom he presented a collection of English books).

It is probable that Sterne made a pretty complete tour of the salons, and there is good reason for assuming that at Madame Geoffrin’s[129] he made the acquaintance of Mlle. de Lespinasse. This young woman, who was about to become one of the most brilliant hostesses in Paris,[130] was eagerly appreciative of the emotional aspect of Sterne’s work. Compact of passion and nerves, a disciple of Rousseau, a ‘daughter of the Sun,’[131] and a sort of female counterpart of Byron, she ate her heart out, was consumed with hopeless love for three men at once, and attempted suicide, quite in the familiar manner of a later school. To love and pain, to heaven and hell, she determined to devote herself.[132] Loathing the world where ‘fools and automatons abound,’ she must construct the world of romance for herself.

Shandyism won her by its frank display of emotion. There were aspects of it which she could never have appreciated, its wayward humour and insincerity, its sprightliness and its dirt; but the tears and the tenderness she understood by instinct. The loves of Yorick and Eliza, never very popular in England, appealed to her as after the order of nature, and no doubt reminded her of her own relations with d’Alembert.

After the appearance of the Sentimental Journey, Mlle. de Lespinasse wrote two chapters[133] in imitation of that work which, though reproducing only such features of Sterne’s manner as she understood, are of great importance as showing the influence of Sterne in the salons. In these the French sentimentalist has adopted the Englishman’s manner in order to pay court to her benefactor, Madame Geoffrin. The chapters record two examples[134] of the elder woman’s charity. The first of these, the incident of the broken vase, is attributed to Sterne himself. Yorick is represented as discovering that a vase which he has recently purchased has a broken lid. The workmen who have just delivered the treasure implore him to have mercy upon their fellow who broke it, whose accident has so alarmed him that he has not dared to appear. He is now fairly in the road to ruin. Pleased with the sympathetic distress of the brother artisans, Yorick inquires into the case, and is able, through La Fleur, to relieve the poor fellow’s misery. He ministers to the needs of a wife and four children, and rewards the kindly friends with a generous pourboire.

The scene of the second chapter is Madame Geoffrin’s salon. Here Sterne is represented as hearing that lady tell the story of her milk-woman. The pathetic death of a cow (sole prop of the milk-woman’s family) recalls the incidents of the dead ass, and of Maria de Moulines and her goat in the Sentimental Journey; but there are serious deficiencies. Sterne, like Mlle. de Lespinasse, would have dwelt on the sentimental pleasure of presenting the milk-woman with two consolatory cows, but he would not have missed the humour in the fact that the cream afterwards delivered to Madame Geoffrin was not fit to drink. Mlle. de Lespinasse shows her appreciation of Sterne’s sentimentalism and her ignorance of his Shandyism.

This imitation of Sterne seems to be the chief record in French of Yorick’s impression on the salon. If it is a reliable view—and there seems to be no good reason for rejecting it—it is clear that Sterne preferred to appear in the drawing-room of Paris without his cap and bells. He realized perhaps that the way to win the hearts of French ladies was with his warm heart and his tearful eye, and not by the sudden caprice of his humour. It was Sterne the emotional epicure, the professed philanderer, and not Yorick the jester, who was known to the salons; and in thus exploiting his sentimentalism, he continued and emphasized one aspect of the work of Rousseau, and, with Richardson, became one of the chief foreign influences exerted upon the romantic movement in France.

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But it was not till the time of Gibbon that any English author duplicated the success of Hume in the Parisian salon, for none had so nearly satisfied the conditions required of an esprit fort. Gibbon was the destroyer of ancient superstitions, who had attacked ecclesiastical tyranny with a new weapon. The scepticism out of which Hume had made a philosophy became in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall a new historical method as deadly as it was disguised. For Gibbon, as for Hume, the salon was a sort of Valhalla, at once a reward and an arena, in which, surrounded by his peers, he was to continue his slaughterous career. Success came at once. He was more popular than Hume, for he did not have the social defects which had, after a time, somewhat dimmed the lustre of Hume’s success. He had, for example, no difficulty with the French language, a tongue which he had spoken from his youth.[135] Madame du Deffand found him as French as her closest friends,[136] and Madame Necker rebuked him for allowing a Frenchman to translate his History when he could have done it better himself.[137] Moreover, though he was an uglier duckling than Hume, his manners had a pomposity which did not encourage familiarity. ‘Il ne tombe pas dans les mêmes ridicules,’ said Madame du Deffand, who regarded it as no slight achievement to avoid becoming a fool when surrounded by fools.[138]

Something of Gibbon’s success was due to a period of preparation, as it were, an earlier career in the salons fourteen years before. He had received his training in 1763 when, at the age of twenty-six, he had come to Paris to meet the literary world, to membership in which he felt himself entitled by his Essai sur l’Étude de la Littérature, a work which had achieved the dignity of a second edition. Lady Hervey had furnished him with an introduction to Madame Geoffrin, and he found a place weekly at her famous Wednesday dinners. He visited other salons, notably those of Madame du Bocage and of the Baron d’Holbach, who had entertained Sterne the year before. Helvétius treated him like a friend.[139] It was a sufficient success for a young man. It was not to be expected that he should leave an impress upon Parisian society at this time, nor did he; but there is little doubt that that society contributed in some measure to his lucidity of vision and to the prevailing spirit of disillusion for which he was presently to be famous.

When he returned to Paris in 1777 he shone in no reflected light, for the publication of the first volume of his Decline and Fall in the preceding year had already made him a European reputation. The book was almost immediately translated into French. The spirit of the work, and in particular the famous explanation of the development of Christianity, appealed to the philosophers. The indignant but somewhat ineffectual attacks of pious English folk upon the rationalistic historian pleased them hardly less. Gibbon’s reception was all that he could desire. ‘I was introduced,’ he tells us in his Memoirs, ‘to the first names and characters of France, who distinguished me by such marks of civility and kindness as gratitude will not suffer me to forget and modesty will not allow me to enumerate.’ According to his own account,[140] he shone in disputes, and got his great victory over the Abbé Mably in the discussion concerning the republican form of government. But in general, the French were struck by his affability. Madame du Deffand could find no other fault in him than his abiding desire to please, and observed that beaux esprits had the same fascination for him that the weapons of Odysseus had for the disguised Achilles. At times he seemed servile, and she was on the point of telling him to comfort himself with the reflection that he deserved to be a Frenchman.[141]

But though he was much in the company of Madame du Deffand, that ‘agreeable young lady of eighty-two,’[142] to whom Walpole had given him a letter of introduction; though he found the best company in Paris in her salon, and made numerous visits with her (notably to the Marquise de Boufflers’); though he constantly took supper with her[143] when she happened to be supping at home, it was not with her that he was most intimate during his triumphant months in Paris. His name will ever be linked with that of Madame Necker. His relations with her had begun nearly a quarter of a century before, and may be read, in a somewhat ameliorated version, in his own Memoirs; the lady’s story is more fully set forth by the Vicomte d’Haussonville in Le Salon de Madame Necker. It will suffice to say here that, after being jilted by Gibbon, the ambitious young Suisse had married a man destined to be hardly less famous in his own time, had moved to Paris, studied, as it were, under Madame Geoffrin, and at length opened a salon of her own. Though less brilliantly gifted than other hostesses, she was perhaps even more ambitious than they. There is something modern about her passion for improvement. She was not unwilling to be a femme savante. She disputed with the philosophers and recorded philosophical platitudes, along with gossip and rules of grammar, in her commonplace-book. It may have been the literary ambition of this lady, it may have been her essential sweetness of character, it may have been some form of feminine pride, that led her to seek friendship with the man who had once refused her his love. During her visit to London in 1776, Hume was constant in his attentions to her and to her husband. In September, after her return to France, she wrote to him,[144] urging him to come to her: ‘C’est à Paris qu’il est agréable d’être un grand homme.’ When at length he came, she would no doubt have been glad to ‘plant’ him in her house, after the French custom; but Gibbon preferred his freedom: ‘The reception I have met with from them,’ he writes,[145] ‘very far surpassed my most sanguine expectations. I do not indeed lodge in their house (as it might excite the jealousy of the husband, and procure me a letter de cachet), but I live very much with them, dine and sup whenever they have company, which is almost every day, and whenever I like it, for they are not in the least exigeans.’ Their satisfaction was no less than Gibbon’s. His serious conversation delighted the serious soul of Madame Necker[146] by its union of interest in details with enthusiasm for great principles, and by the sundry graces which adorned it.

Madame du Deffand always felt that Gibbon’s respect for the standards of the beaux esprits had corrupted his style. She heard in it the declamatory tone of the salons; it had the glitter and the lust for fame with which she was well acquainted.[147] She knew of course that this could not have been the result of Gibbon’s later sojourn in Paris, but she was aware that he had come under the influence of the French salons during an earlier visit. Her hypothesis, which accounts for something of the inflated rhetoric of Gibbon, is certainly worthy of attention; and it may be noted, in support of her view, that Madame Necker, who is a fair measure of what the philosophes wanted, found in Gibbon’s style a ‘captivating magic.’[148]

When Gibbon left Paris there was universal regret. At the Neckers’ they talked of nothing but this bereavement[149] and the hope of a return. He went back, in pudgy complacency, to his historical studies. He had conversed and even disputed with the prophets of a new era; but like the other rationalists, he seems to have had no suspicion of the great change which was presently to make salons impossible. His ignorance of the approaching storm is a significant illustration of the fact that the discussions of the salon were essentially academic, conducted in happy ignorance of the results which were destined to succeed them.