Chapter 259

Arlington Street, Sept. 3, 1765. (page 419)

The trouble your ladyship has given yourself so immediately, makes me, as I always am, ashamed of putting you to any. There is no persuading you to oblige moderately. Do you know, Madam, that I shall tremble to deliver the letters you have been so good as to send me? If you have said half so much of me, as you are, so partial as to think of me, I shall be undone. Limited as I know myself, and hampered in bad French, how shall I keep up to any character at all? Madame d'Aiguillon and Madame Geoffrin will never believe that I am the true messenger, but will conclude that I have picked Mr. Walpole's portmanteau's pocket. I wish only to present myself to them as one devoted to your ladyship; that character I am sure I can support in any language, and it is the one to which they would pay the most regard. Well! I don't care, Madam-it is your reputation that is at stake more than mine; and, if they find me a simpleton that don't know how to express myself, it will all fall upon you at last.' If your ladyship will risk that, I will, if you please, thank you for a letter to Madame d'Egmont, too: I long to know your friends, though at the hazard of their knowing yours. Would I were a jolly old man, to match, at least, in that respect, your jolly old woman!(859)--But, alas! I am nothing but a poor worn-out rag, and fear, when I come to Paris, that I shall be forced to pretend that I have had the gout in my understanding. My spirits, such as they are, will not bear translating; and I don't know whether I shall not find it the wisest part I can take to fling myself into geometry, or commerce, or agriculture, which the French now esteem, don't understand, and think we do. They took George Selwyn for a poet, and a judge of planting and dancing-. why may I not pass for a learned man and a philosopher? If the worst comes to the worst, I will admire Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison; and declare I have not a friend in the world that is not like my Lord Edward Bomston, though I never knew a character like it in my days, and hope I never shall; nor do I think Rousseau need to have gone so far out of his way to paint a disagreeable Englishman.

If you think, Madam, this sally is not very favourable to the country I am going to, recollect, that all I object to them is their quitting their own agreeable style, to take up the worst of ours. Heaven knows, we are unpleasing enough; but, in the first place, they don't understand us; and in the next, if they did, so much the worse for them. What have they gained by leaving Moli`ere, Boileau, Corneille, Racine, La Rochefucault, Crebillon, Marivaux, Voltaire, etc.? No nation can be another nation. We have been clumsily copying them for these hundred years, and are not we grown wonderfully like them? Come, madam, you like what I like of them? I am going thither, and you have no aversion to going thither--but own the truth; had not we both rather go thither fourscore years ago? Had you rather be acquainted with the charming madame Scarron, or the canting Madame de Maintenon? with Louis XIV. when the Montespan governed him, or when P`ere le Tellier? I am very glad when folks go to heaven, though it is after another body's fashion; but I 'wish to converse with them when they are themselves. I abominate a conqueror; but I do not think he makes the world much compensation, by cutting the throats of his Protestant subjects to atone for the massacres caused by his ambition.

The result of all this dissertation, Madam--for I don't know how to call it a letter--is, that I shall look for Paris in the midst of Paris, and shall think more of the French that have been than the French that are, except of a few of your friends and mine. Those I know, I admire and honour, and I am sure I will trust to your ladyship's taste for the others; and if they had no other merit, I can but like those that will talk to me of you. They will find more sentiment in me on that chapter, than they can miss parts; and I flatter myself that the one will atone for the other.

(859) la Duchesse Douairi`ere d'Aiguillon, n`ee Chabot, mother of the Duc d'Aiguillon, who succeeded the Duc de Choiseul as minister for foreign affairs. She was a correspondent of Lady Hervey's. In a letter to Walpole, of the 20th of November 1766, madame du Deffand says:--"Je soupai Iiier chez Madame d'Aiguillon: elle nous lut la traduction de la Lettre d'H`eloyse de Pope, et d'un chant du po`eme de Salomon, de Prior; elle `ecrit admirablement bien; j'en `etais r`eellement dans l'enthousiasme: dites-le `a Milady Hervey." She died in 1772.-E.