Rousseau's Dog

by David Edmonds

  On June 3, hearing of his appointment, Hume wrote happily to Sir Gilbert Elliot: “In spite of atheism and deism, of Whiggism and Toryism, of Scotticism and Philosophy, I am now possessed of an office of credit and of £1,200 a year.” He also had £300 for his equipage and an allowance for furnishing his table as appropriate to his new title. On July 13, Hume’s commission under the Great Seal as secretary to the embassy was delivered into his hands.

  But London politics would ensure that his pleasure in the job would be temporary. Grenville had been dismissed on July 13, 1765, and Charles Watson-Wentworth, marquess of Rockingham, formed a patched-up administration. Conway became one of the two secretaries of state, and through his office, his brother, Hertford, was offered the lord lieutenancy of Ireland.

  Hertford’s reluctant successor in Paris would be the Duke of Richmond, brother-in-law of Sir Charles Bunbury. In the event, the undiplomatic Richmond went to Paris for only four months—November 1765 to February 1766—making himself universally unpopular.

  For Hume, Richmond’s appointment signaled the end of Paris, raising the question whether he could or would go to Ireland as secretary there. The job paid £3,000 a year. While he claimed that all he wanted was a book and a fireside, his letters show his ambition, his relish at being well thought of by the king. In late July, Hume wrote to Blair: “You see what a splendid fortune awaits me; yet you cannot imagine with what regret I leave this country. It is like stepping out of light into darkness, to exchange Paris for Dublin.” He told Adam Smith that the Dublin post was one of “great dignity, as the Secretary is in a manner prime minister of that kingdom.”

  His aspirations seem naive. After all, he was scarcely qualified for Dublin, having no capacity for hard drinking or low politicking. Nor did the political elite take such a prospect seriously. The Rockingham ministry was determined to show its anti-Bute—in other words, anti-Scottish—credentials, pandering to widespread English prejudice. Lord Hertford did what he could for his protégé, but as Hume himself commented, “The cry is loud against the Scots, and the present Ministry are unwilling to support any of our countrymen, lest they hear a reproach of being connected with Lord Bute.”

  Hertford’s son went to Dublin instead, in keeping with Hertford’s reputation for looking after his family. However, Hertford secured Hume a yearly pension of £400 as compensation—and had an apartment prepared for him in Dublin Castle. Yet even a visit to Dublin proved impossible. Lady Hertford encouraged Hume to stay away because of the popular prejudice against him in Ireland as both a sectarian and a freethinker. (The Hertfords themselves remained in Ireland for barely a year: the earl returned to London and went on to the preferment he had long coveted, lord chamberlain, at the heart of the Court.)

  Once again, the stout philosopher’s career had been blocked by his nationality, his beliefs, and perhaps his social standing. Even his pleasure at finally having his commission as secretary had a worm chewing at it. At the end of 1765, Walpole recorded Hume’s suspicion that Walpole had been sent to Paris by London to advise the new ambassador behind Hume’s back.

  However, Hume had been living a double life in Paris. If, for Hume the secretary, it felt the worst of times, for Hume the philosopher and historian it was unquestionably the best.

  7

  He Would Always Have Paris

  In all my life, did I never meet with a being of a more placid and gentle nature; and it is this amiable turn of his character, that has given more consequence and force to his scepticism, than all the arguments of his sophistry.

  —LAURENCE STERNE,

  after disputing with Hume

  at dinner at the British embassy in Paris

  DURING THOSE TWENTY-SIX months in Paris, Hume was subject to the pull of two contrasting societies: political England was his paymaster; cultural France was his home away from home. While he was dished up thin gruel from the governments of King George, he feasted on the lavish applause of the Republic of Letters.

  October 18, 1763, was the day of David Hume’s epiphany. In Paris, French society greeted his arrival as undersecretary with what can only be described as rapture. In England or Scotland, such unreserved public acclaim had never—could never have—been his.

  Hume’s friends, traveling in France, had already told him about his incomparable standing. “They would go to the Indies to serve you,” gushed the wine merchant John Stewart in 1759. “You’re the man in the world they hold in the highest esteem.” A year later, one of Hume’s Edinburgh chums agreed: “No author ever yet attained to that degree of reputation in his own lifetime that you are now in possession of at Paris.” It was taken as a measure of Hume’s towering stature in Paris that he displaced Richardson and Laurence Sterne as the hallowed figure of English literature. A claim of acquaintance with Hume opened doors to the most exclusive salons. The French longed for him to appear among them.

  And there he was, that first evening, still in his traveling clothes, whisked from one noble drawing room to another. At a last engagement of the night, the compliments of the dauphin were relayed to him.

  It was only the opening round of a heady two years of being all the rage. On October 26, Hume wrote to Adam Smith that he had “everywhere been met with the most extraordinary honours, which the most exorbitant vanity could wish or desire.” He was introduced to Mme de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, who spoke to him at unusual length; and to the dauphin’s children—the future Louis XVI, Louis XVIII, and Charles X—who assured him that he had many friends and admirers in France. Walpole’s Journal entry for December 24,1765, makes reference to the dauphin’s terminal illness: “Physicians had ordered the Dauphin 460 medicines. The Dauphin said to [the] Duc de Nivernois, that he was glad to have such a book behind me as Mr. Hume’s Essays.’”

  There were dinner invitations from an array of French dukes and princes. In his best English, Prince Louis de Rohan’s secretary, Abbé Georgel, wrote to Hume: “M. L’Abbé Georgel fait un million de compliments à M. Hume. He makes great account of his vorks, admires her wit, and loves her person.”

  In the brief, dry autobiography Hume penned four months before his death in August 1776, he recollected, modestly: “The more I resiled from their excessive civilities, the more I was loaded with them.” On December 1, 1763, he adopted more poetic language when describing his situation for his fellow Scottish historian William Robertson: “I can only say that I eat nothing but ambrosia, drink nothing but nectar, breathe nothing but incense, and tread on nothing but flowers. Every man I meet, and still more every lady, would think they were wanting in the most indispensable duty, if they did not make to me a long and elaborate harangue in my praise.” Hume had his own explanation for the plaudits lavished on him: “What gave me chief pleasure was to find that most of the elogiums bestowed on me, turned on my personal character; my naivety & simplicity of manners, the candour & mildness of my disposition &c.”

  As for his intellectual accomplishments, the culture of the Republic of Letters was infinitely more congenial and welcoming than London. To begin with, in Paris, he was not viewed through the distorting prism of anti-Scottish feeling, nor belittled because of his skepticism or assumed politics. And more, the profession of letters was taken seriously. In April 1765, Hume wrote to Hugh Blair:

  In London, if a man have the misfortune to attach himself to letters, even if he succeeds, I know not with whom he is to live, nor how he is to pass his time in suitable society. The little company there that is worth conversing with are cold and unsociable; or are warmed only by faction and cabal; so that a man who plays no part in public life becomes altogether insignificant; and if he is not rich he becomes even contemptible. Hence that nation are relapsing into the deepest stupidity and ignorance. But in Paris a man that distinguishes himself in letters meets immediately with regard and attention.

  And in Paris, quite unlike England—or Scotland, for that matter-many of those who paid this obese, jowly philosopher the warmest regard and attention were wo
men. He had never experienced anything like it. Charlemont observed, “No lady’s toilette was complete without Hume’s attendance. At the opera, his broad unmeaning face was usually seen entre deux jolis minois [between two pretty faces].” And not just jolis minois. In The Present State of Polite Learning (1759), Oliver Goldsmith (who would dine with both Hume and Rousseau in London) was impressed by the intellectual attributes of French women: “A man of fashion in Paris, however contemptible we may think him here, must be acquainted with the reigning modes of philosophy as well as of dress to be able to entertain his mistress agreeably.”

  Hume was not a man of fashion; he was the fashion. Hume’s presence in Paris, reported an observer, was “regarded as one of the most beautiful fruits of the peace. … The great and pretty ladies play up to him for all they are worth.” The introduction to the 1820 publication of his Private Correspondence observes that “all the pretty women of France were fond of Hume, and the stout Scotch philosopher appeared highly delighted with their society. … It is not, indeed, surprising that a temper, serene and tranquil like his, should have preferred the witty conversation of accomplished Parisian ladies, in their elegant saloons [sic], to the boisterous political discussions of English gentlemen, over their bottles at taverns and coffee houses.”

  In other words, Hume’s reputation had secured him entry to the “Republic of Letters,” that unique territory governed by outstanding women.

  THE DEADENING BOREDOM and hierarchy of the French court were prime reasons for the existence of the Republic of Letters. In its salons, private amusement coexisted with intellectual sharpshooting, and once invited into a salon, public figures were treated equally, irrespective of their social rank.

  An abundance of excellent food and wine sustained dancing and parlor games, music and singing, brilliant sallies and earnest debate, information and learning. Crucially, the salons supplied informal networks of communication that supported an ease of expression and critical inquiry impossible at the court. Together with the constant correspondence this engendered, the salons became the transmission system of the French Enlightenment, creating, focusing, and broadcasting radical opinion. However, it would be wrong to see the salon system simply as a progressive network. That was only a part of its social influence. Mme Suzanne Necker (née Curchod) saw that the salon “formed the invisible power which, without finances, without troops, without an army, imposes its laws upon the town, on the Court, and even on the king himself.”

  These “brilliant schools of reason,” as the salons have been described, also expressed the manners of the age—Hume found Parisian decorum most agreeable compared with that on the barbarian banks of the Thames. Crafted epigrams and l’air galant were indispensable, as was urbanity. For men, the deft demonstration of adulation was essential; for women, holding their “lovers” captive through charm and intelligence, not favors.

  Women hosts were the constant factor. They served the Republic of Letters as firm but delightful regulators of tact and etiquette: hosts who wanted the guests to shine but could set the tone of the discussions and insist on clarity of language. Their art was the creation and maintenance of civilized conversation. In the 1760s, the philosophes might attend a salon two or three times a week.

  It is not hard to imagine Hume’s sense of well-being as he settled into this enriching landscape. He did the round of the salons, starting with the “empress,” Mme Geoffrin, who took immediately to her “fat wag,” her “fat rascal.” Foreign ambassadors and visiting monarchs were among the guests. To her Monday dinners, she invited artists and art lovers. Mozart first dazzled Paris in her drawing room. Her literary dinners took place on Wednesdays and buoyed up the Encyclopédiste movement—which, in its darkest days, she kept afloat with a private gift of 100,000 écus.

  Mme Geoffrin’s bitter rival was the blind Mme du Deffand. Any one of her regulars who visited Mme Geoffrin’s circle was viewed as a traitor in the du Deffand apartment above a convent in the rue Saint-Dominique. (Walpole was the exception: he saw both women, and yet seems to have survived intact.)

  Unlike Mme Geoffrin, the Marquise du Deffand belonged to the so-called noblesse de l’épée—the high nobility who (or whose ancestors) had served on the field of battle with the king. She separated from the marquis in 1722, having been for a brief, if notorious, interlude—a fortnight—mistress of the regent, Philippe, duc d’Orléans. That liaison, together with her much longer membership of his scandalous circle, brought her a royal pension. Her salon was celebrated for what Walpole called “the prodigious quickness” of her wit. Her reputation was founded on the bon mot about the martyred Saint Denis who walked several miles after his execution, carrying his head under his arm: “It is only the first step that counts.” She attracted a who’s who of scientists, writers, and leading figures in the world of letters and society. She was a freethinker, ridiculing religion. “What is faith? It is to believe firmly in what one does not understand.” For forty-three years, she corresponded with Voltaire; they were amicable foes.

  Although Hume had joined her salon early in his stay, his tenure did not last. Partly his break was a consequence of his choice to frequent the salon of Julie de L’Espinasse, something not forgotten by Mme du Deffand when later he sought her support. The illegitimate offspring of Mme du Deffand’s eldest brother, the twenty-two-year-old Mlle de L’Espinasse had been invited by Mme du Deffand in 1754 to assist at her salon. The great hostess had recognized her warmth, wit, and intelligence; with her niece’s presence, Mme du Deffand’s salon achieved a decade of preeminence.

  However, it became apparent that some, particularly the philosophes, preferred the company of the younger woman; she developed her own informal reception when habitués called on her in the afternoons while her aunt was in repose. D’Alembert fell in love with this embodiment of passionate and romantic sensibility. In 1764, Mme du Deffand expelled her. It was a misjudgment. D’Alembert set her up with a house and a pension. He moved in when seriously ill and she nursed him back to health, though his love for her was unrequited.

  Many of du Deffand’s regulars departed with her niece, who then established her own formal salon in the same street, frequented by a galaxy of stars of the French Enlightenment. Besides Diderot, they included a leading mathematician, an apostle of science and logic in government, and the sparkling journalist who became editor of the Gazette de France—in other words, Jean-Baptiste Le Rond d’Alembert, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and Jean-Baptiste Suard.

  According to Hume’s biographer Ernest Campbell Mossner, it was at de L’Espinasse’s salon that Hume joyfully discovered a “feast of reason” and “the quiet appreciation of his own talents.” D’Alembert’s presence guaranteed real intellectual weight. Hume and d’Alembert achieved an almost instant rapport.

  At this point, Hume also came across the multitalented Diderot, Hume’s equal in profound conversation. A big man himself, Diderot was amazed at Hume’s bulk—like “a portly, well-fed Bernardine monk.” Even two centuries later Bernardine monks were notorious for luxurious living (les gros Bernardins, in the words of a 1930s French popular song).

  Hume basked in the unconditional adulation of Paris. It was social death not to be acquainted with him, or worse, not even to recognize him in the flesh. In his journal, Walpole records an anecdote told by a former French ambassador to London: “A French lady asking him who Mr. Hume was, and being told, begged him not to mention it, as it would make her look very ill bred not to know him. It is incredible the homage they pay him.”

  Hume made less of an impression on his possibly envious compatriots. George Selwyn, wit and politician, wrote to Lord Holland, “In common society he seems a man of the most clumsy capacity I ever saw, and to speak the truth, the fuss which the people of this country have made with a man on account of perfections of which I am confident they are no judge, and whose manners are so unlike their own, has lessened them not a little in my opinion.”

  Hume was treated, said Walpole, with “p
erfect veneration.” Then he added tartly that Hume was “the only thing in the world that [the French] believe implicitly; which they must do, for I defy them to understand any language that he speaks.” Whether Walpole was mocking Hume’s French accent or his distinctive Scottish brogue—or both—is unclear.

  The Scotsman was certainly not all elegant phrases and flashing epigrams in the entertainments staged at home. An anecdote of Mme d’Épinay has him in a “café,” dressed as a sultan and seated between two beautiful “slaves” whom he was supposed to seduce. All he finds to say, slapping his knees and stomach, is “Well my young ladies. Well. Here you are then. Ah well. … Eh bien! Mes demoiselles. Eh bien! Vous voilà donc; eh bien! vous voilà, vous voilà ici?” His performance was not a success. The “slaves” said he was good only at eating veal.

  HUME WAS ALSO a regular at the dinners at one of the few all-male salons—held by the massively wealthy Paul-Henri Thiry Baron d’Holbach, who was at the very hub of the French Enlightenment. Holbach, German-born, was both a major financial supporter of and a contributor to the Encyclopédie, writing and translating articles on subjects as diverse as mineralogy and chemistry, politics and economics. Before Hume came to Paris, he had written to the Scotsman of his desire to meet “one of the greatest philosophers of any age.”

  He presided over what Rousseau in his rage called la coterie holbachique, a group that included Diderot, Grimm, and d’Alembert. Nonetheless, Rousseau is thought to have taken d’Holbach as the model for Wolmar, a worthy atheist of Christian virtues, in Héloïse.

  The baron’s luxurious residence offered a salon with a difference: it was governed by philosophes for philosophes, and a cockpit of their enlightenment. Meetings of the Encyclopedists occurred there twice a week. No hostess imposed her rules of conversation and propriety of subject. After d’Alembert, Hume judged d’Holbach the man most worthy of trust.