Rousseau's Dog (9 page)

It was just as well that Walpole had a slice of the London
beau monde
to entertain him. He found Parisian society humorless, though he appreciated French manners: “It may not be more sincere (and why should it?) than our cold and bare civility; but it is better dressed, and looks natural; one asks no more.” In a letter of October 19, 1765, to his intimate friend Sir Thomas Brand he complained about his boredom. He had been confined to bed with gout in both legs, and declared that he had not laughed since Lady Hertford went away: “Good folks, they have no time to laugh. There is God and the king to be pulled down first; and men and women, one and all are devoutly employed in the demolition. They think me quite profane for having any belief left.”

Traffic was not all in one direction. The French, too, flocked to England. And, notwithstanding their cherished differences, the two sides peered at each other across the Channel to spot the latest trends in fashion. What was
à la mode
in Paris immediately became
le dernier cri
in London—and vice versa.

Grimm listed the objects of mutual desire:

In that, at least, Grimm was an optimist.

Grimm also noted the French partiality for English translations, which appeared with great rapidity, evidence of the impressive degree of cultural exchange. They included Hume's philosophical papers. There had been a cult following for Samuel Richardson ever since the publication of his
Clarissa
(1747). French pilgrims sought out English locations described in
Clarissa.
Rousseau's opinion was that “in no other language is there a novel equal to
Clarisse,
or even approaching it.”

H
ERTFORD HAD TAKEN
the monumental Hôtel de Lassay for his personal use; a visitor said she had never seen a house as beautiful, but the rooms were inconvenient and dirty. There, according to a British visitor, Hume made “a good honest droll good-natured sort of figure at their table, and really puts you in mind of the mastiff-dog at the fire side.”

Away from the piety of the Hertfords' somewhat spare table, Hume's embassy position and his association with Lord Hertford ensured his entrée to the luxurious divertissements of the court and the drawing rooms of the aristocratic elite. However, many of Hume's tasks must have seemed insufferably mundane. The neophyte assistant secretary had among his official duties the issuing of embassy news to the London press. On June 6, 1765, he sent a report to the
London Chronicle
on the king's birthday celebrations in Paris:

Then, between July 21, 1765, when Hertford left Paris having given up his appointment; and November 17, 1765, when the Duke of Richmond took his place, Hume was
chargé d'affaires
and his responsibilities became more serious. In these four months he handled negotiations on various detailed problems left over from the Treaty of Paris, such as the demolition of the fortifications of Dunkirk. Hume solved none of these issues, but Conway praised his negotiating skills.

H
UME SHOULD HAVE
been cheerier than ever before. He had a challenging job and sufficient remuneration. Yet, beneath the jocund surface, anger was curdling. One reason for this was the politically inspired delay in his confirmation as embassy secretary. Since his arrival, his fate had been in the hands of Prime Minister George Grenville. And, throughout 1764 and the first half of 1765, Grenville was content for Bunbury to stay away from Paris (leaving Hume to do all his work), though he plainly had no intention of confirming the Scottish historian in his embassy post if Sir Charles took another.

Hume was no self-seeker, but in March 1764, Hertford persuaded him to contact his friends who might have influence. Hume portrayed himself as insouciant when the attempt failed: “The king has promised it; all the ministers have promised it; Lord Hertford earnestly solicits it. Yet have I been in this condition about six months, and I never trouble my head about the matter.”

According to Walpole, Hertford was not liked either by the Earl of Bute or by the Grenville government, and it was indicative of the poor relations between Hertford and the administration that when he had put in for the expenses of his going to Paris, these were turned down though normally paid. Hertford suspected that his brother's opposition in parliament had caused the denial. If so, the same bad blood might have been behind the refusal to confirm Hume. However, the Grenville correspondence also shows that the prime minister and his close allies were contemptuous of Hertford's dealings with the French and wished he would come home. Discussing how to replace the ambassador, they were not likely to promote his assistant.

By the summer of 1764, nettled by French insinuations of his impotence in London, Hertford dispatched a querulous letter to Grenville, pointing out, first, that in the absence of a secretary he trusted, he could not leave his post or be ill; and second, that Hume was very well suited to act as his deputy if he was confirmed: “I am desirous, in friendship to Mr. Hume and for His Majesty's future service, to see so able a man invested in [the post].” Grenville ignored the letter. In February 1765, his diary records him upbraiding the king for appointing a secretary to the embassy in Spain, “apprehending that Lord Hertford might require the same appointment for Mr. Hume in Paris.”

F
INALLY, THE POLITICAL
wheel of fortune rotated in Hume's favor, if only briefly.

Exasperated by Grenville, the king sought and failed to find a successor, leaving Grenville stronger than before. As Walpole put it, “the king is reduced to the mortification, and it is extreme, of taking his old ministers again. … Grenville has treated his master in the most impertinent manner, and they are now actually digesting the terms that they mean to impose on their captive.”

Their captive and master, the king, was in no position to resist concessions, chief among them the complete exclusion of Bute. In the subsequent shuffling of posts, Bunbury was appointed secretary to the new lord lieutenant of Ireland. Hertford predicted that Bunbury's departure for Dublin would finally result in Hume's confirmation. Hume fancied it would not happen, that “I, a philosopher, a man of letters, no wise a courtier, of the most independent spirit, who has given offence to every sect and every party, that I, I say, such as I have described myself, should obtain an employment of dignity and a thousand a year.”

But, at last, he did. Politically, Grenville might have won a short-term political battle but his relations with the king, vital to matters of patronage, were irrevocably breaking down and the monarch was scheming to topple him for good. Possibly because it was politically convenient, the prime minister gave way on Hume. Hertford's confidence was justified.

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

D
URING 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.