Hume has thus recorded in his "own life" the impression left on him by his reception in Paris:--"Those who have not seen the strange effects of modes, will never imagine the 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 that city abounds above all places in the universe. I thought once of settling there for life." If he thought that he could have taken up his residence in Paris, and preserved for the remainder of his days the fresh bloom of his reputation, he was undoubtedly mistaken; but, dazzled as he in some measure was, we can see in his correspondence that he estimated the sensation he made pretty nearly at its just value. In the circle of toys, seized and discarded, by a giddy fashionable crowd, philosophy will have its turn, as well as poodles, parrots, tulips, monkeys, cafés, and black pages. It had been so a century earlier, when the most abstruse works of Des Cartes had been the ornament of every fashionable lady's toilette; and now the wheel had revolved and philosophy was again in vogue.
A second time we have Lord Charlemont affording us a passing sketch of Hume. Having had an opportunity of witnessing the philosopher's reception in France, he says:--
"From what has been already said of him, it is apparent that his conversation to strangers, and particularly to Frenchmen, could be little delightful, and still more particularly, one would suppose, to French women: and yet no lady's toilette was complete without Hume's attendance. At the opera his broad unmeaning face was usually seen _entre deux jolis minois_. The ladies in France gave the ton, and the ton was deism: a species of philosophy ill suited to the softer sex, in whose delicate frame weakness is interesting, and timidity a charm. . . . . How my friend Hume was able to endure the encounter of these French female Titans, I know not. In England, either his philosophic pride or his conviction that infidelity was ill suited to women, made him perfectly averse from the initiation of ladies into the mysteries of his doctrine."[223:1]