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Prophet_001-050.indd 1 3/2/12 10:27 PM I Before I789 l RoYAL PANEGYRICS In 1763 David Hume arrived in Paris to take up duties with Lord Hertford, Britain's first peacetime ambassador to France since the outbreak of the Seven Years' War. Author of a famous History ofthe Stuarts, David Hume, frequently hailed as the "English Tacitus," was given an official and personal welcome such as few foreign authors have ever received in the French capital. The story of France's adulation is too well known to need retelling here,1 although one example of it is particularly relevant to our purpose. Let us read Hume's own account of his presentation at Versailles in 1763 to the children of the Dauphin, three future kings of France: The scene which passed today really pleased me without embarrassing me. I attended Lord Hertford to Versailles in order to be presented to the Dauphiness and the young Princes, the only part of the royal family whom we had not yet seen. When I was presented to the Due de Berry, a child of ten years ofage, he said to me, "Monsieur , you are much admired in this country; your name is very wellknown ; and it is with great pleasure that I welcome you." Immediately upon which his brother the Comte de Provence, who is two 1. See E. C. Mossner, The Ufe ofDavid Hume (Nelson), 1954, pp. 441-506. 1 Prophet_001-050.indd 2 3/2/12 10:27 PM BEFORE 1789 years younger, advanced to me and said with great presence of mind, "Monsieur, you have been long and impatiently expected in this country: I count on having much enjoyment when I am able to read your fine history." But what is more remarkable, when we were carried to make our bows to the Comte d'Artois, who is about five years of age, and to a young Madame of between two and three, the infant prince likewise advanced to me in order to make me his harangue , in which, though it was not very distinct, I heard him mumble the word Histoire, and some other terms of panegyric. With him ended the civilities of the royal family of France towards me; and I may say it did not end till their power ofspeech failed them: for the Princess was too young to be able to articulate a compliment.2 David Hume, we see, was merely flattered. At the time, he could not have known the extent to which events described so skilfully in his History would one day assume a new and urgent meaning in the political life of the French nation. Nor could he have known that, not quite thirty years later, the eldest of these charming children, condemned to die by the will of that same nation, would once more take up the famous Monsieur Hume's great work as part of his last searching meditations. 2 THE SCIENCE AND ART OF ENGLISH HISTORY The quite unusual popularity of Hume's History of England in eighteenth-century France requires perhaps some preliminary general explanation. His Political Discourses and Philosophical Essays introduced on the continent several years earlier had won him little more than the unflatteringly mild contempt of the devout and the intense but largely uncomprehending praise of a number of philosophes and salonnieres. Originality in epistemological writings has rarely given any philosopher a great popular audience. The 2. David Hume to Alexander Wedderburn, from Paris, 23 November 1763, in The Letters ofDavid Hume, ed. J. Y T. Greig, Oxford, 1932, I. 414-15. 2 ...

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