In the summer of 1776, Mrs. Montagu was to be seen in Paris, welcomed to the first circles as a happy sample of an accomplished English lady. Voltaire, then in his dotage, took the opportunity of her presence to send to the Academy a furious paper against Shakespeare. The lady had a seat of honour among the audience while the vituperative paper was read. When the reading came to an end, Suard remarked to her, “I think, madam, you must be rather sorry at what you have just heard!” The English lady, Voltaire’s old adversary, promptly replied, “I, sir! not at all. I am not one of M. Voltaire’s friends!” She subsequently wrote: “I felt the same indignation and scorn, at the reading of Voltaire’s paper, as I should have done if I had seen harlequin cutting capers and striking his wooden sword on the monument of a Cæsar or Alexander the Great.” In October, after her return to Hill Street, she thus described to Garrick the influence exercised over her by French tragedy and French tragedians: “... Mrs. M—— cannot help intimating that she never felt such pity and terror, which it is the business of tragedy to excite, as at the French theatre, where M. le Kain roars like a mad bull, and Molé rolls his eyes, and has all the appearance of a man in a phrensy ... persons of real taste seem convinced of the false taste prevalent in their tragedies.” The “flutter of Paris” was almost more than her strength could bear. The idea of its being succeeded by the “racket of London” alarmed her. She avoided the “racket,” and recovered from the “flutter,” by spending a season of rest at Sandleford, where she dreamed over Voltaire’s address against Shakespeare, became a rural cottager, feeder of pigs, cultivator of potatoes, or pretended to be so, and “did idleness.” “There is as much an idleness to be done,” she wrote to Garrick, “as there is a darkness that may be visible, and is, like the other, a state and a condition, and a very pleasant and gentle one, when the working-day of bustle and hurry is over.... I came to do idleness, and it is not all done.” The visit to Paris is alluded to among an “infinite deal” of other subjects, in a letter to her brother William, dated Sandleford, June 9, 1777.