“How happy is the Pretender in missing a Crown! When dead, he will have all the advantage that other Kings have, the being remembered; and that greater advantage, which Kings who die in their childhood have, historians will say, he would have been a great King if he had lived to reign; and that greatest advantage which so very few of them have, his reign will be stained with no crimes and blunders. If he is at Florence, pray recommend me to him for his historian; you see I have all the qualities a Monarch demands, I am disposed to flatter him. You may tell him too what I have done for his uncle Richard III. The mischief is in it, if I am not qualified for a Royal Historiographer, when I have whitewashed one of the very few whom my brethren, so contrary to their custom, have agreed to traduce.” In the autumn of 1775, Walpole was in Paris, whence he sends, for the benefit of Conway’s daughter, this important piece of information: “Tell Mrs. Damer, that the fashion now is to erect the _toupée_ into a high detached tuft of hair, like a cockatoo’s crest; and this _toupée_ they call _la physionomie_--I don’t guess why.” And in giving George Selwyn an account of the modish French ladies whom he met, he adds a description suited to the humour of that facetious gentleman: “With one of them,” he says, “you would be delighted, a Madame de Marchais. She is not perfectly young, has a face like a Jew pedlar, her person is about four feet, her head about six, and her _coiffure_ about ten. Her forehead, chin, and neck are whiter than a miller’s; and she wears more festoons of natural flowers than all the _figurantes_ at the Opera. Her eloquence is still more abundant, her _attentions_ exuberant. She talks volumes, writes folios--I mean in _billets_; presides over the Académie, inspires passions.… She has a house in a nut-shell, that is fuller of invention than a fairy tale; her bed stands in the middle of the room, because there is no other space that would hold it; it is surrounded by a perspective of looking-glasses.…” In reference to the rage for _billets,_ he mentions “a collection that was found last winter at Monsieur de Pondeveylle’s: there were sixteen thousand from one lady, in a correspondence of only eleven years. For fear of setting the house on fire if thrown into the chimney, the executors crammed them into the oven.” “There have been known,” he adds, “persons here who wrote to one another four times a day; and I was told of one couple, who being always together, and the lover being fond of writing, he placed a screen between them, and then wrote to Madam on t’other side, and flung them over.” Of his “dear old friend,” he reports: