I had to do so on delivering my credentials, first as resident, then as minister plenipotentiary—on the King’s birthday, the day the Queen gave birth to Prince Frederick, and on the anniversary of the King’s coronation. You must give people something, otherwise they refuse to leave the door, make an abominable row, and end with obscene dances. Happily, I am a bachelor; but you will have to see to this when you arrive....’ In another letter to de Guerchy, the Chevalier writes:— ‘I dined with Lord Hertford to-day and met the diplomatic corps, Lords Sandwich and March, and several other noblemen.... Yesterday, the day of St. Louis, Lords Hertford and March did me the honour to call at the embassy with several illustrious Scotsmen, amongst them David Hume, who will ever be the ornament and glory of his country. Some members of the diplomatic corps had thought proper to tell me that they would call at the French Embassy to celebrate the day of St. Louis. I did not invite, I did not refuse to receive them, and I gave no extraordinary reception. If the minister finds fault with this, I am not to blame.... I could not have acted otherwise.’ Unyielding as the Duke de Broglie shows himself to be in his general condemnation of D’Eon, we find him admitting[119] that French persons of distinction abounded in London during several months after the re-establishment of peace, all eager to visit the country so little known and until then so little understood, and whose customs and literature had only just been brought into fashion by Voltaire and Montesquieu. It became the rage, as sometimes happens with society in Paris; and the idea that they were rendering homage to conquerors did not restrain any of the generation of that day, more interested in political and philosophical innovations than in national honour. The Countess de Boufflers[120] had given the signal, arriving with a number of literary people in her train. ‘I was obliged,’ again wrote D’Eon, ‘to acquit myself of my duty to the Countess de Boufflers, a thousand times more of a philosopher and more learned than I am, and quite a match for any academician; as well as to other persons of quality in London, without including Duclos, de la Condamine, Le Camus, Lalande, &c.’ [Sidenote: AN ODIOUS PROPOSAL.]