The Platonic friendship was never again ruffled; if anything it grew more confidential and almost sentimental. The Neckers visited Gibbon in London more than once, and, when political and financial storms drove them from Paris, Gibbon found their Barony of Copet (as he spells it – he was not very strong in spelling!) a most delightful harbour, though he was too indolent to go there very often. This was in after years, when Lausanne again became his home.
He had published the first volume of his history of “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” and had immediately leaped into fame. The same year Necker was made Director of the Treasury of France, and began that remarkable career of success and disappointment. Perhaps his greatest glory was his daughter, afterwards so well known as Madame de Staël, whose loyalty to him in all the vicissitudes of his life was one of her loveliest characteristics.
Gibbon was back in Lausanne again in 1783; he seems to have reckoned time in lustrums, his dates there being 1753, 1763 and 1783, and he returned to London in 1793 where he died the following year, just a century after Voltaire was born. He certainly had pleasant memories of Lausanne and, after losing his one public office, and the salary which came in so handy, he formed what his friends called the mad project of taking up his permanent residence there. This came about through his old-time friend, Georges Deyverdun, who through the death of relatives and particularly of an aristocratic old aunt, had come into possession of the estate known as La Grotte, one of the most interesting historical buildings in the town, with memories covering centuries of ecclesiastical history. He and Deyverdun formed a project whereby the two should combine their housekeeping resources and live in a sort of mutually dependent independence.
Gibbon had a very pretty wit. A year or two after he had taken this decisive step, had bade a long farewell to the “fumum et opes strepitumque Romae,” and had sold his property and moved with his books to Lausanne, the report reached London that the celebrated Mr. Gibbon, who had retired to Switzerland to finish his valuable history, was dead. Gibbon wrote his best friend, Holroyd, who was now Lord Sheffield: – “There are several weighty reasons which would incline me to believe that the intelligence may be true. Primo, It must one day be true; and therefore may very probably be so at present. Secundo, We may always depend on the impartiality, accuracy and veracity of an English newspaper.” – And so he goes on.
In another letter, after speaking of his old enemy, the gout, and assuring Sheffield that he had never regretted his exile, he pays his respects to his fellow-countrymen: “The only disagreeable circumstance,” he says, “is the increase of a race of animals with which this country has been long infested, and who are said to come from an island in the Northern Ocean. I am told, but it seems incredible, that upwards of forty thousand English, masters and servants, are now absent on the Continent.”
Byron, a third of a century later, had the same ill opinion of his fellow-countrymen: – “Switzerland,” he wrote Moore, “is a curst selfish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic regions of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants and still less their English visitors.”
In a somewhat different spirit Lord Houghton pays his respects to the throng of foreigners who find pleasure and recreation and health in Switzerland. He says: —
“Within the Switzer’s varied land
When Summer chases high the snow,
You’ll meet with many a youthful band
Of strangers wandering to and fro:
Through hamlet, town and healing bath
They haste and rest as chance may call;
No day without its mountain-path,
No path without its waterfall.
“They make the hours themselves repay
However well or ill be shared,
Content that they should wing their way,
Unchecked, unreckoned, uncompared:
For though the hills unshapely rise
And lie the colours poorly bright, —
They mould them by their cheerful eyes
And paint them with their spirits light.
“Strong in their youthfulness they use
The energies their souls possess;
And if some wayward scene refuse
To pay its part of loveliness, —
Onward they pass nor less enjoy
For what they leave; – and far from me
Be every thought that would destroy
A charm of that simplicity!”
Gibbon and Deyverdun were remarkably congenial; interested in the same studies and the same people. Which was the more indolent of the two it would be hard to say. But by this time Gibbon had grown into the comically grotesque figure which somehow adds to his fascination. He had become excessively stout; his little “potato-nose” was lost between his bulbous cheeks; his chin was bolstered up by the flying buttress of much superfluous throat. He had red hair. A contemporary poem describes him: —
“His person looked as funnily obese
As if a pagod, growing large as man,
Had rashly waddled off its chimney-piece,
To visit a Chinese upon a fan.
Such his exterior; curious ’twas to scan!
And oft he rapped his snuff-box, cocked his snout,
And ere his polished periods he began
Bent forward, stretching his forefinger out,
And talked in phrases round as he was round about.”
Early in his career Gibbon was rather careless in his dress, but he could not afford not to be in style as the lion of Lausanne, and he had any number of changes of apparel. He had a valet de chambre, a cook who was not put out if he had forty, or even fifty, guests at a dinner, and who received wages of twelve or fifteen livres a month – a little more than a dollar a week, but money went farther in those primitive days – he had a gardener, a coachman and two other men. Altogether he paid out for service a little more than eleven hundred livres a year. He spent generously, also, for various magazines and other periodicals, French and English, and he was constantly adding to his library. After the French Revolution, when many French émigrés came to Lausanne, there were loud complaints at the increased cost of living.
In 1788 Gibbon required a new maid-servant and his faithful friend, Madame de Séverin, recommended one to him in these terms: —
“She will make confitures, compotes, winter-salads, dried preserves in summer; she will take charge of the fine linen and will herself look after the kitchen service. She will keep everything neat and orderly in the minutest details. She will take care of the silver in the English fashion; she can do the ironing; she can set the table in ornamental style. You must entrust everything to her (except the wine) by count; so many candles, so many wax-tapers in fifty-pound boxes; so much tea, coffee and sugar. The oftener the counting is made, the more careful they are; three minutes every Sunday will suffice. I have excepted nothing of what can be expected of a housekeeper. She will look after the poultry-yard. She will make the ices and all the pastry and all the bonbons, if desired, but it is more economical to buy the latter.”
Gibbon was generous to others; he subscribed to various charities and he paid all the expenses of an orphan boy, Samuel Pache.
Lord Sheffield’s daughter, Maria Holroyd, could not understand why he should prefer Lausanne to London. She declared that there was not a single person there whom he could meet on a footing of equality or on his height; she thought it was a proof of the power of flattery. But there were always distinguished visitors at Lausanne, and Gibbon knew them all. His letters are full of references to the celebrities whom he is cultivating.
He writes to Lady