Yet Paris, in contrast to London, did not feel like a city in its prime. The city's famous street life was increasingly policed out of sight, even in the Marais, and the social hierarchy had ossified around a limited number of titled families. The capital was also suffering from the absence of the Court, which had moved to the Palace of Versailles. Yet the Louvre and other royal buildings still stood, hollowly hogging land throughout the city's centre—a fact seen by another Protestant English visitor as symbolic of Louis' despotic disregard for his own people: ‘Here the palaces and convents have eat[en] up the People's dwellings and crowded them excessively together.’6
Addison soon sought familiarity and conversation among the expats at Paris' English embassy, which then had no fixed address but moved to each ambassador's private residence. At this date, Montagu's stepson Manchester had just been appointed ambassador, inheriting Prior as his secretary. The ‘docile’7 Beau Stanyan, who had already served as Manchester's secretary at the English embassy in Venice, arrived in Paris in June 1699 to replace Prior, but Prior remained for a period of handover. All three Kit-Cats—the ambassador and his two secretaries—were therefore working together at the Paris embassy when Addison arrived. Vanbrugh jokingly congratulated Manchester on fulfilling his ambition to host every English gentleman coming to France, but Addison would have been a particularly honoured guest as he carried introductions from Somers and the ambassador's stepfather, Montagu. Addison became good friends during this time with both Manchester and his wife. Lady Manchester was a beauty, reportedly toasted ‘with an Exemplary Constancy’ at the Kit-Cat Club by the Earl of Carbery.8 When Addison himself eventually joined the Kit-Cat, he would patriotically toast Lady Manchester's natural complexion in contrast to French ‘haughty Dames that Spread / O'er their pale cheeks an Artful red’.9
Prior likewise remarked on the overpainted Parisian women, with the result, he told Montagu, that French men ‘make love to each other to a degree that is incredible, for you can pick your boy at the Tuileries or at the play’.10 Prior seems to have preferred heterosexual flirtations with English ladies in Paris—a business as separate from his relationship with his live-in lover Jane, he told her, as love poetry is from prose:
What I speak, my fair Chloe, and what I write, shows
The diff'rence there is betwixt nature and art. I court others in verse; but I love thee in prose: And they have my whimsies, but thou hast my heart.11
When a newspaper in London falsely reported that Prior was engaged to a certain Lady Falkland, Prior joked to Montagu that such a courtship was impracticable:
She is an old Troy that will not be taken in ten years, and though fifty strong fellows should get in to her by stratagem, they might even march out again at a large breach without being able to set her on fire; but one single sentinel as I am with a thin carcass and weak lungs might lie before her walls till I eat horse-hides and shoe-leather, unless you kindly sent me some refreshments from the Treasury.12
Prior thus used gossip about his own love life as an excuse to beg cash, and to all such requests Montagu remained a responsive friend: ‘Of all my correspondents,’ Prior told him, ‘you are certainly the best, for you never write to me, yet do always what I beg of you. I am extremely obliged to you for the two last hundred pounds.’13
On another occasion, not long before Addison's arrival, Prior begged Montagu: ‘For God's sake, will you think of a little money for me, for I have fluttered away the Devil and all in this monkey country, where the air is infected with vanity, and extravagance is as epidemical as the itch in Scotland.’14
Montagu never reproached Prior for these ‘dunning’ letters, though he once defined ‘men of honour’ as being those who asked no favours of their friends: ‘Free is their service, and unbought their love.’15 Prior required some finesse to keep the two relationships, of patronage and friendship, in balance; he signed off one letter: ‘Adieu, Master; Nobody respects the Chancellor of the Exchequer more, or loves dear Mr Montagu better, than his old friend and obliged humble servant, Matt.’16 Inversely, as Dorset moved into retirement, his relationship with Prior became more that of a friend than patron: ‘I could almost wish you out of all public affairs,’ Dorset told Prior, ‘that I might enjoy your good company oftener and share with you in that ease and lazy quiet which I propose to myself in this latter part of my life.’17
Steele once declared that a gentleman should travel ‘to get clear of national Prejudices, of which every Country has its share’,18yet Addison's time among the Kit-Cats in Paris only reinforced his pre judices. This experience underpinned Addison's lifelong patriotism and dedication to resisting the French model of unmediated and unlimited power, vested in a single monarch: ‘As a British Freeholder, I should not scruple taking [the] place of a French Marquis; and when I see one of my Countrymen amusing himself in his little Cabbage-Garden, I naturally look upon him as a greater Person than the Owner of the richest Vineyard in Champagne.’19
Addison adopted Prior's opinions on nearly everything they encountered in France, and most of those opinions were extremely critical. Prior complained to Montagu about the hypocritical pretence of cordial diplomatic relations with France during this lull before war was sure to resume: ‘We took our leave yesterday of this Court, from whom we had a great many compliments and a damned dinner…they are very obliging to us one day and the same to King James the next.’20
Elsewhere he observed frankly: ‘These people are all the same: civil in appearance and hating us to hell at the bottom of their heart.’21 Prior described Louis XIV as living ‘like an Eastern monarch, making waterworks and planting melons’ while his nation starved.22
He showed the elderly French king as a grotesque, vainly picking at his few remaining teeth, and described the exiled James II as ‘lean, worn and rivelled’23—telling the English ministers, in other words, exactly what they wanted to hear: that their enemies were literally toothless and impotent. Addison, though wondering at the luxury of the French palaces, similarly criticized the disparity between rich and poor, and the displacement of whole villages at Louis' orders, just ‘for the bettering of a View’.24
Addison's only concession to the French was that they had the advantage over the English in good humour. In rural France, he wrote, ‘Everyone sings, laughs and starves.’25 The French were also much more at ease in their conversation, especially compared to Addison, whose natural reticence in groups was accentuated by his poor French. Later, in his essays, Addison would try to convert his own self-conscious personality into the general image of English national character, in contrast to the French: ‘Modesty is our distinguishing Character,