I have been with Madame Geoffrin several times, and think she has one of the best understandings I ever met, and more knowledge of the world.  I may be charmed with the French, but your ladyship must not expect that they will fall in love with me.  Without affecting to lower myself, the disadvantage of speaking a language worse than any idiot one meets, is insurmountable:  the silliest Frenchman is eloquent to me, and leaves me embarrassed and obscure.  I could name twenty other reasons, if this one was not sufficient.  As it is, my own defects are the sole cause of my not liking Paris entirely:  the constraint I am under from not being perfectly master of their language, and from being so much in the dark, as one necessarily must be, on half the subjects of their conversation, prevents me enjoying that ease for which their society is calculated.  I am much amused, but not comfortable.

The Duc de Nivernois is extremely good to me; he inquired much after your ladyship.  So does Colonel Drumgold.(875) The latter complains; but both of them, especially the Duc, seem better than when in England.  I met the Duchesse de Coss`e,(876) this evening at Madame Geoffrin’s.  She is pretty, with a great resemblance to her father; lively and good-humoured, not genteel.

Yesterday I went through all my presentations at Versailles.  ’Tis very convenient to gobble up a whole royal family in an hour’s time, instead of being sacrificed one week at Leicester-house, another in Grosvenor-street, a third in Cavendish-square, etc. etc. etc.  La Reine is le plus grand roi du monde,(877) and talked much to me, and would have said more if I would have let her; but I was awkward and shrunk back into the crowd.  None of the rest spoke to me.  The King is still much handsomer than his pictures, and has great sweetness in his countenance, instead of that farouche look which they give him.  The Mesdames are not beauties, and yet have something Bourbon in their faces.  The Dauphiness I approve the least of all:  with nothing good-humoured in her countenance, she has a look and accent that made me dread lest I should be invited to a private party at loo with her.(878) The poor Dauphin is ghastly, and perishing before one’s eyes.

Fortune bestowed on me a much more curious sight than a set of princes; the wild beast of the Govaudan,(879) which is killed, and actually is in the Queen’s antechamber.  It is a thought less than a leviathan, and the beast in the Revelations, and has not half so many wings, and yes, and talons, as I believe they have, or will have some time or other; this being possessed but of two eyes, four feet, and no wings at all.  It is as fine a wolf’ as a commissary in the late war, except, notwithstanding all the stories, that it has not devoured near so many persons.  In short, Madam, now it is dead and come, a wolf it certainly was, and not more above the common size than Mrs. Cavendish is.  It has left a dowager and four young princes.