This I Take To Be The
Most Agreeable Side Of His Character:
Let us view him on the
quarter of impertinence.
A Frenchman pries into all your secrets
with the most impudent and importunate curiosity, and then
discloses them without remorse. If you are indisposed, he
questions you about the symptoms of your disorder, with more
freedom than your physician would presume to use; very often in
the grossest terms. He then proposes his remedy (for they are all
quacks), he prepares it without your knowledge, and worries you
with solicitation to take it, without paying the least regard to
the opinion of those whom you have chosen to take care of your
health. Let you be ever so ill, or averse to company, he forces
himself at all times into your bed-chamber, and if it is
necessary to give him a peremptory refusal, he is affronted. I
have known one of those petit maitres insist upon paying regular
visits twice a day to a poor gentleman who was delirious; and he
conversed with him on different subjects, till he was in his
last agonies. This attendance is not the effect of attachment, or
regard, but of sheer vanity, that he may afterwards boast of his
charity and humane disposition: though, of all the people I have
ever known, I think the French are the least capable of feeling
for the distresses of their fellow creatures. Their hearts are
not susceptible of deep impressions; and, such is their levity,
that the imagination has not time to brood long over any
disagreeable idea, or sensation.
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