The inhabitants were enthusiastic about
the unaccustomed English plan of paying in full for all supplies
demanded. The British officers were no less delighted with the
climate of Nice, the fame of which they carried to their northern
homes. It was both directly and indirectly through one of these
officers that the claims of Nice as a sanatorium came to be put
so plainly before Smollett. [Losing its prestige as a ville
forte, Nice was henceforth rapidly to gain the new character of a
ville de plaisir. In 1763, says one of the city's historians,
Smollett, the famous historian and novelist, visited Nice.
"Arriving here shattered in health and depressed in spirits,
under the genial influence of the climate he soon found himself a
new man. His notes on the country, its gardens, its orange
groves, its climate without a winter, are pleasant and just and
would seem to have been written yesterday instead of more than a
hundred years ago. . . . His memory is preserved in the street
nomenclature of the place; one of the thoroughfares still bears
the appellation of Rue Smollett." (James Nash, The Guide to Nice,
1884, p. 110.)]
Among other celebrated residents at Nice during the period of
Smollett's visit were Edward Augustus, Duke of York, the brother
of George III., who died at Monaco a few years later, and Andre
Massena, a native of the city, then a lad of six.
Before he left Montpellier Smollett indulged in two more
seemingly irresistible tirades against French folly: one against
their persistent hero-worship of such a stuffed doll as Louis le
Grand, and the second in ridicule of the immemorial French
panacea, a bouillon. Now he gets to Nice he feels a return of the
craving to take a hand's turn at depreciatory satire upon the
nation of which a contemporary hand was just tracing the
deservedly better-known delineation, commencing
Gay sprightly land of mirth and social ease,
Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please. . . .
Such inveteracy (like Dr. Johnson's against Swift) was not
unnaturally suspected by friends in England of having some
personal motive. In his fifteenth letter home, therefore,
Smollett is assiduous in disclaiming anything of the kind. He
begins by attempting an amende honorable, but before he has got
well away from his exordium he insensibly and most
characteristically diverges into the more congenial path of
censure, and expands indeed into one of his most eloquent
passages - a disquisition upon the French punctilio (conceived upon
lines somewhat similar to Mercutio's address to Benvolio), to
which is appended a satire on the duello as practised in France,
which glows and burns with a radiation of good sense, racy of
Smollett at his best.
To eighteenth century lovers the discussion on duelling will
recall similar talks between Boswell and Johnson, or that between
the lieutenant and Tom in the Seventh Book of Tom Jones, but,
more particularly, the sermon delivered by Johnson on this
subject a propos of General Oglethorpe's story of how he avoided
a duel with Prince Eugene in 1716.
