ABSTRACT
Besides attacking non-musical subjects in Jean-François de La Harpe’s Journal de politique et de littérature many times, the Journal de Paris (JP) launched a particularly vicious personal attack against him. In August 1777, the JP devoted a lead article to a review of a Lettre à Monsieur de La Harpe, ou Observations critiques sur son Journal; Par DAVID*** son Ami, adding a few mild criticisms designed to throw readers off the scent of the true author. The Lettre’s text of more than 60 pages belies its claim of being from a friend, for it contains bitter sarcasm and ridicule of La Harpe. Clearly a Gluckist publication, the Lettre’s writing style point to François Arnaud as the author. In seeing the name David attached to a publication, the French public would have recalled le bon David—the term of affection given the Scottish historian and philosopher David Hume, Secretary to the British Embassy at the Court of France in the mid-1760s. The Gluckists’ courting of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the Lettre par DAVID’s inclusion of his insulting epigram bring to mind Rousseau’s strange conduct toward Hume a decade earlier, which had insinuated the capital crime of sodomy and became public knowledge. Thus, the JP’s Lettre review, together with the Lettre’s title page and frontispiece, planted the seeds of suspicion. In this manner, both Hume (d. 1776) and La Harpe were maligned.
