They Only Think They're English

...a British aristocracy that, however attached to economic foundations unknown to its French counterpart, was only the more disposed to employ its riches in the enjoyment of a noble leisure housed in Palladian castles, embellished with Italian paintings, refreshed by parks inspired by the landscapes of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, and entertained by gallant  manners that, without too openly competing with the elegant libertinage whose secret belonged to Catholic France, were ardently practiced intra muros; and there was no destination more favored by English aristocracy in the eighteenth century, in the intervals of peace between the two realms, than Paris or the fair provinces of France, to which this nobility escaped for long sojourns wherever possible.

 Mark Fumaroli on the 18th-Century English country gentlemen  in When the World Spoke French 36 (NYRB 2011).  Fumaroli likes the saucy bits: a page later he remarks on how "Samuel Pepys' Diary bears witness to the extraordinary mixture, in the London of Charles II, of a puritanical repugnance in principle to the debauchery of French and Catholic origin and a greedy appetite for whatever crumbs could be snatched from the revels."