The Abbé Galiani

THE eighteenth century is one of the most interesting in the social, the political, or the literary history of France. It was at once the culmination and decay of the feudal divisions of society ; it was the age of Voltaire, Rousseau, D’Alembert, and a host of others ; and it inaugurated in Europe the democratic movement which has made monarchy constitutional, as a sort of half-way house upon the road to its abrogation. There is a charm about the salons of that time which was lost in those of a later date, when politics had invaded them, and made them private club-rooms rather than salons. Cultivated men and women met to enjoy the highest social pleasure, — that of conversation. The pictures we have of such gatherings in the memoirs, the letters and biographies of the actors show that a freedom of discussion prevailed rarely found now. Conversation was limited only by the rules of good breeding, while prejudice, convention, or superstition had no power of taboo. Without the restrictions of clique, or the vulgarity of lion-hunting, these assemblages welcomed any one who could prove his title to admission by amusing or instructing the company.

One of the chief among the distinguished salons of this time was that of Madame d’Épinay. From Grimm’s Correspondence, and the Memoirs of Diderot, D’Alembert, Morellet, and Marmontel, an admirable conception may be formed of the attractions her receptions offered to the literary men and thinkers of her time. Married to the eldest son of one of the Farmers General, and soon after her marriage becoming disgusted with her husband’s brutality and coarse dissipation, she had money enough to support, domestic unhappiness enough to require, and cultivation enough to secure, the relief and distraction of society. Her own Memoirs, written in the form of a romance, are most valuable as a picture of the society of the times just preceding the Revolution, and even more valuable as the history of her life. Rousseau’s “ Confessions ” had given the pursuit of autobiography a vogue ; and this simple history of a woman’s life, of her marriage, how its illusions were destroyed by her husband, and how the need of love affected her afterlife, is as unique in literature as are the morbid pages in which Jean Jacques seeks to deceive the world concerning his real character.

Among the persons who constantly frequented Madame d’Épinay’s salon was the Abbé Galiani, — the abbé-est of all the abbés of the time. No society then was complete without an abbé, and the veil of any intrigue, if lifted, is sure to disclose one. The Abbé Galiani was, however, better than the type of his class, the mixture of Lovelace and Figaro, disguised only partially in a clerical robe, — a wolf, not in sheep’s clothing, but in that of the shepherd himself. He was a man of real learning, which did not master him, of a trenchant wit, of a humor which frequently more than bordered upon buffoonery, and at the same time with an insight into things which pierced straight to their centre, together with an ability to grasp the whole of a subject, to see all of its bearings, and to epitomize them in an epigram. Diderot, Grimm, D’Alembert, Voltaire, all speak of him in terms of the highest praise, and from what they tell us of him we see that it was with cause. As one of the neglected and little-known characters of this time, so rich in distinguished men and so pregnant with events, it may not be amiss to spend a few minutes in the Abbé’s pleasant company.

Ferdinand Galiani was born near Naples in 1728. His father held an office under the Neapolitan government, and when Galiani was eight years old sent him to Naples and placed him under the care of his uncle, Don Celestino Galiani, the Archbishop of Tarento, who, besides enjoying a reputation as a man of letters, is said to have been the inventor of the game of Lotto, and the system of lotteries by halves and thirds, which is still in use. From twelve to fourteen Galiani was under the care of the Celestins in the monastery of St. Peter à Magella, at Naples, and then, until of age, was instructed by private masters, under the direction of his uncle, in all the branches of a polite education, and especially in political economy, then a new study, and one attracting great attention, but which unfortunately has not even to this day assumed the place it deserves in the regular curriculum of an educational system. His first literary production was a treatise upon the money in use at the time of the Trojan war. This treatise was prepared for his initiation into the Academy of Naples, and formed the basis for his “ Treatise upon Moneys,” published in 1750. He also translated at this time Locke’s Some Considerations on the Consequences of lowering the Interest and raising the Value of Money. But such serious studies could not entirely satisfy the love of fun natural to the age and the character of the young Galiani. The Italian love of academics was then in full vigor, and the custom of making the death of any person sufficiently distinguished the pretext for gaining notoriety for the living by the publication of extravagant eulogies, afforded the young Galiani a fit subject for satire. The death of the chief executioner of Naples offered an opportunity which, aided by a young friend, he immediately improved. In a few days they wrote a small book of eulogies, which they published in 1746, as collected by Antonio Sergio, a Naples advocate. The styles of the most prominent academicians were so clearly parodied that the publication met with even greater success than the writers had hoped; while the academicians were as angry as the public was pleased, and threatened such revenge against the satirists that Galiani and his friend thought it the part of prudence to surrender themselves to the police as the authors. Fortunately for them, however, the king and the queen, having both enjoyed the satire, the satirists were punished simply with being condemned for ten days to increased tasks of spiritual exercise.

Partly to escape, however, the unpleasant notoriety he had gained, Galiani went on a tour through Italy. His treatise upon Moneys secured him a favorable reception ; and in Florence, Rome, Turin, and elsewhere he was received into the academies, and formed acquaintances with the leading men of letters, thus laying the foundation for the extensive correspondence which he kept up during his life, and the results of which he left at his death in eight thick volumes of letters from his Italian correspondents, and fourteen from those of other countries. These letters still remain unpublished, and have been justly described as containing the history of the ideas of his age.

After his return to Naples Galiani became interested in trying to account for the eruptions of Vesuvius, and made a large collection of the stones thrown out by that volcano. These, with his notes, he sent to the Pope Benedict XIV., with whom he had become personally acquainted when in Rome, writing upon one of the boxes containing them, “ Beatissime pater, fac ut lapides isti panes fiant.” The Pope, understanding the suggestion, gave him his blessing, and a small ecclesiastical position with an income of about four hundred ducats.

At the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum an academy had been instituted by King Charles III., and Galiani was named a member of it, with a yearly salary of two hundred and fifty ducats. In the first volume of the Antiquities of Herculaneum, published in 1757, are many special studies from his pen. In 1759 he was made secretary to the French Embassy, and went to Paris. He had been successful up to this time; he had received several church offices, was an abbé with the right to wear a mitre and to be called monsignor, but he had not found really congenial surroundings. These he found in Paris ; and to his sojourn there, which lasted ten years, he always looked back as to the happiest period of his life. As he himself said, Paris was the only city where people listened to him. His first appearance at the Court of Versailles is a picture. The Abbé was a small man, just large enough to escape being a dwarf, and just small enough to attract attention. His height was only four feet six inches, and Grimm describes him as having the head of Plato with the quickness and gestures of Harlequin. The stately Louis, in full costume, surrounded by his courtiers, enters the splendid reception-hall in the palace of Versailles. The crowd in attendance had relieved the ennui of waiting by observing each other, and, struck with the diminutive stature and quick motions of the new official from Italy, were eagerly attentive to observe his reception by the king. When, in his turn, Galiani is presented, seeing a look of surprise upon Louis’s face, he disarms criticism by saying, “ Sire, you see before you the sketch of the secretary; the secretary will follow,”

Struck by his readiness and wit, the king was very gracious to the new secretary, and Galiani’s success was assured. He soon became a frequent member of the circles which met at the houses of Madame Geoffrin, Madame d’Épinay, D’Holbach, Necker, and others, where with his wit, buffoonery, learning, and good-nature he not only amused those present, but in his way opposed the ideas of the new school of philosophers.

After his return to Naples, in a letter to Madame Geoffrin, he says : “ Here I am, then, as always, the abbé, the little abbé, your little thing. I am seated in the good arm-chair, shaking my hands and feet like a crazy person, my wig awry, talking a great deal, and saying things they think sublime and attribute to me. Ah, madame, what an error ! it is not I who said so many fine things. Your arm-chairs are the tripods of Apollo, and I was their sibyl. Be sure that on the straw-seated chairs of Naples I say only stupidities.”

“ The Abbé,” says Diderot, in a letter to Mademoiselle Voland, “is inexhaustible in jokes and pleasant sayings. He is a treasure on rainy days. I said to Madame d’Epinay, that if the toymakers made such, no one would be without one.” Grimm writes: “The little being, born at the foot of Vesuvius, is a real phenomenon. With the ability to see clearly and deeply, he unites vast and solid learning, with the views of a man of genius, the charm and agreeableness of a man who seeks only to amuse and please. He is a Plato with the quickness and gestures of Harlequin.” Marmontel says : “ The Abbé Galiani is in person the prettiest little harlequin which Italy has ever produced. But upon the shoulders of this harlequin is the head of a Machiavelli.”

The following story will show the character of his wit. The incident is told by two or three of his literary friends, but here the version given by the Abbé Morellet is chiefly followed. One day, after dinner at the Baron d’Holbach’s, the philosophers were conversing about the First Great Cause. D’Holbach, as is well known, was the author of The System of Nature, published under the name of Miraband, and which, though a harmless enough book, has been magnified by the fears of the bigots into a terrible destroyer of everything that is indestructible. The philosophers talked with freedom, and questioned, as was the custom among them, the existence of any such intelligent, personal cause or creator. Galiani listened calmly to the whole of their remarks, and finding that he was alone to maintain the opposite, waited until the meeting was about to separate, and then said : “ Gentlemen, philosophers, you are quick in drawing your conclusions. I will commence by saying that if I was the Pope, I would hand you all over to the Inquisition ; or if I was king of France, I would put you all in the Bastile ; but as I have the happiness of being neither one nor the other, I will dine here next Tuesday, and you shall listen to me with the patience I have listened to you, and I will refute you all.”

It was agreed,and the next Tuesday, after dining and taking coffee, the abbé seated himself in an arm-chair, and, as was his habit, crossing his legs under him, tailor-fashion, took his wig off, as it was warm, and swinging it in one hand, gesticulated with the other, and commenced thus : “ I will imagine, gentlemen, that he among you who is the most convinced that the world is the result of chance is playing at dice, — I will not say in a gambling-house, but in the best house in Paris, — and that his antagonist throws once, twice, three, four times, in fact every time, double sixes. Before the game had lasted very long, my friend Diderot, who would thus lose his money, would say without hesitation, without doubting it for a minute, ‘ The dice are loaded, I am swindled.’ Ah, philosophers ! What! because for ten or twelve times in succession the dice happened to fall in such a way as to make you lose a half-dozen francs, you would firmly believe that it was in consequence of some cunning trick, some concealed swindle; and yet seeing in this universe such a prodigious number of combinations, ten thousand times more difficult and complicated, more continuous and more useful, you do not suspect that nature’s dice are also loaded, and that there is above some grand rogue who amuses himself with thus catching you ?”

The Abbé was no bigot, but he felt also a natural repugnance to the theories of the philosophers. He felt, that we did not yet know enough of Nature to formulate a system of her methods. Man, he said, is made to observe effects, without being able to divine their causes ; he has five senses, made expressly to indicate pleasure and pain, but not a single one to show him the truth or falsity of anything. He believed in the strength of our illusions, and that the saddest thing on earth was to lose them. He thought the sceptic a kind of intellectual gymnast, and compared him to a ropedancer, who performed the most wonderful feats in the air, leaping about on cord, and filling the spectators with astonishment and fright, while none of them were tempted to follow or imitate him. In politics he used to say, “ Fools made the text, and men of sense the commentaries”; while his definition of a statesman was, “ A man who has the key to the problem, and knows that the unknown quantity is reduced to zero.”

Grimm, in a letter dated 1768, writes : “ If my old master, Doctor Ernesti, of Leipsic, should ask me if they knew Latin in France, in the sense which he would attach to that question, I would be obliged to confess that I have met in Paris but one man who knew Latin, and that he is an Italian, the Abbé Galiani ; and to prove this I should send him an inscription which this charming abbé put at the foot of a picture painted by our friend the Marquis de Croismare. The object was to make the picture acceptable to M. du Perai, a lawyer of Caen, who had rendered many services to M. de Croismare, for which he would receive no pay.

M. ANTONIUS CROISMARIUS TABELLAM SUAM MANU PICTAM IN CUBICULUM ANDRÆ DU PERAI DEDICAVIT.

UT VOTUM, SOLVERET, LUBENS MERITO, AMICITIÆ ET PERPETUÆ ERGA SE BENEVOLENTIÆ.

During his residence in Paris, Galiani commenced his Commentary upon Horace, with which he was occupied more or less all the rest of his life, and which at his death was found among his papers, with a treatise entitled Concerning Instincts, or the Natural Tastes and Habits of Man, or the Principles of the Law of Nature and of Nations, taken from the Poems of Horace, together with a life of Horace made up of extracts from his writings ; a portion of this Commentary was printed by Campenon in his translation of Horace. The published work of the Abbé which gained him the most reputation, was his Dialogues concerning the Commerce in Grain, which was published in 1770, the year after he had left Paris for Naples. In 1764 the exportation of grain had been made free by a royal edict, and the subsequent increase in price was popularly attributed to its influence. The economists declared, and with truth, that the increase in price was due to quite other causes ; but Galiani maintained the popular opinion in these Dialogues, more as affording him an opportunity for attacking the economists and their dry methods of investigating such subjects, than really as advocating his own views. He used to say of it himself that “ it was less a book upon the commerce in grain, than a work upon the science of government ; that it should be read in the blank places between the lines.” Voltaire was delighted with it; it was a book in his own style, and he wrote to Diderot about it : “ It seems that Pluto and Molière united in composing this book. No one ever reasoned better or more pleasantly.”

It is chiefly, however, in the continuous correspondence which the Abbé Galiani kept up with Madame d’Épinay, after his departure from Paris in 1769 until his death in 1783, that his reputation as a man of letters must be based. In 1818 there were published two editions of selections from these letters ; one was printed from the originals, and the other from a copy. They are both in two volumes, and are both so full of errors, misreadings, misprints, and mistakes of all kinds, that it is a wonder that before this there has not been a correct edition given to the world. Among all the collections of letters, memoirs, autobiographies, and personal studies in which French literature is so rich, these two volumes will yield to none in interest. The only publication which could compete with them in this would be a judicious selection from the correspondence which Galiani left at his death, made up of letters from the literary and scientific men of the continent of Europe. They are full of suggestions, fresh ideas, criticisms from the stand-point of a man who looks at the reality of things and has but little, if any, regard for the conventions or the prejudices of the bourgeoise Mrs. Grundy.

He writes thus of Cicero : “We can consider Cicero as a literary man, as a philosopher, and as a statesman. He was one of the greatest literary men that has ever been in the world; he knew all that was known in his time, except geometry and sciences of that nature. He was a mediocre philosopher ; for he knew all that the Greeks had thought, and reproduced it with admirable clearness ; but he thought nothing and had not power enough to imagine anything. He had the address and the good fortune to be the first who put the thoughts of the Greeks into Latin, and that made him read and admired by his compatriots. It is this which has made Voltaire produce more noise than Bochart, Bossuet, Huet, Le Clerc, Érmond, Grotius, and others. They have said, in Latin, about the Bible, all that Voltaire has expressed in French ; people are ignorant of them and speak only of him. As a statesman, Cicero was of low extraction, and, wishing to rise, was obliged to throw himself into the party of the opposition, — of the lower house, or the people, if you choose. This was the easier for him, since Marius, the founder of that party, was from his province. He was even tempted to do this, for he commenced his career by attacking Sylla and connecting himself with the members of the opposition party, at whose head, after the death of Marius, were Claudius, Catiline, Caesar. But the party of the great needed a jurist and a learned man, for the great lords did not generally know how either to read or write ; he perceived, therefore, that they had the greater need of him, and that he could play a more brilliant part among them. He allied himself with them, and from that time we see a new man, an upstart among the patricians. Imagine in England a lawyer whom the court needs as a chancellor, and who therefore follows the ministerial party. Cicero shone at the side of Pompey, whenever there was a question concerning matters of jurisprudence; but he wanted birth, riches, and, above all, as he was not a warrior, he in that matter had to play a subordinate part. Beside, by natural inclination, he liked Caesar’s party, and he was disgusted with the pride of the great, who often made him feel the price of the favors with which they loaded him. He was not pusillanimous, he was hesitating; he did not defend scoundrels, he defended members of his own party, who did not deserve worse than those of the opposition. The affair of Catiline was serious, for it was connected with a great party ; no parliamentary affair is small in England, though it is often ridiculous in France. His eloquence was not venial, not more so than Mr. Pitt’s ; it was that of his party. Finally, God did not allow one of his clients to assassinate him ; for God never allows ; he acts, and always does what seems good to him. Voltaire laughs at us when we speak of Cicero’s government of Cilicia ; there is nothing in it that so much resembles the government of Sancho Panza in the island of Barataria. It was a matter of party, in order to raise him to the honor of a triumph, as the military exploits of M. de Soubise were intended only to raise him to the honor of a marshal’s bâton; yet Cicero failed there, and his friend Cato was the first who opposed him. He did not wish to prostitute an honor which was already too much degraded ; and beside, Cicero’s birth could not compare with that of the house De Rohan, As for Cicero’s virtues, we know nothing about them : he never governed. Concerning his merit for having opened the gates of Rome to philosophy, it is well to say that the party of the opposition was a party of sceptics, since the priests, that is, the augurs, the pontiffs, etc., were all lords and patricians. Thus the opposition attacked religion, and Lucretius had written his poem before Cicero’s time. The party of the great sustained religion. Therefore Cicero, who in his heart leaned towards the opposition, was a sceptic in secret, and did not dare to appear so. When Caesar’s party triumphed he showed himself more openly, and did not blush at doing so ; but the foundation of pagan scepticism, which was called wisdom (Sophia), was not due to him, but to Caesar’s party. The praise which posterity has given to Cicero comes from the fact that he followed the party opposed to that which the cruelty of the emperors has made odious.”

The new spirit of historical study, of which the nineteenth century is justly proud, and which it claims as its own, has hardly produced a better specimen of its peculiar merits than this, written in the eighteenth century. We of to-day and in this country have seen an eloquent Cicero, whose character, whose culture, whose political course, and whose reputation show how truly Galiani understood human nature and applied his knowledge to the reconstruction of history.

Hear him again on the province of criticism : “ Of a man’s merit only his own age has the right to judge. But an age has a right to judge of another age. If Voltaire has judged the man Corneille, he is absurdly envious. If he has judged the age of Corneille and the position of the dramatic art of that time, he can do so, and our age has the right to examine the taste of preceding ages. I have never read Voltaire’s notes on Corneille, nor wished to read them, notwithstanding that they stared at me from all the mantel-shelves of Paris when they appeared ; but I have happened to open the book two or three times for distraction, and each time I have thrown it aside with indignation, because I have stumbled upon grammatical notes which told me that a word or phrase of Corneille’s was not good French. This has appeared to me as absurd as though I was told that Cicero or Virgil, although Italians, did not write in as good Italian as Boccaccio or Ariosto. What impertinence ! Every age and every country has a living language, and all are equally good. Each writes its own. We do not know what will happen to the French language when it shall have become dead; but it may be that posterity will write French in the style of Montaigne and Corneille, and not in that of Voltaire. There would be nothing strange in that. We write Latin in the style of Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, and not in that of Prudentius, Sidonius, Apollinaris, though, without question, the Romans were infinitely better informed in the fourth century concerning the sciences, astronomy, geometry, medicine, literature, etc., than they were in the times of Terence and Lucretius. It is a matter of taste, and we can foresee nothing about the tastes of posterity, — if indeed we have a posterity and a universal deluge does not interfere in the matter.”

During the latter part of his life in Naples Galiani lived much alone, finding his chief companionship in his Paris correspondence, and in the society of his cats, of which he was very fond. His letters often speak of them, and of his study of their habits, their characters, and their position in the scale of being. Some of his views in the following extract might be claimed as evincing more than a tendency towards Darwinism. He writes the letter in 1776: “Since you know it, I will say to you concerning beasts, I see that they commence by considering as certain a matter which is very doubtful. We believe that whatever beasts know has been given them by instinct, and has not come to them by tradition Are there any accurate naturalists who will say that the cats, for three thousand years, have caught rats and known the medicinal virtue of herbs, or rather of the herb, as they do now ? If they know nothing about it, why do they take as certain a matter which is in question, or reason endlessly upon what is false or doubtful ? My researches upon the habits of cats have given me very strong suspicions that they are perfectible, but only in the course of a long series of ages. I believe that all which cats know is the result of forty or fifty thousand years. We have only a few ages of natural history, so that the changes they have made in this time are imperceptible. Men also have taken an immense time for their perfectibility, for the people of California and New Holland, who are three or four thousand years old, are real brutes still. Perfectibility, from what they say, had begun to make great progress in Asia more than twelve thousand years ago, and God knows how long before that men had made only vain efforts after it. If an Asiatic race had not passed into Europe and Africa, and if Europe had not passed over into America, so as to make the tour of the world, man would still be only the most cunning, malicious, and adroit of monkeys. Thus perfectibility is not a gift to man in general, but only to the white and bearded race. By alliance the swarthy and bearded race, the swarthy and not bearded race, and the black race have gained something. All that they say about climates is nonsense, a non causa pro causa, the most common error of our logic. It is all a matter of race. The first, the most noble of races, comes from the north of Asia. The Russians are nearest to these, and therefore have made more progress in fifty years than the Portuguese can be made to make in five hundred.”

One of the Abbé’s passions was planning books, which seldom advanced further than the sketch. His letters contain a dozen or more projects of this kind, which are most suggestive. One or two of them will serve as samples : “ My treatise upon education is all made. I prove that education is the same for man as for animals ; it reduces itself to these two points : Learn to support injustice, learn to support ennui. What is done in a stable to a horse ? The horse naturally likes to amble, trot, gallop, walk, but he does it when he wishes to and according to his own pleasure. He is taught, however, to assume these gaits despite himself, against his reason (this is the injustice), and to continue them two hours at a time (this is the ennui). Thus we teach a child Latin, Greek, French, etc. Education should eradicate and remove the talents ; if it does not do this, you have a poet, an improviser, hero, painter, amusing man, an original who entertains you, but dies of hunger, not being able to secure any one of the riches which are provided in the social order. The English are the least educated people in the world, and consequently the greatest, the most grasping, and soon to be the most unhappy of all. Public education leads to democracy, private education leads right to despotism. There are no colleges in Constantinople, in Spain, in Portugal.”

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Here is another idea of a book : “ I have in my head a book which excites my imagination. I want to make it, but have not the arms for doing so. Its title should be, Moral and Political Teachings given by a Mother Cat to her little Ones. Translated from Cat into French, by M. de Scratchey, Interpreter of the Cat Language in the King’s Library. As I have no other society here except that of my cat, I am constantly dreaming of this book, which would be quite original. The mother should first teach her little ones to fear the men gods. Then she should explain theology to them, and the two principles, god, the good man, and the demon, the bad dog; then she should teach them morality, the contest with mice, moles, etc.; finally, she would tell them of the future life and of the celestial Ratopolis, which is a city with walls of parmesan cheese, floors of liver, pillars of eels, etc., and which is filled with rats destined for their amusement.”

The best idea of a book which we find in this correspondence is one of a romance, to be “ founded on fact,” as the phrase goes. It is well known that Ganganelli, who became Pope Clement XIV., commenced at nearly the lowest round of the social ladder his career which ended in St. Peter’s chair. Among the friends of his early youth was a boy who afterwards became a comic actor, a harlequin, known to fame as Carlin. It would seem that the childish friendship thus begun withstood the disruptive force of their different paths in life, and was broken only by the death of Ganganelli. It was a singular contrast in every way, — a pope and a clown starting out in life together as boys, and continuing friends until death parted them. It was a practical realization, not of the dance of death, but of the dance of life, of how we are all of us merely men, and that the paltry distinctions of the world, its divisions, its differences, its classes, and what not, are not even skin deep, but simply the various fashion of the clothes we wear. Whether we dress in motley, with a cap and bells, or wear pontifical robes and a triple crown, our hearts are of the same fibre, and know no such distinctions in their attractions to each other. Our sphere of action may be before the foot-lights or before the world ; we may seek to amuse our fellows by following their bent or lead them by addressing their fears : these differences are nothing when we come to know each other, and get at the real man who hides himself behind the trappings of his office. Society makes kings or beggars, but nature makes men. After the death of Ganganelli, Madame d’Épinay, in one of her letters, mentioned the fact of this friendship, and in reply Galiani writes thus in February, 1774: “What you tell me of the old friendship of Carlin and the Pope has made me dream, and a sublime idea has come into my head, which you must communicate to Marmontel from me, so as to electrify him. It seems to me that upon this can be built the finest of all romances, in a series of letters, and one that is sublime. We will commence by supposing that these two school companions, Carlin and Ganganelli, having formed the closest friendship in their youth, had promised to write each other at least once every two years, and give an account of their condition. They keep their word, and write letters full of soul, of truth, of heart utterances, without sarcasms or bad jokes. These letters would thus present the singular contrast of two men, one of whom had always been unhappy, and, because he had been unhappy, had become a pope ; the other, always happy, had remained a clown. A pleasant feature would be that the clown always offers money to Ganganelli, who would be a poor monk, then a poor cardinal, finally Pope, and then not in too easy circumstances. Harlequin would offer him his credit at the court for the restitution of Avignon, and the Pope would thank him for it. My brain is already so full of this work, that I could make it or dictate it in a fortnight, if I had the strength. I would keep to the strictest truth, or semblance of it, without any romantic episode, and I would convince the world that the harlequin had been the happiest of men, and Ganganelli the most unhappy. Thirty letters and as many answers would make the work; much genius and no wit would make a masterpiece of it.”

To this Madame d’Épinay replies: “You are right charming and sublime, Abbé. The letters between Harlequin and Ganganelli would make a unique work ; but where was your head in proposing Marmontel to do it? I will take good care not to say a word to him about it, for he would make it a failure. There are only two men in the world able to undertake this enterprise and carry it through successfully. You first, before all, and Grimm, after he has been in Italy. To give to this work the truth and originality it should have, it is necessary to have been upon the spot, to have seen the Italian monks, and also to be able to express, not servilely what one has seen, but the ideas suggested by what one has seen. No one understands better than Grimm the tricks of imitation which give such an air of truth. I understand them very well also ; but I am too ignorant to have enough true ideas, placing wit aside, and, as you say, there must be none of that. Considering everything, Abbé, take your courage in both hands, and make the romance. I condemn you to do it. It is absolutely necessary. You see that you alone can carry out a plan so fine, so sublime, and so profound. It is a matter of a month, and why delay? Come, is it commenced ? Dictate to me, and I will write. Hold on, do better; by each mail, instead of writing to me, send me a letter of Ganganelli’s, and I will answer with a letter from Harlequin. It will be good or bad ; you will correct it if it is nearly good, or you will rewrite it if it is nearly bad. You will add the sacramental terms, the idioms of the country ; this will give a very comic tone to our correspondence, and will catch the curious persons of the post-office.” ¹

The Abbé responds to this : “ What Pope and what Harlequin do you expect from me ? However, if you absolutely desire this original and perfect romance, take the trouble to make acquaintance with Carlin, and get from him the true and exact dates of the events of his life. The date of his birth, his first studies, his arrival in France, his entrance upon the theatre, his marriage, the births of his children, — these should be very exact and to the smallest details, — disputes with his associates, with the gentlemen of the chamber, etc. As much must be known and with as much precision of the Father Ganganelli. With these materials one must build ; without these nothing will have an original air, there will be no truth, no good pleasantry, no tone. Do this on your side, and then let me do it on mine, and God knows what will come of it.”

There are other letters in these volumes referring to this projected novel, which it is evident from this sketch would in Galiani’s hands have been made a most striking and forcible work. The question is, Did Galiani ever write the work proposed ? Nothing in these letters settles this question. There are various collections of Ganganelli’s letters, both genuine and counterfeit. An English translation was published in 1777 which Lowndes says is known to be a forgery. A French translation by Caraccioli, who we learn from Galiani’s correspondence with Madame d’Épinay was in Italy with him, was published in 1773. But these are dreary reading. For years the writer of these pages has been in search of Galiani’s projected work. Perhaps the interest he has felt in it may have so influenced his mind that he cannot decide whether his impression of having really met it is a dream, or a dim, half-effaced remembrance of a perusal in his early days of omnivorous, half-digested reading. Certain it is that a somewhat careful and extended search during the last ten years or so has failed to satisfy him concerning its existence, and in despair he thus appeals to others for assistance. The only result he has been able to reach is the following title : Clement XIV. et Carlo Bertinazzi. Correspondance inelite. Paris, 1827. 3d ed. Augmentée de Notes Hist. d' une Lettre retrouvée et d' une vignette. 1827. 4th ed. 1829.

Carlin’s real name was Carlo Antonio Bertinazzi. He was born in Turin in 1713. In 1741 he made his first appearance in Paris at the Comédie Italienne, where for forty-two years he continued to play the role of harlequin with great success, establishing a reputation, not only as an actor, but as an improviser, a man of great wit, and also as an estimable man in private life. He died in 1783.

After leaving Paris Galiani lived in Naples until his death, in 1787. His life there was quiet, his official duties requiring much of his attention. These he performed with exactness and promptness. Beside this he supported and acted the part of a father to three of his nieces, which in his day was supposed to consist chiefly in providing them with suitable husbands. This duty he performed most conscientiously, though his letters show it was not the most congenial occupation to him. His heart, as the best of his thought, was in Paris ; there his reputation was made, and there it has chiefly remained. Sainte-Beuve, in a notice devoted to Galiani, proposes that he should have an honorable literary resting-place in French literature, and that upon the urn erected to his memory there should be engraved “ A Silenus, the head of Plato, a Punch, and one of the Graces.”

Edward Howland.