DE THOU--PINELLI--PEIRESC.
It was long a saying among the French that a man had never seen Paris who
had not looked upon the books of Thuanus. The historian Jacques-Auguste
de Thou held a leading place in literature, without pretending in any way
to rival the greatness of Joseph Scaliger or the erudition of Isaac
Casaubon. He was the master of a great store of personal and secret
history collected in state papers and records; but he was also famous for
the extent of his general scholarship, and for the patronage which he
manifested towards all who laboured about books. He was himself a most
fastidious collector. He never heard of the appearance of a valuable work
without ordering three or four copies on the fine paper manufactured for
his private use; and of any such book already issued he would order
several sets of sheets to be taken to pieces in order to procure one
perfect example. His library was not large. It consisted of about 8000
printed books and 1000 manuscripts, chiefly upon historical subjects; but
they were all well selected, well bound, and in perfect condition. There
is a letter upon this subject by Henri Estienne the printer, in which the
high reputation of De Thou's library is contrasted with Lucian's just
invective against the illiterate book-hunter: 'The satirist would have
honoured a man like you, so learned and so generous in your library: you
choose your books with taste, and proportion the cost of binding to the
price of the volume; and Lucian, I am sure, would have praised your
carefulness in these respects.'
In all matters connected with literature De Thou was helped by his friend
'Pithoeus,' of whom it was said that no one knew any particular author as
well as Pierre Pithou knew all the classics. By talent and hard work
combined Pithou had 'distilled the quintessence of wisdom' out of the
garnered stores of antiquity. Upon his death De Thou was inclined to give
up his books and the work that had made life pleasant. He wrote in that
strain to his associate Isaac Casaubon. 'On the loss of my incomparable
friend, the partner of my cares and my counsellor in letters and
politics, the web that I was weaving fell from my hand, and I should not
have resumed my history were it not a tribute to the memory of one who
has done so much for me.'
De Thou's end was hastened by the death of his wife. Those who know the
look of his books, stamped with a series of his family quarterings, will
remember that he was first married to Marie Barbançon, and afterwards to
Gasparde de la Chastre. 'I had always hoped and prayed,' he wrote at the
commencement of his will, 'that my dearest Gaspara Chastræa would have
outlived me.'
Admonished by her loss to set his affairs in order he began to take
special pains in providing for the future of his books. He anticipated
the public spirit of Cardinal Richelieu, to whom the merit is often
assigned of having been the first to bequeath the use of his library to
scholars. The Cardinal was not particular about the methods by which he
amassed his literary wealth: he is said to have increased his store by
all the arts of cajolery, and even by bare intimidation; and he may have
wished to make some amends by directing that 'persons of erudition'
should have access to his books after his death. De Thou had an equal
love of books, and showed perhaps a kinder feeling about the use of the
treasures which his own care had accumulated. 'It is important,' he
wrote, 'for my own family and for the cause of learning that the library
should be kept together which I have been for more than forty years
collecting, and I hereby forbid any division, sale, or dispersion
thereof; I bequeath it to such of my sons as shall apply themselves to
literature, and they shall hold it in common, but so that it shall be
free to all scholars at home or abroad. I leave its custody to Pierre du
Puy until my sons are grown up, and he shall have authority to lend out
the MSS. under proper security for their safe return.'
Pierre and Jacques du Puy, the 'two Puteani' as they were often called,
were the sons of a distinguished bibliophile, Charles du Puy, who died in
1594, and were themselves the leaders in a curious department of
book-learning. Their father was the founder of a library enriched by his
care with the best specimens of early printing and a few rare MSS. In the
latter class he possessed an ancient bilingual copy of St. Paul's
Epistles, a Livy in uncial characters, and the precious fragments of the
Vatican Virgil, which he gave to Fulvio Orsini in his lifetime. 'On his
death,' says M. Guigard, 'the bibliographical succession passed to Pierre
and Jacques, his younger sons, the first a Councillor of State, the other
Prior of St. Sauveur-les-Bray, and both employed as guardians of the
books in the Royal Library. No two men were ever more ardently devoted to
the interests of learning. They worked in concert at increasing and
improving their father's library; but their chief object was to
accumulate and preserve the obscurer materials of history. The
_Collection Du Puy_, which has now became national property, comprised
more than 800 volumes of fugitive pieces, memoirs, instructions,
pedigrees, letters, and all the other miscellaneous documents that were
classed by D'Israeli 'under the vague title of State Papers.' It has been
said that the object of their 'Titanic labour' was to ease the way for
the historian De Thou; but it is more likely that the brothers obeyed an
instinct for the acquisition of secret history; 'life would have been too
short to have decided on the intrinsic value of the manuscripts flowing
down in a stream to the collectors.' The surviving brother bequeathed
these State Papers to the Abbé de Thou (the fourth possessor of the
'Bibliotheca Thuana') who sold them to Charron de Ménars; they were
eventually purchased by Louis XVI., and were deposited in the Royal
Library, where the printed books and certain other MSS. had been already
received under a legacy from Jacques du Puy.
When the historian died the brothers jointly undertook the trust that had
fallen to Pierre. 'Among all the French scholars,' said Gassendi,'these
two Puteani do most excel; and now, abiding with the sons of Thuanus,
they sustain by all the means in their power the library and the students
that have been committed to their care. François-Auguste de Thou, the
historian's eldest son, became Grand-Master of the King's books; he added
considerably to the 'Bibliotheca Thuana,' and his house became the
meeting-place of the Parisian _savants_. A brilliant career was cruelly
cut short by the malignity of Richelieu.
The young Cinq-Mars was in a plot with the Queen and Gaston of Orléans to
overthrow the Cardinal's power. His friend De Thou was aware of the
design, but had taken no part in the conspiracy. The Cardinal arrested
them both, and dragged them along the Rhone in a boat attached to his own
barge; and De Thou was executed as a scapegoat, while most of the leaders
saved their lives. The Cardinal died soon afterwards, without having
confiscated the library; and it passed to Jacques-Auguste, the
historian's younger son, who by a tardy act of grace had been restored
to the civil rights enjoyed by his brother before his unjust conviction.
He was by all accounts as great a book-collector as his father; and he
had the good fortune to marry an heiress, Marie Picardet, who brought
with her a large quantity of books from her father's house in Britanny.
In the year 1677 the 'Bibliotheca Thuana' with all its additions passed
to the Abbé Jacques-Auguste de Thou, who was soon afterwards compelled to
part with it to the Président Charron de Ménars. St. Simon praised its
new owner as a most worthy and honourable nonentity; but he had the sense
to step into the breach and to save the 'Thuana' from destruction. When
he sold the library to the Cardinal de Rohan, in 1706, he reserved the
_Collection Du Puy_ for his daughters. It is believed that the Cardinal,
through the cleverness of his secretary Oliva, obtained the historian's
choice examples for less than the price of the binding. We must follow
the career of the collection to its melancholy end. The Cardinal left it
to his nephew the Prince de Soubise. The world knows him as the inventor
of a sauce and as the general in one lost battle; but he had a higher
fame among the booksellers for his prowess in the auction-room. He seems
to have been the victim of a frenzy for books. He impressed them by
crowds, and marshalled them in regiments and myriads. They all fell in
1789 before the hammer of the auctioneer. Dibdin has described the
catalogue. It was unostentatious and printed on indifferent material. He
hoped, with his curious insistance on the point, that there were 'some
few copies on large paper.' It is a mark of the changes in
book-collecting that Dibdin praised the index as excellent, 'enabling us
to discover any work of which we may be in want'; but it is now regarded
as remarkable for its poverty, and especially for the extraordinary
carelessness that left eight noble specimens from Grolier's library
without the slightest mark of distinction.
Gian-Vincenzio Pinelli was a celebrated man of letters whose library at
Padua formed 'a perpetual Academy' for all the scholars of his day. Born
at Naples in 1538, he spent the greater part of his long life at Padua,
where he was sent to study the law; but the only sign of his professional
labours appears to have been that he rigidly excluded all works on
jurisprudence from his magnificent library. His books, says Hallam, were
collected by the labours of many years: 'the catalogues of the Frankfort
fairs and those of the principal booksellers in Italy were diligently
perused, nor did any work of value appear from the press on either side
of the Alps which he did not instantly add to his shelves.' Remembering
the traditions of the age of Poggio, when the rarest classics might be
found perishing in a garret or a cellar, Pinelli was always in the habit
of visiting the dealers in old parchment and the brokers who carried off
deeds and papers from sales, just as Dr. Rawlinson collected and gave to
the Bodleian a mass of unsorted documents, including, as we have seen,
even the logs of recent voyages, and the pickings of "grocers'
waste-paper." In each case the industry of the collector was constantly
rewarded by the discovery of valuable literary materials, which would
have been lost under ordinary circumstances. The library of Pinelli was
augmented by that of his friend Paul Aicardo, the two _literati_ having
entered into an undertaking that the survivor should possess the whole
fruit of their labours. On Pinelli's death, in 1601, his family
determined to transfer his books to Naples. The Venetian government
interfered on the ground that, though Pinelli had been allowed to copy
the archives and registers of the State, it had never been intended that
the information should be communicated to a foreign power. Their
magistrate seized a hundred bales of books, of which fourteen were packed
with MSS. On examination it appeared that there were about three hundred
volumes of political commentaries, dealing with the affairs of all the
Italian States; and it was arranged, by way of compromise, that these
should remain at Padua in a repository under the charge of an official
guardian. The rest of the library was despatched in three shiploads from
Genoa. One vessel was captured by pirates, and the cargo was thrown
overboard, only a few volumes being afterwards cast ashore. The other
ships arrived safely at Naples; but it appears that the new proprietors
had little taste for literature. The whole remaining stock was found some
years afterwards in a mouldy garret, packed in ninety bales; and it was
purchased at last for 3000 crowns by Cardinal Frederic Borromeo, who
used it as the basis for the Ambrosian Library which he was at that time
establishing in Milan. Another library was afterwards founded at Venice
by members of the Pinelli family engaged in the Levantine trade. On the
death of its last possessor, Maffeo Pinelli, in 1787, the collection was
sold to a firm of English booksellers. It seems by Dibdin's account to
have been in a poor condition, though Dr. Harwood declared that, 'there
being no dust in Venice,' it had reposed for some centuries in excellent
preservation. This immense body of books was re-sold in London two years
afterwards at prices which barely covered the expenses incurred, though a
large amount was obtained for a copy of the Polyglott Bible of Ximènes in
six folio volumes printed upon vellum.
The praises of the great Pinelli were spread abroad by Scaliger, De Thou,
and Casaubon; but his memory, perhaps, has been best preserved by the
ardent friendship of Peiresc. He was visited at Padua by the young
philosopher in whose mind he found a reflection of his own; and it was
generally agreed that the lamp of learning had passed into safe hands
when it was yielded by Pinelli to the student from Provence. Nicolas
Fabry de Peiresc belonged to an ancient family established near Aix. His
father had been selected by Louis XII. to share the education of the
Princess Renée. A man of learning himself, he spared no expense in the
boy's instruction, who became celebrated even in his childhood for the
strength of his precocious intellect. The most eminent professors in
Italy combined to exalt 'the ripe excellence of his unripe years'; and
when Pinelli died it was said that Peiresc had taken the helm of
knowledge and was guiding the ship as he pleased. He explored at leisure
the riches of Florence and Rome, and afterwards watched the rise of the
'Ambrosiana' at Milan. A letter from Joseph Scaliger, who ruled literary
Europe like a King, from his chair at Leyden, sent Peiresc off to Verona,
where he hunted up evidence in support of the wild story that the
Scaligers were the representatives of the Ducal line of La Scala.
Julius Cæsar Scaliger, the father of the great philologist, had amused
the world by claiming to be the son of Benedetto and Berenice della
Scala, to have been a page of the Emperor Maximilian, and to have fought
in the Battle of Ravenna; and he pretended that he had become a
Cordelier, so as to rise to the Papal throne and expel the Venetians from
his dominions. Peiresc was by no means a believer in this extraordinary
romance; but he did his best to collect the coins, epitaphs, and
pedigrees, which might please his learned correspondent. Crossing the
Alps, we are told, 'he viewed the Lake of Geneva and made a tour through
a multitude of books'; and returned to Aix with a library and cabinet of
gems, 'thinking to himself that he would never see such plenty again.'
When he visited Paris in 1605, his first object, he said, was to see the
illustrious De Thou, to thank him for his kind letters, and to enquire
for messages from Scaliger. 'I cannot express,' he repeats, 'how joyfully
he entertained me.' De Thou took down his books for the visitor, and
showed him the records under lock and key that contained the secrets of
his history, 'opening his very heart, and brimful of a wonderful
sincerity.' Next day Casaubon came in from the _Bibliothèque du Roi_, and
showed much pleasure at being introduced to the traveller. His letters of
a later date show his high esteem for Peiresc. 'I am eagerly waiting to
hear what Scaliger will say about the antiques, but I foresee that you
will have room to glean after his harvest.' On another occasion he wrote:
'I do not know if you heard that the Duke of Urbino has sent me the
Polybius, but I am indeed most beholden to you for the kindness.'
Ten years afterwards Peiresc came to Paris again, wishing to explore the
Oriental treasures in the library of De Mesmes, and to visit the huge
collections in the houses of St. Victor and St. Germain. Here he gained
the friendship of Pierre Séguier and the elegant Nicolas Rigault, and of
Jérome Bignon, the first of a long dynasty of librarians. In England he
saw the Bodleian, and talked with Savile, and admired Sir Robert Cotton
as 'an honestly curious sort of man.' In Holland his chief business was
to visit Scaliger, and we are told that he was careful not to ask about
the treatise on squaring the circle, or to hint any doubt as to the truth
of the Verona romance. Here at Leyden he read in the great library, soon
to be endowed with Scaliger's books, and saw the room of which Heinsius
so nobly said: 'In the very bosom of Eternity among all these illustrious
souls I take my seat'; and at Louvain he could only lament the death of
Justus Lipsius, whom he regarded as 'the light and the loadstar of
wisdom.'
Gassendi has left us an account of the library collected by Peiresc.
Besides his acquisitions in the East, of which we have spoken elsewhere,
the books came in crowds from his agents in France and Germany, and his
scribes in the Vatican and Escorial. 'When any library was to be sold by
public outcry, he took care to buy the best books, especially if they
were of some neat edition that he did not already possess.' He bound them
in red morocco with his cypher or initials in gold. One binder always
lived in the house, and sometimes several were employed at once, 'when
the books came rolling in on every side.' He would even bind up bits of
old volumes and worm-eaten leaves; good books, he said, were so badly
used by the vulgar, that he would try to have them prized at least for
their beauty, and so perhaps they might escape the hands of the
tobacconist and the grocer. A treatise published by Jerome Alexander
contained a wonderful description of the establishment. 'Your house and
library,' says the dedication, 'are a firmament wherein the stars of
learning shine: the desks are lit with star-light and the books are in
constellations: and you sit like the sun in the midst, embracing and
giving light to them all.' Peiresc was anxious to circulate the book,
which contained a rare treatise by Hesychius; but he took care to compose
another dedication, which was printed and inserted without comment.
Notwithstanding his profuse purchases he did not leave a large collection
at his death. His friends complained that he lent 'a world of books' that
were never returned, and that he was especially lavish of any works that
could be replaced by purchase. 'About ten years after his death,' says
his friend Lemontey, 'his relations brought his books to Paris, where I
saw them in 1647; they formed a great company of volumes, most curiously
bound. They ought to have been sold _en bloc_, but as the Genius of the
library had fled, the Fates ordained that they should be torn asunder.'
Most of the books were purchased for the Collège de Navarre. A great
number of the MSS. were destroyed, though there are still a few volumes
in the public library at Carpentras. These were purchased from Louis
Thomassin, a member of Peiresc's family, by Don Malachi d'Inguimbert,
librarian to Pope Clement XII., who founded the collection of Carpentras
when he became Bishop of the diocese. There is a tradition that Peiresc's
correspondence, containing many thousands of documents, was destroyed by
his grand-niece, 'a kind of female Omar,' who insisted in using the
papers for lighting fires and making trays for her silk-worms.
Peiresc employed some of the most learned men of his time to collect for
him in Italy. Jacques Gaffarel, who had been engaged in similar work for
Richelieu, was his principal agent in Rome. At Padua he was so fortunate
as to secure the services of the archæologist Tomasini. But his
correspondence shows that the prince of librarians, Gabriel Naudé, was at
once his agent, his adviser, and his friend; and it is from Naudé that we
take the words of grief which remain as the scholar's memorial. 'Oh cruel
Fate and bitter Death, thrust into the midst of our jollity! Was there
ever a man, I pray you, more skilled in history and philology, more ready
to assist the student, more endowed with wit and wealth and worth, the
equipment of any man who, like Peiresc, is to hold the world of letters
at his beck and call.'