Commentary on Horace, and working at the duties of his secretaryship
with an entirely superfluous energy, his social life in Paris began
early in the morning. It was his custom to stop in bed till the middle
of the day and thus receive his friends; _tenir son lit de justice_, he
called it. Sometimes he would wrap himself up, and sit on the bed with
his little legs crossed like a tailor. He talked a great deal--a great
deal too much, said some people; he had no ‘flashes of silence.’ When
his friend began speaking he waited impatiently to leap into the
conversation himself; and when the friend attempted to make himself
heard, ‘Let me finish,’ says the Abbé, ‘you will have plenty of time to
answer me back;’ but he took good care that that time never came.
‘Paris,’ he used to say regretfully in later years, ‘is the only place
where they listened to me;’ and one of his biographers declares
pathetically that he died of ‘paroles rentrées et non écoutées.’
No wonder he was so full of life in the French capital. The talk of the
morning was always followed by more talk in the evening. On Thursdays,
it was Madame Geoffrin’s turn to receive. This ‘nurse of philosophy,’
this calm, placid, old hostess with her quiet, orthodox principles, and
her prudent, regular life, could no more help loving this little
libertine of a wit than could her lighter sisters. He was ‘her abbé, her
little abbé, her _petite chose_.’ As for him, he loved her without
after-thought, and with the whole-hearted impetuosity of his nature. He
declared that she inspired him with wit, that her arm-chairs were the
tripods of Apollo and he was the Sibyl. Her very primness egged him on
to more reckless stories, to wilder buffooneries; but he went away
laughing at her and loving her and respecting her, and did all to the
end of his life.
There was another woman whom he also respected, but whom he did not
love. With her one intense, overmastering passion centred on her
husband, Madame Necker was for ever the Calvinist pastor’s daughter,
‘rigid, frigid, and good.’ One female friend spoke of her acrimoniously
as ‘soaked in starch,’ and Galiani himself complained, without by any
means intending a compliment, of her ‘cold demeanour of decency.’ How
such a ribald, rollicking person as himself ever gained admittance to a
Puritan household would be a wonder in our day; but in that day if, as
Galiani himself wrote, one was only to know virtuous people, the number
of one’s friends would be alarmingly reduced. And--and--Madame Necker’s
salon was not for herself or her acquaintance; it was for her husband.
Across the dinner-table on those Fridays the lively and daring Italian
would defend with his rapid, reckless tongue the causes which his heavy
host could only maintain with his pen. Leaning after dinner against the
chimney corner, with his sparkling eyes lighting up his keen pale face,
with his dwarf’s figure dressed always with an infinite neatness and
nicety, Galiani would fight single-handed that battle against the
Economists, his own and Necker’s special antipathies, and fight it, too,
against such men as Thomas, Raynal, and Morellet. No wonder Madame
Necker overlooked her visitor’s peccadilloes. The little Abbé had such a
resistless torrent of logic! If the other side had reason in its favour,
no one had a chance of advancing that reason. Directly anyone else began
to talk, Galiani slipped away, and, there being no Opposition,
Parliament rose.
After the orthodoxy of Madame Geoffrin and the decency of Madame Necker,
the gatherings of Baron d’Holbach at Grandval might have been supposed
to have afforded Galiani an agreeable contrast. Not content with
disbelieving himself, the Baron’s scepticism was of that eager and
proselytising kind which must for ever be destroying the faith of
others. He delivered himself of it with a daring irreverence that made
even the Italian Abbé shudder, though, heaven knows! he talked freely
enough himself, and had listened to free enough talk from others. He was
here, as he had been at the Neckers’, almost alone in the Opposition. It
delighted him to lean over the table and assure these persons who were
for pushing throne and Church, King and priest, down the abyss as fast
as might be, that _he_ loved despotism, ‘bien cru, bien vert, bien
âpre.’ It was Galiani who alone perceived that these wild theories,
conceived in _salons_, must, when translated into deeds, first of all
destroy those who conceived them, and that a change in the Constitution,
which might be a very beautiful thing when done, was a very vile thing
in the doing. ‘It worries two or three generations,’ he said, ‘and only
obliges posterity. Posterity is merely a possibility, and we are
realities. And why should realities put themselves out for
possibilities?’
One day at d’Holbach’s, the conversation on the Deity became so
outrageous, that, with every man’s hand against him, Galiani rose.
‘_Messieurs les Philosophes_,’ says he, ‘you go too fast. If I were the
Pope, I should hand you over to the Inquisition; if the King, to the
Bastille. But as I have the good luck to be neither, I shall come to
dinner next Thursday, and you shall listen to me as patiently as I have
listened to you.’
Thursday came. After dinner and coffee, the Abbé takes an armchair,
crosses his legs, removes his wig (the night being sultry), and, with
those lively gesticulations which he can no more help than he can help
breathing, tells a story.
‘Please suppose, gentlemen, that one of you, who is the most convinced
that this world is the result of chance, happens to be playing at dice,
not in a gambling hell but in one of the best houses in Paris. His
adversary, casting one, two, three, four--many times--always throws
number six. After the game has gone on a little while, my friend
Diderot, we will say, who is losing his money, will certainly call out,
“The dice are cogged! This is some swindlers’ den!” What, philosopher,
what? Because ten or twelve throws of dice come out of the box so that
you lose half a dozen francs, you are firmly convinced that this is the
result of a clever design, an artificial combination, a complicated
roguery; and yet, seeing in the universe a mighty number of combinations
a thousand times more difficult, more complicated, and more useful, you
do not suspect that Nature’s dice are also cogged, and that above there
is a great Arranger?’
It was a most happy illustration, if not a convincing argument. But the
age which was swayed by the eloquence of Rousseau always preferred an
example to a reason: while the class who laughed later at ‘The Marriage
of Figaro’ might certainly be counted on to enjoy a joke against itself.
There was a fourth _salon_ where Galiani was much more at home than at
Grandval, or under the prim wings of Madame Necker or the motherly
feathers of Madame Geoffrin. At Madame d’Épinay’s alone, he was
perfectly natural, his rollicking, buffooning, all-daring self, able, as
only a Southerner is able, to make himself entirely ridiculous without
being at all contemptible.
Madame d’Épinay was that clever wife of a ruined Farmer General, who had
been petted by Rousseau, and played with by Voltaire. Madame d’Houdetot
was her sister-in-law; Diderot was her constant associate; Grimm was her
lover; and Galiani became, and remained for twenty years, her most
sincere and admiring friend.
A Platonic friendship is perhaps only possible when one or other of the
Platonists is in love with a third person. Grimm, with his
well-regulated head and heart, was not only perfectly able to keep a
fickle woman true to him, but himself to retain an honest regard for the
Abbé and to use his opinions and his wit for the ‘Literary
Correspondence.’
Madame d’Épinay’s _salon_ was of all _salons_ the most thoroughly
characteristic of the time and the people. No one had any duty but to
amuse himself. From early in the morning, a few charming and
accomplished women, who always relegated their children to servants,
their stupid husbands to oblivion, and their households to chance,
talked delightfully over their embroidery (with which the fashion
demanded they should toy) to men, of whom among many astounding
characteristics, not the least astounding is their prodigious idleness
coupled with their prodigious literary production.
Galiani himself was the greatest attraction Madame d’Épinay’s circle
could claim. When he came in on a dripping country afternoon at La
Chevrette, or in some murky winter twilight in Paris, there came with
him, said Diderot, light, brightness, gaiety, folly, mirth--everything
which makes one forget the cares of life. Mademoiselle d’Ette, who was
at once her hostess’s worst and dearest friend, looked up from her
embroidery frame with her stealthy eyes aglow to welcome an acquisition
so delightful. Madame d’Épinay was, as ever, gay, caressing,
_insouciante_. Diderot was in ecstasies (he was always in an ecstasy
about something) at the little Italian’s arrival. He was a perfect
treasure on a wet day! If the toy-shops made Galianis, everybody would
buy one!
The Abbé takes his seat, cross-legged as usual, and from that head which
was ‘a library of anecdotes,’ reels out a dozen stories, acting them all
with an inimitable liveliness, while his hearers laugh till they cry.
A few of those stories sound dull in print, or have lost point with
their youth; many more disgust modern taste by their elegant indecency.
But the man who dubbed Paris, ‘the _Café de l’Europe_,’ d’Holbach, ‘the
_maître d’hôtel_ of philosophy,’ and the vaunted liberty of the Apostles
of the Social Contract, ‘the right of interfering in other people’s
business,’ still proves his title of wit. It was Galiani too who defined
the death of Maria Theresa as ‘an ink-bottle spilt over the map of
Europe;’ and Sophie Arnould’s exquisite lost voice as ‘the most
beautiful asthma’ he ever heard. It was Galiani who said that suffering
was the cart-horse, and _ennui_ the horse in the rich man’s stable. It
was Galiani who declared that the Jesuits lengthened the Creed and
shortened the Decalogue that they might succeed better in the world, and
Galiani who affirmed that the priests had changed the name of the
Sacrament from _Pénitence_ to Confession, because they thought it
sufficient to avow their sins without correcting them. Finally, it was
Galiani who proved that he knew intimately one side of the life around
him, when he declared that the women of the eighteenth century loved
with their minds, not with their hearts.
Always inimitably good-humoured, never bored, never weary, ready to play
on the clavecin or sing in the most charming voice in the world if the
audience should tire of his conversation, seeing the ridiculous side of
any subject in a flash, prompt with an anecdote to fit the most
unforeseen occasion--‘the little creature born at the foot of Vesuvius,’
clown, harlequin, Punchinello--whatever men called him--was, and is,
without counterpart in social history. There will be and have
been--there certainly were in the eighteenth century--many agreeable
young gentlemen who not only often dined out, but who entirely lived and
fattened on a pretty taste in stories and _bons mots_, and a constant
readiness to make fools of themselves for the benefit of an idle
audience afraid of being bored; but there was rarely, if ever, a buffoon
of such vast and solid erudition, of mental capacities so great and so
varied, and of mental achievements so momentous, as the Abbé Galiani.
While the _salons_ were petting and spoiling him, while he seemed to be
doing nothing but talk from morning till night and from night until
morning, while he was regarded as such a complete and irresistible joke
that people laughed at his very name, he had yet worked so hard as
Secretary to the Embassy and Chargé d’Affaires that he raised the whole
diplomatic corps to a worthier position, and advanced the interests of
Naples with a steadiness and persistency usually allotted to a very
different character. His Majesty Louis the Fifteenth presented him with
a box set in diamonds. Choiseul’s light indifference changed into a cool
consideration. All the time the man was writing, observing, thinking.
Was he a politician _pour rire_? He seemed to be everything _pour rire_.
But after all, who knows? The men who had laughed the most heartily at
his absurdities, turned and looked at him again with a wonder in their
eyes.
In 1765 he obtained a year’s leave of absence and went home to take the
baths of Ischia. In 1766, on the invitation of the Marquis Caraccioli,
Italian Ambassador, he went to stay in London.
It must be recorded regretfully that the Abbé did not find Britain or
the British at all to his taste. David Hume said indignantly that though
he only remained two months in our country, talked himself the whole
time, and would not allow an Englishman to put in a word, yet when he
came away he dogmatised on the character of the nation all the rest of
his life as if he had never studied anything else. That he did not share
the Anglomania of Voltaire is certainly true. Some years later, to one
of his correspondents, he defined the English rather happily as ‘the
best educated nation in the world, and consequently the greatest, the
most troublesome, and the most melancholy.’ But some at least of his
letters abuse England very freely. It was, no doubt, as difficult for
the Britons to understand a Galiani as for a Galiani to understand them;
and not at all wonderful that he carried away from our shores an
impression of an Englishman as a solid, emotionless person, who resented
buffoonery as an insult, never uttered a joke or saw one, and had all
the qualities which make a nation mighty and an individual disagreeable.
The Abbé was a somewhat graver man himself when he came back to Paris.
He was now thirty-eight years old, a little less free of tongue, a
thought less sceptical in religion. His letters of the time contain
grave observations on the Seven Years’ War, and on the condition of the
Paris Parliament. But he was still about the _salons_, still Parisian to
the finger-tips, and he still loved Paris from his soul.
And in 1769, like a clap of thunder, came the _foudroyant_ news of his
recall to Naples.
Recalled! The hostesses of Paris looked at each other in dismay.
Recalled! It is surely the end of all things if some political exigency,
some party question, is allowed to interfere with our amusements like
this! Is it Choiseul, who has protected the Economists, while Galiani
hated them, who has done this thing? The exact reason for it was then
matter of speculation, and is so still. It was enough, more than
enough, that it was a fact that this dear, merry, little Abbé must pack
up his trunks and go out of light into darkness, out of the sunshine of
social favour in which he had basked and purred and gambolled, into the
gloom of the provincial obscurity from which he had come.
If Paris was struck with dismay, Galiani himself was overwhelmed by the
greatest calamity of his life. He declared that he had never wept at
anything, not even the death of his relations, so much as at leaving
Paris. ‘They have torn me from Paris,’ he cried, ‘and they have torn out
my heart.’ He swore that the only good thing that wearisome Mr. Sterne,
the English author, ‘ever uttered was when he said to me, “It is better
to die in Paris than to live in Naples.”’ He wrung his hands, and
bemoaned out loud, according to his temperament. He followed his
departure by letters to Madame d’Épinay and to d’Alembert which are
really pathetic. He was also leaving behind him in Paris a woman to whom
he was tied by an attachment, not Platonic. He was torn, in brief, from
everything--friends and mistress, career, work, play--life itself. No
wonder despair seized his soul. He went, and in parting flung into the
camp of the Economists, whom he believed to be the enemy responsible for
his overthrow, a bomb whose explosion rang through Europe.
In 1770 there appeared in Paris the ‘Dialogues on the Corn Trade.’ The
taxation of, or free trade in, grain had long been a vexed question, not
only in the minds of politicians but in the minds of all intelligent
Frenchmen. Free Food! cried the Economist, rich in the support of Turgot
and of Choiseul. Tax it! replied their opponents, mighty with the
strength of Terrai, the graceless Controller-General, and the growing
influence of Necker.
Through the wit and the parties, in the midst of ardent secretarial
duties and of continual literary studies, somehow, at some time--though
how and at what time it would be difficult to say--Galiani had brought
to bear on the question his Italian shrewdness and brilliancy, all the
learning and observation taught him by his uncle, and the judgment and
the wisdom taught him by Heaven. No man would have believed that such a
merry, light, social person could have pondered so deeply; no one _had_
believed it. The book was in the form of a dialogue between a Marquis
and a Chevalier, It was as gay and rollicking as the little Abbe’s own
talk. In fact, it was his own talk; but it was something much more. It
was much more even than a pamphlet on a passing question, on a matter
of local momentary importance, ‘Read between the lines and in the
margin,’ it was an able work on the science of government, what Grimm
called justly ‘the production of a sound and enlightened philosopher,
and of a statesman.’ In it the author exposed his theory that a man of
State must know not only his business but the human heart--‘You must
study men before you can rule them.’ This knowledge he denied to Turgot;
and he warned France, in solemn prophecy to be fulfilled too soon, to
beware in her rulers, not the rogues and the knaves--they soon show
themselves in their true colours--but _l’honnête homme trompé_. ‘He
wishes all men well, so all men trust him; but he is deceived as to the
means of doing well.’
The work was received with the wildest enthusiasm. In far Ferney, the
spirited old Patriarch of Literature jumped for joy, almost literally,
at a wit and a style so inimitable. No man ever reasoned so agreeably
before.... ‘No man has ever made famine so amusing.... If the work does
not diminish the price of bread, it will give pleasure to the whole
nation.... Plato and Molière have combined to write it....’ Excellent!
excellent! And in the same year, 1770, the master himself wrote for his
‘Questions on the Encyclopædia’ the article on Grain wherein Galiani was
not forgotten.
Diderot, who, with Grimm and Madame d’Épinay, had helped to correct the
proofs of the ‘Dialogues,’ declared impetuously to Mademoiselle Volland
that he had gone down on his knees to implore Galiani to publish them.
Grimm said that if he were Controller-General he should attach the Abbé
to France, if it cost the King forty thousand livres per annum, ‘without
any other stipulation but that he should amuse himself and come twice a
week to chat with me over the affairs of my Government.’ Even Fréron,
Élie Fréron, the brilliant Parisian journalist, who hated Voltaire and
consequently all Voltaire’s colleagues and disciples, could not help
praising the thing in his ‘Literary Year.’ Frederick the Great wrote the
author a flattering letter.
The book’s foes advertised it even better than its friends. At first,
the leaders in the Economist camp looked at each other in dismay.
Granted that they had justice and reason on their side, what could
justice and reason do in the Paris of 1770 against that bubbling,
sparkling wit? The capital must, first of all, be amused. What use,
then, to advance the always doubtful argument that a writer cannot be at
once gay and trustworthy, that if he is really worth hearing he can
never be heard without a yawn?
The Abbé Morellet, as large as Galiani was small, and as ponderous in
style as the Abbé was light, was employed to answer him. The good man
wrote his refutation with such haste and ardour that the skin of his
little finger was completely worn off from much rubbing against the side
of his desk. And, after all, no one read him. He may, or may not, be
right; he is certainly dull!
Then Turgot took up a mightier pen and wielded a mightier influence.
Noble and disinterested, a better and a greater man than Galiani, the
Statesman of that company of which the Abbé was but the Wit, Turgot
sought, as did Galiani, the good and the progress of humanity; but he
sought it by a different road, and by the labour of his whole life. He
recognised the cleverness of the book; a bad cause, said he, could not
be maintained with more grace and cleverness. But my little brother the
Abbé is wrong, not the less. In the ‘Dialogues’ there peeped out,
thought Turgot, something of the comfortable indifference of those who
are content to leave the world as it is because it goes so smoothly with
them, something of the laziness and the selfishness that come naturally
to a little writer himself so comfortably beneficed and mitred. Galiani
lacked, in fact, Turgot’s ‘instincts of the heart which teach the head.’
Right or wrong--_l’honnête homme trompé_ perhaps--Turgot had put his
soul into the great cause of humanity, and Galiani had only put his
mind. What wonder that they saw the same world with different eyes, and
would have worked out the salvation of falling France, by methods not
only opposite but opposed?
Galiani went back to Naples. For many months, for years, his letters are
full of his book, that effort which, even if misdirected, proved that he
was no drone in the hive, that he too had that one great virtue common
to all the philosophers and redeeming half their sins--he had heard the
trumpet-call of responsibility towards his fellows, and had answered it.
After Paris, Naples was not merely dull, it was extinction. The poor
little Abbé bemoaned his fate to Madame d’Épinay in the most touching of
all jesting letters. True, there was society here, and Galiani was its
lion. But what society! There was Lady Orford, Robert Walpole’s
daughter-in-law, who had a country house close to Galiani’s at Santo
Sorio, at the foot of Vesuvius, and there was Sir William Hamilton, now
British envoy and, to be, the husband of Lady Hamilton. Presently there
came, too, the Marquis of Lansdowne, who was amiable, which, said
Galiani, ‘is a very rare thing for an Englishman, and Secretary of
State, which is a very common thing.’
But the Abbé hated the English; and he was bored to death. The Court of
Naples gave him more lucrative posts--and though he described himself as
_avide_ without being _avare_, which meant that he was greedy of money
and yet lavish in spending it--money, even when it does not beget
_ennui_, certainly never destroys it. He turned to his museum full of
medals and bronzes, pictures and weapons--and that bored him too. Paris,
Paris! He hankered after it for ever. ‘What is the good of inoculation
here,’ he grumbled, after expressing delight in that discovery, ‘when
living itself is not worth while?’ ‘What a life!’ he wrote dismally to
d’Holbach in 1770. ‘Nothing amusing here ... no edicts ... no
suspensions of payment ... no quarrels about any thing--not even about
religion. Dear Paris, how I regret you!’
In 1771 died there that Madame Daubinière to whom he had been attached
by no Platonic tie, and whom he had not hesitated to recommend to the
good offices of Madame d’Épinay; and in the same year the death of
Helvétius, the rich and amiable ex-Farmer-General, ‘left a blank in the
line of our battalion.’ ‘Let us love each other the better, we who
remain,’ says Galiani. ‘Close the lines. Advance! Fire!’ He was always
declaring he had no heart; but it was there, under the lava of
worldliness and mockery, as Pompeii and Herculaneum lay hid beneath the
lava of his own Vesuvius. He was soon busy procuring a post at Court for
his unsuccessful brother Bernard--Bernard, who had a large family,
little money, and the dull bookworm talents that bring no more. Then
Bernard died, and up starts the Abbé in a new _rôle_. There are three
stupid nieces to be married, to say nothing of the widow! The
indefatigable uncle found the girls eligible husbands, although one of
them, as he wrote frankly, was as ugly as a hunchback. Then he
discovered some one to marry his sister-in-law. ‘If this goes on,’ he
wrote to Madame d’Épinay, ‘people will clap when I go into my box at the
theatre.’