ANECDOTES OF CELEBRATED AUTHORS, FRENCH AND ITALIAN.
Crebillon's manner of life was extremely singular. He slept little, and lay very hard; he was always surrounded with about thirty cats and dogs; and used to smoke tobacco, to keep his room sweet against their exhalations. Being one day asked, in a large company, which of his works he thought the best? "I don't know," answered he, "which is my best production; but this (pointing to his son, who was present) is certainly my worst." "It is," replied the son, with vivacity, "because no Carthusian had a hand in it," alluding to the report that the best passages in his father's tragedies had been written by a Carthusian friar, who was his friend.
Molieres, the celebrated French priest and mathematician, was a very irritable man, which led him frequently into passions, of which one was the cause of his death in 1742. In other respects he was reckoned a very amiable character; but was apt to be so absent, or absorbed in his studies, as to appear almost wholly insensible to surrounding objects. His infirmity in this respect became known, and he was accordingly made the subject of depredations. A shoe-black once finding him profoundly absorbed in a reverie, contrived to steal the silver buckles from his shoes, replacing them with iron ones. At another time, while at his studies, a villain broke into the room in which he was sitting, and demanded his money; Molieres, without rising from his studies, or giving any alarm, coolly showed him where it was, requesting him, as a great favour, that he would not derange his papers.
Ariosto, the celebrated Italian poet, being asked why he had not built his house in a more magnificent manner, and more suitable to the noble descriptions which he had given of sumptuous palaces, beautiful porticoes, and pleasant fountains, in his Orlando Furioso, he replied, "that words were combined together with less expense than stones." To such a degree was he charmed with his own verse, and so much did he also excel in his manner of reading, that he was always disgusted if he heard his own writings repeated with an ill grace and accent. Accordingly, it is said, that, when he accidentally heard a potter singing a stanza of his Orlando in an incorrect and ungraceful manner, he was so incensed, that he rushed into his shop and broke several of the pots which were exposed to sale; when the potter expostulated with him for this unprovoked injury, Ariosto replied, "I indeed have broken half a dozen of your pots, which are not worth so many halfpence, and you have spoiled a stanza of mine, which is worth a considerable sum of gold." He was so attached to a plain and frugal mode of life, that he says of himself in one of his poems, "that he was a fit person to have lived in the world when acorns were the food of mankind." His constitution was delicate and infirm; and, notwithstanding his temperance and general abstemiousness, his health was often interrupted. He bore his last sickness with uncommon resolution and serenity; affirming, "that he was willing to die on many accounts, and particularly because he found that the greatest divines were of opinion that we shall know one another in the other world;" and he observed to those who were with him, "that many of his friends were departed, whom he desired to visit, and that he thought every moment tedious till he gained that happiness."
Dante, the celebrated Italian poet, has been described by Boccacio, as of a middle stature, of a pensive and melancholy expression in his countenance. He was courteous and civil, and his way of living extremely temperate. He is said to have been a very absent man, of which instances have been recorded; once meeting with a book in an apothecary's, which he had been long looking for, he opened it, and read from morning till night without being roused from his pursuit by the distraction and tumult occasioned by a great wedding passing through the street. For some time he roved about Italy in an indigent and distressed condition, till he was hospitably received by the Lord of Ravenna, his patron and friend.
Paul Scarron, whose life abounds with curious features, married Mademoiselle d'Aubignè, afterwards the celebrated Madame de Maintenon, who was at that time only sixteen years of age. On his marriage, the notary asked him what dowry he would settle upon his wife? he replied, "Immortality: the names of the wives of kings die with them, but the name of Scarron's wife shall live for ever." He was accustomed to talk to his superiors with great freedom, and in a very jocular style. In a dedication to the king, he thus addressed his majesty: "I shall endeavour to persuade your majesty, that you would do yourself no injury, were you to do me a small favour; for in that case I should become gay. If I should become more gay, I should write sprightly comedies; and if I should write sprightly comedies, your majesty would be amused, and thus your money would not be lost. All this appears so evident that I should certainly be convinced of it, if I were as great a king as I am now a poor unfortunate man." Scarron took pleasure in reading his works to his friends, as he composed them; he used to call it trying them. Segrais and another person coming to him one day, "Take a chair," he said, "and sit down, that I may examine my Comic Romance." When he saw them laugh very heartily, he said he was satisfied, "my book will be well received since it makes persons of such delicate taste laugh." He was not disappointed in his expectations, for the Romance had a great run. In the year 1638, he was attending the Carnival at Mons, of which he was a canon. Having put on the dress of a savage, he was followed by a troop of boys into a morass, where he was kept so long, that the cold penetrated his debilitated limbs, which became contracted in such a manner, that he used to compare his body to the shape of a Z. He died in 1660, at the age of fifty; he said to his friends who surrounded his dying bed, "I shall never make you weep so much as I have made you laugh." In his epitaph, made by himself, he desires, in a mixture of the comic and the pathetic, that the passengers would not awaken, by their noise, poor Scarron from the first good sleep he had ever enjoyed.