We may form some idea of the beautiful things which Foucquet had collected in this house by consulting the inventory preserved in the Archives, and published by M. Bonnaffé,[24] "of the statues, busts, scabella, columns, tables and other works in marble and stone at Saint-Mandé."
Among these things there are many antiques. Most of the modern pieces of sculpture are by Michel Anguier, who passed three years, 1655-58, at Saint-Mandé. There he executed the group of La Charité which has already been mentioned, and a Hercules six feet in height, as well as "thirteen statues, life-size, copied from the most beautiful antiques of Rome, notably the Laocoôn, Hercules, Flora, and Juno and Jupiter." This we are told by Germain Brice.[25] He had seen them in a garden in the Rue Culture-Sainte-Catherine, where they were in the beginning of the eighteenth century, Germain Brice also tells us that in those days eight other statues, by the same sculptor, and also coming from Saint-Mandé, adorned the house of the Marquise de Louvois at Choisy. We learn also, from other sources, that one of the ceilings of Saint-Mandé was painted by Lebrun.[26]
Finally, the Abbé de Marolles speaks of the beautiful things which Foucquet had painted at Saint-Mandé, and the Latin inscriptions which were entrusted to Nicolas Gervaise, his physician. We may remark in this connection that Louis XIV, who in art did little more than continue Foucquet's undertakings, derived from the functions which the Superintendent conferred upon this Nicolas Gervaise the ideas of that little Academy, the Academy of Inscriptions and Medals, which he founded five or six years later.
But the most famous room in the house of which we are now speaking was the library, because the noblest room in any house is that in which books are lodged, and because La Fontaine and Corneille used to linger in the library of Saint-Mandé. It was there that the poets used to wait for the Superintendent. "Every one knows," said Corneille, "that this great Minister was no less the Superintendent of belles-lettres than of finance; that his house was as open to men of intellect as to men of affairs, and that, whether in Paris or in the country, it is always in his library that one waits for those precious moments which he steals from his overwhelming occupations, in order to gratify those who possess some degree of talent for successful writing."[27]
It was in this gallery that La Fontaine, as well as Corneille, used to sit waiting until the master of the house had leisure to receive the poet and his verses. One day he waited a whole hour. Monsieur le Surintendant was occupied; whether with finance or with love posterity cannot hope to know. Nevertheless, the good man found the time short: he passed it in his own company. Unfortunately, the suisse unceremoniously dismissed "the lover of the Muses," who, having returned home, wrote an epistle which should assure his being received the next time. "I will not be importunate," he said:
Je prendrai votre heure et la mienne.
Si je vois qu'on vous entretienne,
J'attendrai fort paisiblement
En ce superbe appartement
Ou l'on a fait d'étrange terre
Depuis peu venir à grand-erre[28]
(Non sans travail et quelques frais)
Des rois Céphrim et Kiopès
Le cercueil, la tombe ou la bière:
Pour les rois, ils sont en poussière:
C'est là que j'en voulais venir.
Il me fallut entretenir
Avec les monuments antiques,
Pendant qu'aux affaires publiques
Vous donniez tout votre loisir.
(Certes j'y pris un grand plaisir
Vous semble-t-il pas que l'image
D'un assez galant personnage
Sert à ces tombeaux d'ornement).
Pour vous en parler franchement,
Je ne puis m'empêcher d'en rire.
Messire Orus, me mis-je à dire,
Vous nous rendez tous ébahis:
Les enfants de votre pays
Ont, ce me semble, des bavettes
Que je trouve plaisamment faites.
On m'eut expliqué tout cela,
Mais il fallut partir de là
Sans entendre l'allégorie.
Je quittai donc la galerie,
Fort content parmi mon chagrin,
De Kiopès et de Céphrim,
D'Orus et de tout son lignage,
Et de maint autre personnage.
Puissent ceux d'Egypte en ces lieux,
Fussent-ils rois, fussent-ils dieux.
Sans violence et sans contrainte,
Se reposer dessus leur plinthe[29]
Jusques au brut du genre humain!
Ils ont fait assez de chemin
Pour des personnes de leur taille.
Et vous, seigneur, pour qui travaille
Le temps qui peut tout consumer,
Vous, que s'efforce de charmer
L'Antiquité qu'on idolâtre,
Pour qui le dieu de Cléopâtre
Sous nos murs enfin abordé,
Vient de Memphis à Saint-Mandé:
Puissiez vous voir ces belles-choses
Pendant mille moissons de roses....[30]
At once absurd and charming is this song which the Gallic lark composed to the sarcophagi of Africa. It is hardly necessary to say that the coffins, at the strange shape of which La Fontaine wondered, had never enclosed the bodies of "Kiopès and of Céphrim." Messire Orus had not told his secrets to the most lovable of our poets. We must not forget that the scholars of that time were as ignorant on this point as our friend.
These two mummy-cases were the first which had been brought to Paris from the banks of the Nile. They bore their history written upon them, but no one knew how to read it. The chance guess of some admirer had attributed to them a royal origin.[31]
The truth is that they had been discovered twenty-five years earlier in a pyramid by the inhabitants of the province of Saïd; transported to Cairo, then to Alexandria, they were bought by a French trader, who landed them at Marseilles on the 4th September, 1632, where they were acquired, it is believed, by a collector of that town, M. Chemblon.[32]
There was then at Rome a German Jesuit, by name Athanasius Kircher, a man of vivid imagination, very learned, who, having dabbled in physics, chemistry, natural history, theology, antiquities, music, ancient and modern languages, invented the magic lantern. This reverend Father really knew Coptic, and thought he knew something of the language of the ancient Egyptians. To prove this he wrote a large quarto volume entitled Lingua Ægyptiaca restituta, which proves quite the contrary. But it is very easy to deceive oneself, especially when one is a scholar. A brother of his in Jesus, Father Brusset, told him of the arrival of the two ancient coffins, and Father Kircher went to Marseilles to see them. Later he treated of them in his Œdipus Ægyptiacus, a pleasant day-dream in four folio volumes; La Fontaine's, in the Saint-Mandé library, was at all events shorter.