"Teach the public, for example, he wrote in his Advice to a Journalist (1741), that the Chef d'œuvre d'un inconnu or Matanasius is by the late M. de Sallengre and an illustrious mathematician of a consummate talent who adds wit to scholarship, lastly by all those who contributed in The Hague to the Journal Littéraire, and that M. de Saint-Hyacinthe provided the song with many remarks. But if to that skit be added an infamous pamphlet worthy of the dirtiest rogue, and written no doubt by one of those sorry Frenchmen who wander about foreign lands to the disgrace of literature and their own country, give due emphasis to the horror and ridicule of that monstrous alliance."
To that crushing blow Saint-Hyacinthe replied without delay. "Though your Temple du goût," he wrote, "has convinced me that your taste is often depraved, I cannot believe you can go the length of confounding what is the work of one with what is the work of many.... I am not so fortunate as to do honour either to my country or to literature; but I may say that if it suffices to love them to do them honour, no one surely would do so more than I.... I have never been vile enough to praise foreign countries at the expense of my own, and heap eulogies upon their great men, while undervaluing those that do honour to France."
Bitter as the reply was, it did not appease Saint-Hyacinthe's anger. Hearing that Voltaire had just been elected a member of the French Academy, "The Academy," he wrote to a friend, "will be honoured to receive among the forty a man devoid of either morals or principles, and who does not know his own tongue unless he has begun learning it these few years past" (17th February 1743). His Recherches philosophiques he had inscribed to the King of Prussia and, the latter taking no notice of the work, "Voltaire," he complained, "has indisposed the king against me" (10th October 1745).[301]
The latter part of his life Saint-Hyacinthe spent at Geneken, near Breda. Thence he had launched his indignant reply to the Advice to a Journalist. His literary activity was still great. The two letters, now published for the first time, show him trying to induce Dutch booksellers to publish the manuscripts of which he possesses "two chests full." As usual, he is in dire straits, persecuted by duns and lawyers, yet none the less full of hopes. The schemes he thinks about are excellent till he is cheated by some "great rogue." One pictures to oneself an eighteenth-century Mr. Micawber, buoyant and impecunious. Nor are there missing in the background the wife and family, whose protest is brought home to us in a startling manner by the "seduction" of the eldest daughter. Here Saint-Hyacinthe refers to Mlle de Marconnay, for so she was called, who, under the patronage of the Duchesse d'Antin, retired to Troyes.[302] The fates of the two other children are unknown.
I
TO M. DE LA MOTTE, IN AMSTERDAM
Sluys, 27th June 1742.
Monsieur,—It was with the utmost joy that I heard from M. Mortier that you were in good health and thought kindly about me. I should have had the honour to tell you sooner how pleased I was at the news had I not suddenly fallen very ill just as I was intending to do so. The attack of illness in which I battled long with death, had seized me for the second time since last September and it was thought I should not recover, as I suffered in the meantime from ague, and this has weakened me so that, though out of danger for the last two months, I can hardly walk from my room to the door of my house and am unable to attend continuously to anything however trifling. My state is the cruellest possible. Not only have I been ill ten months, but my wife and two children are ailing. I left Paris two years ago and came here to settle some money-affairs, which should have turned out well I thought, as I was allowing the income to accumulate in order to pay off a few debts. Those entrusted with the administration of the estate have contrived to settle matters to their own advantage and are appropriating all. Besides, the co-heir has brought an action against me and his attorney here—the greatest rascal I have ever known—will raise quibbles on the plainest things in the world, evidently to fish in troubled waters, and have the pleasure of making me detest this country, wherein he has but too well succeeded. The judges have at last submitted the matter to arbitration and, though still unable to stand, I had myself carried here to end it. I shall see how all will turn out in a few days, after which, if my strength comes back, I shall try to spare a week or ten days to journey to Holland, especially with a view to meeting you, Monsieur, and two other persons. I shall tell you all that has befallen me since I left England. I shall tell how my eldest daughter was perverted, how the old duchess Dantin and two other ladies coming one day when her mother was dining out, carried her off to the convent of the New Catholics where the perversion still goes on. That is why I wrote to her mother to leave Paris promptly with her two other children, and am debarred from returning there. You shall see in the tale of my adventures a series of unfortunate occurrences at which one would wonder if one might wonder at what the malice of men can do.