CHAPTER XIII.
LATER COLLECTORS: FRANCE—ITALY—SPAIN.
We have still to notice one or two of Grolier's contemporaries, who may be classed as great book-collectors of an old-fashioned type. They knew the whole history of 'the Book,' and were themselves the owners of exquisite treasures, which are now hoarded up as the choicest remains of antiquity. But their function was not so much to collect books as rare and curious objects as to undertake the duty of saving the records of past history from destruction. They did the work in their day which has now devolved upon the guardians of public and national libraries. No private person could now take their place; but the interests of literature could hardly have been protected in a former age without the personal labour and enthusiasm of Orsini and Pétau.
Fulvio Orsini was born in 1529. He began life as a beggar, though for many years before his death he was the leader of Italian learning. A poor girl had been abandoned with her child and was forced to beg her bread in the streets of Rome. The boy obtained a place in the Lateran when he was only seven years old: the Canon Delfini recognised his precocious talents and undertook to find him a classical education. The student obtained some small preferment, and succeeded to his patron's appointment. His marvellous acquaintance with ancient books secured him a place as librarian to the Cardinal Farnese, and he received many offers of more lucrative employment: but he found that if he accepted he would have to live away from Rome; and he refused everything that could cause inconvenience to his mother, whose comfort was his constant care. On his death, in the year 1600, he bequeathed his vast collections to the Vatican, and the gift can only be compared to such important events as the arrival of the spoils of Urbino, or the great purchase of mss. from the Queen of Sweden.
Orsini has been ridiculed for having more books than he could read, and for an excessive devotion to the antique. 'Here is a library like an arsenal,' said the satirist, 'stored with all the requisites for any campaign. The owner buys all the books that come in his way: it is true that he will not read them; but he will have them magnificently bound, and ranged on the shelves with a mighty show, and there he will salute them several times a day, and will bring his friends and servants to make their acquaintance.' Orsini is rebuked for his admiration of a dusty manuscript. 'When one of these old parchments falls into his hands, he makes you examine the decayed leaves on which the eye can hardly trace any marks of an ancient pen. 'What is this treasure that we have here?' he cries, 'and oh! what joy, here we have the delight of mankind, and the world's desire, and pleasures not to be matched in Paradise!' 'There,' says our satirist, 'you have the very portrait of Fulvio Orsini. Why, he once took a manuscript Terence, full of holes and mistakes, in writing to Cardinal Toletus, and told him that it was worth all the gold in the world'; and, to convince his Spanish Eminence, he said that the book was a thousand years' old. 'Est-il possible?' replies the Cardinal, 'you don't say so. I can only say, my friend, I would rather have a book hot from the press than all the old parchments that the Sibyl had for sale.'
Jacques Bongars, the faithful councillor and ambassador of Henri Quatre, was the owner of a remarkable library, consisting to a great extent of State papers and historical documents, which Bongars had special facilities for collecting during his official visits to Germany. He had studied law at Bourges under the learned Cujacius, of whom it is recorded that when his name was mentioned in the German lecture-rooms, every one present took off his hat. Bongars has described his excitement at purchasing the great lawyer's library. 'My chief care has been to seek out the books belonging to Cujas. I expect that you will have a fine laugh when you think of all that crowd that goes to Court as if it were a fair, to do their business together, and to try to get money out of the King, while a regular courtier like myself rushes off to this lonely spot to spend his fortune on books and papers, all in disorder and half eaten by the book-worms. You will be able to judge if I am an avaricious man. No trouble or expense is anything to me where books are concerned. Would to God that I were free, and had time to read them. I should not feel any envy then of M. de Rosny's wealth or the Persian's mountain of gold.' While residing at Strasburg he bought the manuscripts belonging to the Cathedral from some of the soldiers by whom the city was more than once pillaged during the wars of religion.
About the year 1603 Bongars arranged with Paul Pétau for the joint purchase of a large collection of manuscripts, which had belonged to the Abbey of St. Bénoit-sur-Loire, and had been saved by the bailiff Pierre Daniel when the Abbey was plundered. The share of Bongars in this collection was transferred to Strasburg, and passed eventually with the rest of his books to the public library of the city of Berne.
Paul Pétau was a man of universal accomplishments. He was the rival of Scaliger in the science of chronology; his doctrinal works are praised as 'a monument of useful labour'; 'he solaced his leisure hours with Greek and Hebrew, as well as Latin verse,' and, according to Hallam's judgment, obtained in the last subject the general approbation of the critics. He formed a valuable museum of Greek, Roman, and Gaulish antiquities, with a cabinet of Frankish coins, to which Peiresc was a generous contributor. His library contained several books that had belonged to Grolier; but it was chiefly remarkable for its mss., of which several were published by Sirmond and Du Chesne among other materials for the history of France. Many of them had been acquired from the collection of Greek and Hebrew books formed by Jean de Saint André, or out of the mass of chronicles, romances, and old French poems belonging to Claude Fauchet, and a large portion came, as we have seen, out of an ancient Benedictine Abbey. Paul Pétau's books of all kinds were left to his son Alexander. The printed books, comprising a number of finely illustrated works on archæology, were sold at the Hague in 1722; the sale included the old library inherited by Francis Mansard, and the mss. relating to Roman antiquities that had been the property of Lipsius. A thousand splendid volumes on parchment, the pride of the elder Pétau, described by all who saw them in terms of glowing admiration, were sold in his son's lifetime to Queen Christina of Sweden. She had always intended to buy some great collection, and had thought among others of buying up those of Henri de Mesmes, of De Béthune, and the Cardinal Mazarin. She was delighted with her new acquisition, and carried it off to Rome, where she made a triumphal entry with her books amidst the popular rejoicings.