The Great Book-Collectors

by Charles Isaac Elton; Mary Augusta Elton

DE THOU—PINELLI—PEIRESC.

It was long a saying among the French that a man had never seen Paris who had not looked upon the books of Thuanus. The historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou held a leading place in literature, without pretending in any way to rival the greatness of Joseph Scaliger or the erudition of Isaac Casaubon. He was the master of a great store of personal and secret history collected in state papers and records; but he was also famous for the extent of his general scholarship, and for the patronage which he manifested towards all who laboured about books. He was himself a most fastidious collector. He never heard of the appearance of a valuable work without ordering three or four copies on the fine paper manufactured for his private use; and of any such book already issued he would order several sets of sheets to be taken to pieces in order to procure one perfect example. His library was not large. It consisted of about 8000 printed books and 1000 manuscripts, chiefly upon historical subjects; but they were all well selected, well bound, and in perfect condition. There is a letter upon this subject by Henri Estienne the printer, in which the high reputation of De Thou's library is contrasted with Lucian's just invective against the illiterate book-hunter: 'The satirist would have honoured a man like you, so learned and so generous in your library: you choose your books with taste, and proportion the cost of binding to the price of the volume; and Lucian, I am sure, would have praised your carefulness in these respects.'

In all matters connected with literature De Thou was helped by his friend 'Pithœus,' of whom it was said that no one knew any particular author as well as Pierre Pithou knew all the classics. By talent and hard work combined Pithou had 'distilled the quintessence of wisdom' out of the garnered stores of antiquity. Upon his death De Thou was inclined to give up his books and the work that had made life pleasant. He wrote in that strain to his associate Isaac Casaubon. 'On the loss of my incomparable friend, the partner of my cares and my counsellor in letters and politics, the web that I was weaving fell from my hand, and I should not have resumed my history were it not a tribute to the memory of one who has done so much for me.'

De Thou's end was hastened by the death of his wife. Those who know the look of his books, stamped with a series of his family quarterings, will remember that he was first married to Marie Barbançon, and afterwards to Gasparde de la Chastre. 'I had always hoped and prayed,' he wrote at the commencement of his will, 'that my dearest Gaspara Chastræa would have outlived me.'

Admonished by her loss to set his affairs in order he began to take special pains in providing for the future of his books. He anticipated the public spirit of Cardinal Richelieu, to whom the merit is often assigned of having been the first to bequeath the use of his library to scholars. The Cardinal was not particular about the methods by which he amassed his literary wealth: he is said to have increased his store by all the arts of cajolery, and even by bare intimidation; and he may have wished to make some amends by directing that 'persons of erudition' should have access to his books after his death. De Thou had an equal love of books, and showed perhaps a kinder feeling about the use of the treasures which his own care had accumulated. 'It is important,' he wrote, 'for my own family and for the cause of learning that the library should be kept together which I have been for more than forty years collecting, and I hereby forbid any division, sale, or dispersion thereof; I bequeath it to such of my sons as shall apply themselves to literature, and they shall hold it in common, but so that it shall be free to all scholars at home or abroad. I leave its custody to Pierre du Puy until my sons are grown up, and he shall have authority to lend out the mss. under proper security for their safe return.'

Pierre and Jacques du Puy, the 'two Puteani' as they were often called, were the sons of a distinguished bibliophile, Charles du Puy, who died in 1594, and were themselves the leaders in a curious department of book-learning. Their father was the founder of a library enriched by his care with the best specimens of early printing and a few rare mss. In the latter class he possessed an ancient bilingual copy of St. Paul's Epistles, a Livy in uncial characters, and the precious fragments of the Vatican Virgil, which he gave to Fulvio Orsini in his lifetime. 'On his death,' says M. Guigard, 'the bibliographical succession passed to Pierre and Jacques, his younger sons, the first a Councillor of State, the other Prior of St. Sauveur-les-Bray, and both employed as guardians of the books in the Royal Library. No two men were ever more ardently devoted to the interests of learning. They worked in concert at increasing and improving their father's library; but their chief object was to accumulate and preserve the obscurer materials of history. The Collection Du Puy, which has now became national property, comprised more than 800 volumes of fugitive pieces, memoirs, instructions, pedigrees, letters, and all the other miscellaneous documents that were classed by D'Israeli 'under the vague title of State Papers.' It has been said that the object of their 'Titanic labour' was to ease the way for the historian De Thou; but it is more likely that the brothers obeyed an instinct for the acquisition of secret history; 'life would have been too short to have decided on the intrinsic value of the manuscripts flowing down in a stream to the collectors.' The surviving brother bequeathed these State Papers to the Abbé de Thou (the fourth possessor of the 'Bibliotheca Thuana') who sold them to Charron de Ménars; they were eventually purchased by Louis xvi., and were deposited in the Royal Library, where the printed books and certain other mss. had been already received under a legacy from Jacques du Puy.

When the historian died the brothers jointly undertook the trust that had fallen to Pierre. 'Among all the French scholars,' said Gassendi,'these two Puteani do most excel; and now, abiding with the sons of Thuanus, they sustain by all the means in their power the library and the students that have been committed to their care. François-Auguste de Thou, the historian's eldest son, became Grand-Master of the King's books; he added considerably to the 'Bibliotheca Thuana,' and his house became the meeting-place of the Parisian savants. A brilliant career was cruelly cut short by the malignity of Richelieu.

The young Cinq-Mars was in a plot with the Queen and Gaston of Orléans to overthrow the Cardinal's power. His friend De Thou was aware of the design, but had taken no part in the conspiracy. The Cardinal arrested them both, and dragged them along the Rhone in a boat attached to his own barge; and De Thou was executed as a scapegoat, while most of the leaders saved their lives. The Cardinal died soon afterwards, without having confiscated the library; and it passed to Jacques-Auguste, the historian's younger son, who by a tardy act of grace had been restored to the civil rights enjoyed by his brother before his unjust conviction. He was by all accounts as great a book-collector as his father; and he had the good fortune to marry an heiress, Marie Picardet, who brought with her a large quantity of books from her father's house in Britanny. In the year 1677 the 'Bibliotheca Thuana' with all its additions passed to the Abbé Jacques-Auguste de Thou, who was soon afterwards compelled to part with it to the Président Charron de Ménars. St. Simon praised its new owner as a most worthy and honourable nonentity; but he had the sense to step into the breach and to save the 'Thuana' from destruction. When he sold the library to the Cardinal de Rohan, in 1706, he reserved the Collection Du Puy for his daughters. It is believed that the Cardinal, through the cleverness of his secretary Oliva, obtained the historian's choice examples for less than the price of the binding. We must follow the career of the collection to its melancholy end. The Cardinal left it to his nephew the Prince de Soubise. The world knows him as the inventor of a sauce and as the general in one lost battle; but he had a higher fame among the booksellers for his prowess in the auction-room. He seems to have been the victim of a frenzy for books. He impressed them by crowds, and marshalled them in regiments and myriads. They all fell in 1789 before the hammer of the auctioneer. Dibdin has described the catalogue. It was unostentatious and printed on indifferent material. He hoped, with his curious insistance on the point, that there were 'some few copies on large paper.' It is a mark of the changes in book-collecting that Dibdin praised the index as excellent, 'enabling us to discover any work of which we may be in want'; but it is now regarded as remarkable for its poverty, and especially for the extraordinary carelessness that left eight noble specimens from Grolier's library without the slightest mark of distinction.

Gian-Vincenzio Pinelli was a celebrated man of letters whose library at Padua formed 'a perpetual Academy' for all the scholars of his day. Born at Naples in 1538, he spent the greater part of his long life at Padua, where he was sent to study the law; but the only sign of his professional labours appears to have been that he rigidly excluded all works on jurisprudence from his magnificent library. His books, says Hallam, were collected by the labours of many years: 'the catalogues of the Frankfort fairs and those of the principal booksellers in Italy were diligently perused, nor did any work of value appear from the press on either side of the Alps which he did not instantly add to his shelves.' Remembering the traditions of the age of Poggio, when the rarest classics might be found perishing in a garret or a cellar, Pinelli was always in the habit of visiting the dealers in old parchment and the brokers who carried off deeds and papers from sales, just as Dr. Rawlinson collected and gave to the Bodleian a mass of unsorted documents, including, as we have seen, even the logs of recent voyages, and the pickings of "grocers' waste-paper." In each case the industry of the collector was constantly rewarded by the discovery of valuable literary materials, which would have been lost under ordinary circumstances. The library of Pinelli was augmented by that of his friend Paul Aicardo, the two literati having entered into an undertaking that the survivor should possess the whole fruit of their labours. On Pinelli's death, in 1601, his family determined to transfer his books to Naples. The Venetian government interfered on the ground that, though Pinelli had been allowed to copy the archives and registers of the State, it had never been intended that the information should be communicated to a foreign power. Their magistrate seized a hundred bales of books, of which fourteen were packed with mss. On examination it appeared that there were about three hundred volumes of political commentaries, dealing with the affairs of all the Italian States; and it was arranged, by way of compromise, that these should remain at Padua in a repository under the charge of an official guardian. The rest of the library was despatched in three shiploads from Genoa. One vessel was captured by pirates, and the cargo was thrown overboard, only a few volumes being afterwards cast ashore. The other ships arrived safely at Naples; but it appears that the new proprietors had little taste for literature. The whole remaining stock was found some years afterwards in a mouldy garret, packed in ninety bales; and it was purchased at last for 3000 crowns by Cardinal Frederic Borromeo, who used it as the basis for the Ambrosian Library which he was at that time establishing in Milan. Another library was afterwards founded at Venice by members of the Pinelli family engaged in the Levantine trade. On the death of its last possessor, Maffeo Pinelli, in 1787, the collection was sold to a firm of English booksellers. It seems by Dibdin's account to have been in a poor condition, though Dr. Harwood declared that, 'there being no dust in Venice,' it had reposed for some centuries in excellent preservation. This immense body of books was re-sold in London two years afterwards at prices which barely covered the expenses incurred, though a large amount was obtained for a copy of the Polyglott Bible of Ximènes in six folio volumes printed upon vellum.

The praises of the great Pinelli were spread abroad by Scaliger, De Thou, and Casaubon; but his memory, perhaps, has been best preserved by the ardent friendship of Peiresc. He was visited at Padua by the young philosopher in whose mind he found a reflection of his own; and it was generally agreed that the lamp of learning had passed into safe hands when it was yielded by Pinelli to the student from Provence. Nicolas Fabry de Peiresc belonged to an ancient family established near Aix. His father had been selected by Louis xii. to share the education of the Princess Renée. A man of learning himself, he spared no expense in the boy's instruction, who became celebrated even in his childhood for the strength of his precocious intellect. The most eminent professors in Italy combined to exalt 'the ripe excellence of his unripe years'; and when Pinelli died it was said that Peiresc had taken the helm of knowledge and was guiding the ship as he pleased. He explored at leisure the riches of Florence and Rome, and afterwards watched the rise of the 'Ambrosiana' at Milan. A letter from Joseph Scaliger, who ruled literary Europe like a King, from his chair at Leyden, sent Peiresc off to Verona, where he hunted up evidence in support of the wild story that the Scaligers were the representatives of the Ducal line of La Scala.