Other knights have been celebrated for other qualities. Thus, Sir Julius Cæsar never heard Bishop Hackett preach without sending him a piece of money. Indeed, the good knight never heard any preacher deliver a sermon without sending him money, a pair of gloves, or some other little gift. He was unwilling, he said, to hear the Word of God, gratis.
Other knights have cared less to benefit preachers, than to set up for makers or explainers of doctrines themselves. Thus the Chevalier Ramsay held that Adam and Eve begot the entire human race in Paradise, the members of which fell with their procreators; and in this way the chevalier found in an intelligible form “the great, ancient, and luminous doctrine of our co-existence with our first parents.” The Chevalier deemed that in teaching such doctrine he was rearing plants for a new Paradise; but he was not half so usefully engaged as some brother knights who were practically engaged as planters. We may cite Sir John St. Aubyn, who introduced plane-trees into Cornwall in 1723; and Sir Anthony Ashley, the Dorchester knight, who enjoys the reputation of having introduced cabbages into England about the middle of the sixteenth century.
In contrast with these useful knights, the person of the once famous Chevalier de Lorenzi seems to rise before me, and of him I will now add a few words, by way of conclusion to my miscellaneous volume.
It is perhaps the tritest of platitudes to say that men are distinguished by various qualities; but it is among the strangest if not most novel of paradoxes, that the same man should be remarkable for endowments of the most opposite quality. The eccentric knight whose name and title I have given above, is, however, an illustration of the fact; namely, that a man may be at once stupid and witty. It was chiefly for his stupidity that Lorenzi was famous, a stupidity which excited laughter. I must, nevertheless, say in behalf of the brother of the once celebrated minister of France at the Court of Florence, in the days of Louis XV., that his stupidity so often looks like wit, as to induce the belief that it was a humor too refined for his hearers to appreciate.
Acute as Grimm was, he seems to have undervalued the chevalier in this respect. That literary minister-plenipotentiary of the Duke of Saxe Gotha could only see in the chevalier the most extraordinary of originals. He acknowledges, at the same time, Lorenzi’s high feeling of honor, and his frank and gentle spirit. The chevalier was crammed with scientific knowledge, but so confusedly that, according to Grimm, he could never explain himself in an intelligible way, or without exciting shouts of laughter on the part of his hearers. Madame de Geoffrin, when comparing the chevalier with the ungraceful M. de Burigny, said that the latter was awkward in body, but that Lorenzi was awkward in mind. As the latter never spoke without, at least, an air of profound reflection, and had therewith a piquant Florentine accent, his mistakes were more relished. I do not think much of his misapprehension when introduced, at Lyons, to M. de la Michaudière, in whose company he dined, at the residence of the commandant of the city. The gentleman was addressed by an old acquaintance as Le Michaudière, and Lorenzi, mistaking this for L’Ami Chaudière, persisted in calling the dignified official by the appellation of Monsieur Chaudière, which, to the proud intendant of Lyons, must have been as bad as if the chevalier had certified that the intendant’s father was a brazier.
He was far more happy, whether by chance or design, I can not say, at a subsequent supper at M. de la Michaudière’s house. At the table sat M. le Normant, husband of Madame de Pompadour, then at the height of her brilliant infamy. Lorenzi hearing from a neighbor, in reply to an inquiry, that the gentleman was the consort of the lady in question, forthwith addressed him as Monsieur de Pompadour, which was as severe an infliction as husband so situated could well have endured.
This honorable chevalier was clearly not a religious man—but among knights and other distinguished personages in France, and elsewhere, at the period of which I am treating, the two terms were perfectly distinct, and had no necessary connection. Accordingly, a lady who had called on Lorenzi one Sunday morning, before eleven o’clock, proposed, at the end of their conversation, to go with him to mass. “Do they still celebrate mass?” asked the chevalier, with an air of astonishment. As he had not attended mass for fifteen years, Grimm gravely asserts that the Florentine imagined that it was no longer celebrated. “The more,” adds the epistolary baron, “that as he never went out before two o’clock, he no longer recollected that he had seen a church-door open.”
The chevalier, who was Knight of the Order of St. Stephen of Tuscany, and who had withdrawn from the French Army, with the rank of colonel, after the conquest of Minorca, had a great devotion toward the abstract sciences. He studied geometry and astronomy, and had the habit, says Grimm, to measure the events of life, and reduce them to geometrical value. As he was thoughtful, he more frequently, when addressed, made reply to abstruse questionings of his own brain than to persons who spoke to him. Grimm, after saying that the Knight of St. Stephen was only struck by the true or false side of a question, and never by its pleasant or amusing aspect, illustrates his saying by an anecdote, in which many persons will fail to find any remarkable point. Grimm encountered him at Madame Geoffrin’s, after his return from a tour in Italy. “I saw him embroiling his senses with the genealogies of two ladies in whose society he passes his life, and who bear the same name, although they are of distinct families. Madame Geoffrin endeavored to draw him from these genealogical snares, observing to him:—‘Really, chevalier, you are in your dotage. It is worse than ever.’ ‘Madame,’ answered the chevalier, ‘life is so short!’” Grimm thought he should have done rank injustice to posterity if he had not recorded this reply for the benefit of future students of laconic wit. And again:—Grimm shows us the chevalier walking with Monsieur de St. Lambert toward Versailles. On the way, the latter asked him his age. “I am sixty,” said the knight. “I did not think you so old,” rejoined his friend. “Well,” replied the chevalier, “when I say sixty, I am not indeed quite so old, just yet; but—” “But how old are you then, in reality?” asked his companion. “Fifty-five, exactly; but why may I not be allowed to accustom myself to change my age every year, as I do my shirt?”
One day, he was praising the figure of a lady, but instead of saying that she had the form of a nymph, he said that her shape was like that of Mademoiselle Allard. “Oh!” cried Grimm, “you are not lucky, chevalier, in your comparison. Mademoiselle Allard may be deservedly eulogized for many qualities, but nobody ever thought of praising her shape.” “Likely enough,” said Lorenzi, “for I do not know, nor, indeed, have I ever seen her; but as everybody talks about Mademoiselle Allard, I thought I might talk about her too.”
If there was satire in this it was not of so neat a quality as that exhibited by him at Madame Greffon’s, where he was spending an evening with Grimm and D’Alembert. The last two were seated, and conversing. Lorenzi stood behind them, with his back to the chimney-piece, and scarcely able to hold up his head, so overcome was he by a desire to sleep. “Chevalier,” said Grimm, “you must find our conversation a horrid bore, since you fall asleep when you are on your legs.” “Oh, no!” exclaimed the chevalier, “you see I go to sleep when I like.” The naïveté with which he insinuated that he liked to go to sleep rather than listen to the small talk of a wit and a philosopher, was expressed with a delicious delicacy.