A few of those stories sound dull in print, or have lost point with their youth; many more disgust modern taste by their elegant indecency. But the man who dubbed Paris, ‘the Café de l’Europe,’ d’Holbach, ‘the maître d’hôtel of philosophy,’ and the vaunted liberty of the Apostles of the Social Contract, ‘the right of interfering in other people’s business,’ still proves his title of wit. It was Galiani too who defined the death of Maria Theresa as ‘an ink-bottle spilt over the map of Europe;’ and Sophie Arnould’s exquisite lost voice as ‘the most beautiful asthma’ he ever heard. It was Galiani who said that suffering was the cart-horse, and ennui the horse in the rich man’s stable. It was Galiani who declared that the Jesuits lengthened the Creed and shortened the Decalogue that they might succeed better in the world, and Galiani who affirmed that the priests had changed the name of the Sacrament from Pénitence to Confession, because they thought it sufficient to avow their sins without correcting them. Finally, it was Galiani who proved that he knew intimately one side of the life around him, when he declared that the women of the eighteenth century loved with their minds, not with their hearts.
Always inimitably good-humoured, never bored, never weary, ready to play on the clavecin or sing in the most charming voice in the world if the audience should tire of his conversation, seeing the ridiculous side of any subject in a flash, prompt with an anecdote to fit the most unforeseen occasion—‘the little creature born at the foot of Vesuvius,’ clown, harlequin, Punchinello—whatever men called him—was, and is, without counterpart in social history. There will be and have been—there certainly were in the eighteenth century—many agreeable young gentlemen who not only often dined out, but who entirely lived and fattened on a pretty taste in stories and bons mots, and a constant readiness to make fools of themselves for the benefit of an idle audience afraid of being bored; but there was rarely, if ever, a buffoon of such vast and solid erudition, of mental capacities so great and so varied, and of mental achievements so momentous, as the Abbé Galiani.
While the salons were petting and spoiling him, while he seemed to be doing nothing but talk from morning till night and from night until morning, while he was regarded as such a complete and irresistible joke that people laughed at his very name, he had yet worked so hard as Secretary to the Embassy and Chargé d’Affaires that he raised the whole diplomatic corps to a worthier position, and advanced the interests of Naples with a steadiness and persistency usually allotted to a very different character. His Majesty Louis the Fifteenth presented him with a box set in diamonds. Choiseul’s light indifference changed into a cool consideration. All the time the man was writing, observing, thinking. Was he a politician pour rire? He seemed to be everything pour rire. But after all, who knows? The men who had laughed the most heartily at his absurdities, turned and looked at him again with a wonder in their eyes.
In 1765 he obtained a year’s leave of absence and went home to take the baths of Ischia. In 1766, on the invitation of the Marquis Caraccioli, Italian Ambassador, he went to stay in London.
It must be recorded regretfully that the Abbé did not find Britain or the British at all to his taste. David Hume said indignantly that though he only remained two months in our country, talked himself the whole time, and would not allow an Englishman to put in a word, yet when he came away he dogmatised on the character of the nation all the rest of his life as if he had never studied anything else. That he did not share the Anglomania of Voltaire is certainly true. Some years later, to one of his correspondents, he defined the English rather happily as ‘the best educated nation in the world, and consequently the greatest, the most troublesome, and the most melancholy.’ But some at least of his letters abuse England very freely. It was, no doubt, as difficult for the Britons to understand a Galiani as for a Galiani to understand them; and not at all wonderful that he carried away from our shores an impression of an Englishman as a solid, emotionless person, who resented buffoonery as an insult, never uttered a joke or saw one, and had all the qualities which make a nation mighty and an individual disagreeable.
The Abbé was a somewhat graver man himself when he came back to Paris. He was now thirty-eight years old, a little less free of tongue, a thought less sceptical in religion. His letters of the time contain grave observations on the Seven Years’ War, and on the condition of the Paris Parliament. But he was still about the salons, still Parisian to the finger-tips, and he still loved Paris from his soul.
And in 1769, like a clap of thunder, came the foudroyant news of his recall to Naples.
Recalled! The hostesses of Paris looked at each other in dismay. Recalled! It is surely the end of all things if some political exigency, some party question, is allowed to interfere with our amusements like this! Is it Choiseul, who has protected the Economists, while Galiani hated them, who has done this thing? The exact reason for it was then matter of speculation, and is so still. It was enough, more than enough, that it was a fact that this dear, merry, little Abbé must pack up his trunks and go out of light into darkness, out of the sunshine of social favour in which he had basked and purred and gambolled, into the gloom of the provincial obscurity from which he had come.
If Paris was struck with dismay, Galiani himself was overwhelmed by the greatest calamity of his life. He declared that he had never wept at anything, not even the death of his relations, so much as at leaving Paris. ‘They have torn me from Paris,’ he cried, ‘and they have torn out my heart.’ He swore that the only good thing that wearisome Mr. Sterne, the English author, ‘ever uttered was when he said to me, “It is better to die in Paris than to live in Naples.”’ He wrung his hands, and bemoaned out loud, according to his temperament. He followed his departure by letters to Madame d’Épinay and to d’Alembert which are really pathetic. He was also leaving behind him in Paris a woman to whom he was tied by an attachment, not Platonic. He was torn, in brief, from everything—friends and mistress, career, work, play—life itself. No wonder despair seized his soul. He went, and in parting flung into the camp of the Economists, whom he believed to be the enemy responsible for his overthrow, a bomb whose explosion rang through Europe.
In 1770 there appeared in Paris the ‘Dialogues on the Corn Trade.’ The taxation of, or free trade in, grain had long been a vexed question, not only in the minds of politicians but in the minds of all intelligent Frenchmen. Free Food! cried the Economist, rich in the support of Turgot and of Choiseul. Tax it! replied their opponents, mighty with the strength of Terrai, the graceless Controller-General, and the growing influence of Necker.