Through the wit and the parties, in the midst of ardent secretarial duties and of continual literary studies, somehow, at some time—though how and at what time it would be difficult to say—Galiani had brought to bear on the question his Italian shrewdness and brilliancy, all the learning and observation taught him by his uncle, and the judgment and the wisdom taught him by Heaven. No man would have believed that such a merry, light, social person could have pondered so deeply; no one had believed it. The book was in the form of a dialogue between a Marquis and a Chevalier, It was as gay and rollicking as the little Abbe’s own talk. In fact, it was his own talk; but it was something much more. It was much more even than a pamphlet on a passing question, on a matter of local momentary importance, ‘Read between the lines and in the margin,’ it was an able work on the science of government, what Grimm called justly ‘the production of a sound and enlightened philosopher, and of a statesman.’ In it the author exposed his theory that a man of State must know not only his business but the human heart—‘You must study men before you can rule them.’ This knowledge he denied to Turgot; and he warned France, in solemn prophecy to be fulfilled too soon, to beware in her rulers, not the rogues and the knaves—they soon show themselves in their true colours—but l’honnête homme trompé. ‘He wishes all men well, so all men trust him; but he is deceived as to the means of doing well.’
The work was received with the wildest enthusiasm. In far Ferney, the spirited old Patriarch of Literature jumped for joy, almost literally, at a wit and a style so inimitable. No man ever reasoned so agreeably before.... ‘No man has ever made famine so amusing.... If the work does not diminish the price of bread, it will give pleasure to the whole nation.... Plato and Molière have combined to write it....’ Excellent! excellent! And in the same year, 1770, the master himself wrote for his ‘Questions on the Encyclopædia’ the article on Grain wherein Galiani was not forgotten.
Diderot, who, with Grimm and Madame d’Épinay, had helped to correct the proofs of the ‘Dialogues,’ declared impetuously to Mademoiselle Volland that he had gone down on his knees to implore Galiani to publish them. Grimm said that if he were Controller-General he should attach the Abbé to France, if it cost the King forty thousand livres per annum, ‘without any other stipulation but that he should amuse himself and come twice a week to chat with me over the affairs of my Government.’ Even Fréron, Élie Fréron, the brilliant Parisian journalist, who hated Voltaire and consequently all Voltaire’s colleagues and disciples, could not help praising the thing in his ‘Literary Year.’ Frederick the Great wrote the author a flattering letter.
The book’s foes advertised it even better than its friends. At first, the leaders in the Economist camp looked at each other in dismay. Granted that they had justice and reason on their side, what could justice and reason do in the Paris of 1770 against that bubbling, sparkling wit? The capital must, first of all, be amused. What use, then, to advance the always doubtful argument that a writer cannot be at once gay and trustworthy, that if he is really worth hearing he can never be heard without a yawn?
The Abbé Morellet, as large as Galiani was small, and as ponderous in style as the Abbé was light, was employed to answer him. The good man wrote his refutation with such haste and ardour that the skin of his little finger was completely worn off from much rubbing against the side of his desk. And, after all, no one read him. He may, or may not, be right; he is certainly dull!
Then Turgot took up a mightier pen and wielded a mightier influence. Noble and disinterested, a better and a greater man than Galiani, the Statesman of that company of which the Abbé was but the Wit, Turgot sought, as did Galiani, the good and the progress of humanity; but he sought it by a different road, and by the labour of his whole life. He recognised the cleverness of the book; a bad cause, said he, could not be maintained with more grace and cleverness. But my little brother the Abbé is wrong, not the less. In the ‘Dialogues’ there peeped out, thought Turgot, something of the comfortable indifference of those who are content to leave the world as it is because it goes so smoothly with them, something of the laziness and the selfishness that come naturally to a little writer himself so comfortably beneficed and mitred. Galiani lacked, in fact, Turgot’s ‘instincts of the heart which teach the head.’
Right or wrong—l’honnête homme trompé perhaps—Turgot had put his soul into the great cause of humanity, and Galiani had only put his mind. What wonder that they saw the same world with different eyes, and would have worked out the salvation of falling France, by methods not only opposite but opposed?
Galiani went back to Naples. For many months, for years, his letters are full of his book, that effort which, even if misdirected, proved that he was no drone in the hive, that he too had that one great virtue common to all the philosophers and redeeming half their sins—he had heard the trumpet-call of responsibility towards his fellows, and had answered it.
After Paris, Naples was not merely dull, it was extinction. The poor little Abbé bemoaned his fate to Madame d’Épinay in the most touching of all jesting letters. True, there was society here, and Galiani was its lion. But what society! There was Lady Orford, Robert Walpole’s daughter-in-law, who had a country house close to Galiani’s at Santo Sorio, at the foot of Vesuvius, and there was Sir William Hamilton, now British envoy and, to be, the husband of Lady Hamilton. Presently there came, too, the Marquis of Lansdowne, who was amiable, which, said Galiani, ‘is a very rare thing for an Englishman, and Secretary of State, which is a very common thing.’
But the Abbé hated the English; and he was bored to death. The Court of Naples gave him more lucrative posts—and though he described himself as avide without being avare, which meant that he was greedy of money and yet lavish in spending it—money, even when it does not beget ennui, certainly never destroys it. He turned to his museum full of medals and bronzes, pictures and weapons—and that bored him too. Paris, Paris! He hankered after it for ever. ‘What is the good of inoculation here,’ he grumbled, after expressing delight in that discovery, ‘when living itself is not worth while?’ ‘What a life!’ he wrote dismally to d’Holbach in 1770. ‘Nothing amusing here ... no edicts ... no suspensions of payment ... no quarrels about any thing—not even about religion. Dear Paris, how I regret you!’