He rang his bell, and having told one of his gentlemen to send up a seat, a servant brought in a stool. A seat without a back and without arms! It made me quite angry. I cut my story short, told it badly, and had finished in a quarter of an hour.
“I write better than you speak,” said he.
“My lord, I never speak well except when I am at my ease.”
“But you are not afraid of me?”
“No, my lord, a true man and a philosopher can never make me afraid; but this stool of yours . . . .”
“You like to be at your ease, above all things.”
“Take this, it is the funeral oration of Prince Eugene; I make you a present of it. I hope you will approve of my Latinity. You can kiss the Pope’s feet tomorrow at ten o’clock.”
When I got home, as I reflected on the character of this strange cardinal—a wit, haughty, vain, and boastful, I resolved to make him a fine present. It was the ‘Pandectarum liber unicus’ which M. de F. had given me at Berne, and which I did not know what to do with. It was a folio well printed on fine paper, choicely bound, and in perfect preservation. As chief librarian the present should be a valuable one to him, all the more as he had a large private library, of which my friend the Abbé Winckelmann was librarian. I therefore wrote a short Latin letter, which I enclosed in another to Winckelmann, whom I begged to present my offering to his eminence.
I thought it was as valuable as his funeral oration at any rate, and I hoped that he would give me a more comfortable chair for the future.
Next morning, at the time appointed, I went to Monte Cavallo, which ought to be called Monte Cavalli, as it gets its name from two fine statues of horses standing on a pedestal in the midst of the square, where the Holy Father’s palace is situated.