Danton: A study

by Hilaire Belloc

The lack of education in the Robespierrian functionary is worth noting.

VIII
CATALOGUE OF DANTON’S LIBRARY

No part of the very scanty evidence we possess upon Danton’s personal life and habits is of more value than this little list. It is the small and carefully chosen bookcase of a man thoroughly conversant with English and Italian as well as with his own tongue. He buys a work in the original almost invariably, and collects, in a set of less than two hundred works, classic after classic. He has read his Johnson and his Pope; he knows Adam Smith; he has been at the pains to study Blackstone. It must be carefully noted that every book he bought was his own choice. There were only a few legal summaries at the old home at Arcis, and Danton was a man who never had a reputation for learning or for letters, still less had he cause to buy a single volume for effect. I know of few documents more touching than this catalogue, coming to the light after seventy years of silence, and showing us the mind of a man who was cut off suddenly and passed into calumny. He had read familiarly in their own tongues Rabelais and Boccaccio and Shakespeare.

The following volumes are in English:—

A translation of Plutarch’s Lives	8	vols.
Dryden’s translation of Virgil	4	”
Shakespeare	8	”
Pope	6	”
Sussini’s Letters	1	vol.
The Spectator	12	vols.
Clarissa Harlowe	8	”
A translation of Don Quixote (probably Smollett’s)	4	vols.
” ” Gil Blas	4	”
Essay on Punctuation	1	vol.
Johnson’s Dictionary (in folio)	2	vols.
Blackstone	1	vol.
Life of Johnson	2	vols.
Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” (number of vols. given as 23, probably an error)
Robertson’s History of Scotland	2	”
” ” America	2	”
Works of Dr. Johnson	7	”

The following are in Italian:—

(The names are not given in Italian by the lawyer, and I can only follow his version.)

Venuti: History of Modern Rome	2	vols.
Guischardini: History of Italy	4	”
Fontanini: Italian Eloquence	3	”
Denina’s Italian Revolutions	2	”
Caro’s translation of Virgil	2	”
Boccaccio’s Decameron	2	”
Ariosto	5	”
Boiardi’s edition of the “Orlando Furioso”	4	”
Métastase (?)	8	”
Dalina (?)	7	”
Reichardet (?)	3	”
Davila: History of the French Civil Wars	2	”
“Letters on Painting and Sculpture”	5	”
Il Morgante de Pulci, 12 mo	3	”

The remainder (except one or two legal books and classics) are in French.