CAR. That you may be acquainted with it, sir, I beg.
"TO THE KING.
"Sire,—Your most humble, most obedient, most faithful and most learned subject and servant, Caritidès, a Frenchman by birth, a Greek
[Footnote: The original has Grec, a Greek. Can Caritidès have wished to allude to the græaca fides? Grec means also a cheat at cards, and is said to owe its name to a certain Apoulos, a knight of Greek origin, who was caught in the very act of cheating at play in the latter days of Louis XIV.'s reign, even in the palace of the grand monarque.]
_by profession, having considered the great and notable abuses which are perpetrated in the inscriptions on the signs of houses, shops, taverns, bowling-alleys, and other places in your good city of Paris; inasmuch as certain ignorant composers of the said inscriptions subvert, by a barbarous, pernicious and hateful spelling, every kind of sense and reason, without any regard for etymology, analogy, energy or allegory whatsoever, to the great scandal of the republic of letters, and of the French nation, which is degraded and dishonoured, by the said abuses and gross faults, in the eyes of strangers, and notably of the Germans, curious readers and inspectors of the said inscriptions…"
[Footnote: This is an allusion either to the reputation of the Germans as great drinkers, or as learned decipherers of all kinds of inscriptions.]
ER. This petition is very long, and may very likely weary…
CAR. Ah, sir, not a word could be cut out.
ER. Finish quickly.
CAR. (Continuing). "Humbly petitions your Majesty to constitute, for the good of his state and the glory of his realm, an office of controller, supervisor, corrector, reviser and restorer in general of the said inscriptions; and with this office to honour your suppliant, as well in consideration of his rare and eminent erudition, as of the great and signal services which he has rendered to the state and to your Majesty, by making the anagram of your said Majesty in French, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldean, Arabic…"