“That fellow has vowed to translate all the classic authors, and has almost reached the end of his labors, having spared neither Plautus nor Lucretius nor Horace nor Virgil nor Juvenal nor Martial, nor many others. Your Ovid and Seneca have as yet fought him off, but I do not consider them saved, and all the mercy they can expect is that of the Cyclops to Ulysses—to be devoured last.” That Chapelain was not the only one who did not appreciate the literary talent of the Abbé, and that he often found difficulty in finding publishers for his translations, is admitted by de Marolles himself when, in his poem on “The City of Paris,” he says:
“J’ai perdu des amis par un rare caprice
Quand je leur ai donné des livres que j’ai faits
Comme gens offensés, sans pardonner jamais
Bien qu’on n’ait point blessé leur méchant artifice.”
But it is not as a man of letters that de Marolles interests us: it is as a great lover of the art of Engraving and the greatest collector of prints in history. Not until he had reached the age of forty-four did he begin to collect them systematically. Then he purchased the first part of the Delorme Collection for one thousand louis d’or, the prints owned by Kervel, and those of several other small collectors. His activity was so great that nine years later, in his memoirs, he was able to refer to this collection as follows:
“God has given me grace to devote myself to pictures without superstition, and I have been able to acquire a collection numbering more than 70,000 engravings of all subjects. I began it in 1644, and have continued it with so much zeal, and with such an expense for one not wealthy, that I can claim to possess some of the work of all the known masters, painters as well as engravers, who number more than 400.”
He further adds:
“I have found that collecting such things was more suited to my purse than collecting paintings, and more serviceable to the building up of a library. Had we in France a dozen such collectors among the nobility, there would not be enough prints to satisfy them all, and the works of Dürer, Lucas, and Marcantonio, for which we now pay four and five hundred écus when in perfect condition, would be worth three times that amount.... It seems to me that princes and noblemen who are collecting libraries should not neglect works of this kind, as long as they contain so much information on beautiful subjects; but I know of no one who has undertaken to do this except for medals, flowers, architecture, machines, and mathematics.”
The collection of the Abbé de Marolles had become so famous by 1666, that Colbert, after having had it examined and appraised by Felibien and Pierre Mignard, advised Louis XIV to purchase it for the royal library. The deed was signed in 1667, and in the following year the Abbé de Villeloin received from the royal treasury the sum of twenty-six thousand livres ($25,000) for what was described in a seal-colored document as “un grand nombre d’estampes des plus grands maîtres de l’antiquité.” Let us see what this meant.