We can only bemoan the fact that he never received a proper classical education . . .
To the Director of the National
Sir,
It is certainly no fault of mine if there has been a ten-day hiatus in the elaboration of the historical narrative you requested of me. The work that was to have provided the basis for this narrative, namely the official history of the abbé de Bucquoy, was due to be sold on November 20th but in fact was not put up for sale until the 30th, either because it had been withdrawn for some reason (which was what I was told) or because the number of items in the catalogue was such that the book had to wait ten days before coming up for auction.
There was a chance the work would end up abroad, like so many of our books. The information I had received from Belgium referred only to the existence of Dutch translations of the book, but there was no mention of its original edition, printed in Frankfurt, with the German on facing pages.
As you are aware, I had unsuccessfully attempted to locate the book in Paris. It was not to be found in the public libraries, and the various rare book dealers I had visited had not set sight on it for some time. According to them, there was only one bookseller, M. Toulouse, who was likely to have a copy of it.
M. Toulouse specializes in books having to do with religious issues. He asked me what exactly the book I was looking for was about, and then said to me: « My dear sir, I do not have a copy of it on hand... But even if I did, I could not guarantee I would sell it to you. »
I understood that because he generally sold books to the clergy, he obviously wanted nothing to do with a son of Voltaire.
I replied that I could just as well do without the book, having already managed to acquire a fairly general idea of its title character.
« And this how people write history these days! » he sneered.9
You’ll probably tell me that I should have just borrowed the history of the abbé de Bucquoy from M. de Montmerqué or some other bibliophile. To which I would reply that a serious bibliophile never lends his books. In fact he does not even read his books, for fear of wearing them out.
There was a famous bibliophile who had a friend; — this friend had fallen in love with a sextodecimo edition of Anacreon, printed in Lyon in the sixteenth century and bound together with the poetry of Bion, Moschus, and Sappho. The owner of the book would not have defended his wife as vigorously as this sexto. Every time his friend dropped by for lunch, he would cross through the library with a studied indifference, casting a secret covetous glance at the Anacreon.
One day he said to his friend, « What are you planning to do with that poorly bound sixteenmo with the cut pages? I’d be happy to trade you the Italian version of the Dream of Polyphile in the Aldine editio princeps, with engravings by Bellini. The book is only of interest to me because I want to round out my collection of Greek poets. »
The owner merely smiled.
« What else could you want in exchange?
— Nothing, I don’t like swapping books.
— What if I also threw in my Romaunt of the Rose, with annotations in the hand of Marguerite de Valois?
— Nothing doing ... Let’s just drop the subject.
— You know I’m not a rich man, but I’d gladly offer a thousand francs.
— Forget it . . .
— Well, fifteen hundred then.
— Money matters shouldn’t come between friends. »
The bibliophile’s resistance only served to whet the desire of his friend. After several more offers, all of which were rejected, the friend, unable to contain his passion any longer, blurted out:
« Well, I shall have the book at your death, when they sell off your estate.
— At my death? But I’m younger than you are . . .
— That may be, but you have a wicked cough.
— And what about your sciatica?
— You can make it to eighty with sciatica! »
I’ll stop here. This discussion could easily be a scene out of Molière or one of those illustrations of human folly that only Erasmus was capable of treating in light-hearted fashion . . . The long and the short of it was that the bibliophile died several months later and his friend was able to get the book for six hundred francs.
« And to think that he refused to sell it to me for fifteen hundred», he would inevitably remark when showing off his treasure. But, once one got off the topic of this book (which had been the only cloud in their fifty-year friendship), his eyes would mist with tears as he affectionately remembered his fine friend.
This anecdote may serve a useful purpose in an age when the art of collecting, be it of books, autographs, or objets d’art, is no longer generally understood in France. It may also explain some of the difficulties I encountered in trying to procure the Abbé de Bucquoy.
Last Saturday, at seven in the evening, I returned to Paris from Soissons, — where I had been looking for further information on the Bucquoys, — in order to be present at Techener’s for the auctioning off of the library of M. Motteley, — an auction that has been going on for some time now and that was the object of an article in the Indépendance de Bruxelles the day before yesterday.
An auction of books or of curiosities holds the same attraction for the collector as the green felt of a gaming table holds for the gambler. The paddle with which the auctioneer pushes the books toward the buyers and rakes in the money makes this comparison all the more exact.
The bidding was lively. There was one book alone that went for six hundred francs. At a quarter of ten, the History of the abbé de Bucquoy was put on the auction block at twenty-five francs . . . When the price reached fifty-five francs, the regulars and even M. Techener himself called it quits: there was just one other person left bidding against me.
At sixty-five francs, my competitor bowed out.
The mallet of the auctioneer10 awarded me the book for sixty-six francs.
I subsequently had to come up with another three francs and twenty centimes to pay the auction fee.
I have since learned that my competitor was a representative from the Bibliothèque Nationale.
The book is thus mine; I am now in a position to continue on with my work.
Yours, etc.
GÉRARD DE NERVAL
CONTINUATION AND CONCLUSION OF THE FOREWORD. — SAINT-MÉDARD THE ARCHIVES. — THE LONGUEVAL DE BUCQUOY CASTLE. — REFLECTIONS, ETC.
It takes only an hour and a half to walk from Ver to Dammartin. — I set off one fine morning, and was delighted by the ten-league horizon stretching out on all sides of the once redoubtable old castle that dominates the countryside. Its tall towers have been demolished, but you can still see the original location of its entranceway and courtyards on a raised site that has since been replanted with rows of lime trees to create an esplanade. The remaining moats have been safely hedged off with thorn bushes and belladonna, — although an archery range has been set up in one of them just on the outskirts of town.
Sylvain has returned home; — leaving me to continue on toward Soissons through the forest of Villers-Cotterets; all the leaves are down, but here and there one comes across green patches of pine that have been planted in an effort to reforest the huge areas that had formerly been thinned out here. — That evening, I arrived in Soissons, the celebrated Augusta Suessonium where the destiny of France was decided in the 6th century.
It was after Clovis triumphed at the battle of Soissons that this Frankish king underwent the humiliation of having to give up the golden vase he had acquired during the sack of Reims. Perhaps he thought that by rendering this sacred and precious object he might make his peace with the Church. But one of his warrior chieftains insisted that this vase be portioned out along with the rest of the booty that was to be shared in common, — equality being one of the cardinal principles of these Frankish tribes who had originated in Asia. — The golden vase was therefore broken up in parts, as was the head of this egalitarian chieftain when it eventually fell victim to Clovis’s ha
tchet (or francisque). Such was the origin of our monarchy.
Soissons, a fortified town of the second class, contains a number of curious antiquities. The cathedral, whose tall spire commands some seven leagues of surrounding countryside, also boasts a lovely Rubens behind its high altar. The original cathedral is far more curious with its lacy, festooned steeples, but unfortunately only its façade and towers still stand. There is another church that they are in the process of restoring with that exquisite stone and Roman mortar which are the pride of this region. I stopped to chat with some of the stone carvers who were having lunch around a fire of briar roots and who seemed to me to know their art history extremely well. They lamented the fact (as I had) that Saint-Jean-des-Vignes, the town’s original cathedral, was not being restored and that they were instead repairing this dreary church, — which had apparently been deemed more commodious. In these days of lukewarm faith, the flock of the faithful can only be attracted by a certain level of elegance and comfort.
The stone carvers told me that Saint-Médard was worth visiting, — it was just outside of town, beyond the bridge and the railroad station on the Aisne. The modern part of it has been remodeled into an establishment for the deaf-and-dumb. But there was a surprise in store for me. First, the crumbling tower where Abelard had briefly been held prisoner. You can still see the Latin inscriptions scrawled on the walls in his own hand. — Then, there were the huge vaults that have only recently been cleared out and where they discovered the tomb of Louis the Fair, — a kind of large stone vat that reminded me of tombs of Egypt.
Near these vaults, which are made up of underground cells with niches here and there as in Roman catacombs, one can see the prison where this same emperor was held by his children, the ledge where he slept on a mat, as well as various other details, all perfectly preserved because the limestone caverns, together with fossilized debris that sealed off these underground chambers, kept the humidity out. All they had to do was clear away the debris, — an operation that is still underway at the present, with new discoveries being made every day. It’s a Carlovingian Pompeii.
As I left Saint-Médard, I strayed along the banks of the Aisne which flows among the reddish stands of osier and the naked poplars. The weather was splendid, the grass was green, and two kilometers downstream I found myself in a village by the name of Cuffy, which provides an excellent view of Soissons with its towers in jagged profile and its Flemish roofs flanked by stone stairs.
They serve a refreshing local white wine in this village, as bubbly as real champagne.
And indeed, the lay of the land here is virtually identical to Épernay. It’s an outcropping of the nearby Champagne region, and the southern exposure of its slopes makes for red and white wines that are fairly tangy. All the houses are built out of millstones that have been perforated like sponges by snails and tendrils. The church is old, but rustic. There is a glassworks at the top of the hill.
It was no longer possible to lose my way back to Soissons. I returned to town to continue my research at the local library and archives. — I found nothing in the library that was not equally available in Paris. The archives are at the subprefecture and probably contain some interesting items, given how far the town dates back. The secretary said to me, « Sir, our archives are up there in the attic, but they haven’t been sorted into any kind of order.
— Why not?
— Because the town has allocated no funds for this purpose. Most of the items are in Gothic and Latin . . . We’d need to have some sort of specialist sent over from Paris. »
It was obviously not going to be easy to dig up anything about the Bucquoys there. As for the current condition of the Soissons archives, let me merely mention it in passing to concerned paleographers. — If France proves to have the resources to pay specialists to examine the memories of its past, I shall be happy to have somehow contributed to the undertaking.
There are so many other things I would have liked to have brought to your attention: the great fair that was at that moment going on in town, the municipal theater (which was playing Lucrèce Borgia), the local customs which have been well-preserved in the region, given the absence of any rail links to the rest of the country, — even though the residents of these parts resent this situation. They had hoped the Northern Line would pass through here, for it would have created numerous economic advantages . . . A person of great influence had apparently managed to convince the Strasbourg Line to run its tracks through the surrounding wood-lands (on account of the access to the timber this would permit), — but these are merely local suppositions and rumors whose truth cannot be substantiated.
I have finally reached the goal of my excursion. The Soissons to Reims diligence dropped me off at Braine. An hour later, I was at Longueval, the cradle of the Bucquoys. Here it was, the home of the lovely Angélique and the chief residence of her father — who seems to have had as many castles as his ancestor, the great count de Bucquoy, conquered during the wars of Bohemia. — The towers have all crumbled, as at Dammartin. But the underground vaults still exist. The site of the castle, which dominates the village below in its narrow gorge, is covered with new buildings, all built within the last seven or eight years (which is when the ruins were finally sold). Having thus soaked up enough local color to make any novel appealing or any work of history credible, I proceeded on to Château-Thierry, site of the celebrated statue of La Fontaine, who stands there dreaming on the banks of the Marne, a stone’s throw from the tracks of the Strasbourg Line.
REFLECTIONS
« And then . . . (This is how Diderot began one of his stories, someone is bound to remind me.)
— Go on!
— You have merely imitated Diderot.
— Who had imitated Sterne . . .
— Who had imitated Swift.
— Who had imitated Rabelais.
— Who had imitated Merlinus Coccaius . . .
— Who had imitated Petronius . . .
— Who had imitated Lucian. And Lucian had imitated numerous others . . . And most particularly, the author of the Odyssey who led his hero around the Mediterranean for ten years before finally bringing him home to that fabled Ithaca, whose queen, hounded as she was by some fifty suitors, spent every night undoing what she had woven that day.
— But Ulysses finally found his way back to Ithaca.
— And I have found my way back to my abbé de Bucquoy.
— Explain.
— What else do you think I have been talking about for the past month? » By now my readers must be sick of hearing about the count of Bucquoy, member of the League and later generalissimo in the Austrian army, — or about M. de Longueval de Bucquoy and his daughter Angélique, — who eloped with La Corbinière from the very castle whose ruins I have just been inspecting . . .
Or about the abbé de Bucquoy himself, a biographical sketch of whom I have provided, — and whom M. d’Argenson refers to in his correspondence as the alleged abbé de Bucquoy.
— The same probably holds true of those salt smugglers, the faux saulniers. Nobody believes in them anymore. — These fake salt merchants could not be true salt merchants. The documents of the period spelled their name as follows: fauxçonniers. They were simply people engaged in the illegal sale of salt, not only in the Franche-Comté, Lorraine, Burgundy, but also in Champagne, Picardy, Brittany, — everywhere. Saint-Simon on several occasions recounts their exploits, and even mentions that certain regiments of the army would engage in salt smuggling when their paydays became too erratic, — this under the reign of Louis XIV or during the Regency. Mandrin, at a somewhat later date, was a captain of these salt smugglers. Could a simple highwayman have had the resources to occupy villages and to engage in pitched battles?... But given the way history was written back in those days, there were no doubt good reasons to hush up the existence of such widespread resistance to the gabelles, — one of the principle causes of popular discontent. The peasants have always considered the salt tax as something that cut int
o their subsistence, — and as one of the heaviest burdens farmers had to bear.
THE HISTORY OF THE ABBÉ DE BUCQUOY
The book I have just bought at the auction of the Motteley library would be worth far more than sixty-nine francs and twenty centimes had its margins not been so cruelly trimmed back. Its binding, which is brand new, bears the following title in golden letters: The History of the abbé count de Bucquoy, Esq., etc. If this duodecimo has any real value at all, it is probably because three brochures in verse and prose composed by the author have been bound into the book; but since these were originally printed on far larger sheets, their margins have been cut down to the very quick of the text, though without affecting its legibility.
The volume contains all the various items listed in Brunet, Quérard, and the Michaud Biography. Facing the title page, there is an engraving of the Bastille with the caption Living Hell, accompanied by the quotation: Facilis descensus Averni.
Luckily we have since had these lovely lines by Chénier:The hell of the Bastille, now scattered to the
winds,
Is but a gust of lowly dust and lifeless ash;
And from this tomb of blackness now rises to the
sky,
Proud, sparkling, ready to bear arms,
The wing of Blessèd Liberty!
The French here echoes the Latin.
I. A ROADHOUSE IN BURGUNDY
The grand siècle was no more: — it had gone the way of all waning moons and suns. The period of Louis XIV’s brilliant military victories was now on the decline. He was losing the territories he had formerly conquered in Flanders, Franche-Comté, on the banks of the Rhine, in Italy. Prince Eugène was scoring successes in Germany, Marlborough was prevailing in the North ... The French nation was reduced to taking its revenge with the words of a folk song.
France had exhausted itself in the service of the old king’s dynastic ambitions and stubborn system of government. Our nation has always been eager to throw its support behind warrior kings, and Henry IV and Louis XIV of the house of Bourbon were only too willing to oblige, even though the latter had occasion to complain that it was only his « majesty » that had driven him to cross the Rhine. If necessary, these kings took refuge in their vices. Their amorous adventures contributed to the upkeep of castles and rustic retreats, and they were thereby able to maintain that ideal mixture of gallantry and valor which has always been one of the most chivalrous dreams of our nation.
The Salt Smugglers Page 14