CHAPTER XXIII. FRANCE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Montfaucon OUR first important name is that of Bernard de Montfaucon (1655-1741), who was born at the château of Soulage in Languedoc. After leaving school, he read all the historical works in his father's library, beginning with the French translation of Plutarch. Apart from the library, there was a chest of books left in his father's care. The chest was invaded by rats, but the young Montfaucon came to the rescue by finding a key that would unlock the chest, thus saving its contents from destruction, and finding fresh fields of literature to explore. The reading of history led to his first becoming a soldier; but after serving for two years in the army, he entered the Benedictine Order at Toulouse in 1675. He subsequently studied the language and literature of Greece for two years at Sorèze and for eight at Grasse. In 1686 he was diligently reading Herodotus at Bordeaux. After removing to Paris in the following year, he spent three years in Italy (1698-1701), exploring the great collections of мss, and devoting special attention to the Laurentian Library. An account of his travels was published under the title of the Diarium Italicum (1702), which was translated into English. This includes a full description of the topography of Rome, with some notice of earlier writers on the subject, and a scheme for a more complete survey'. Some of the results of this tour were embodied in the two volumes of fragments of the Greek Fathers (1707). While Latin alone had been the theme of Mabillon's treatise De Re Diplomatica, the foundations 1 Gibbon, c. lxxi ad finem (vii 324 Bury). S. II. 25 From a portrait by Paulus Abbas Genbacensis' (1739), engraved by Tardieu fils, and reproduced by Odieuvre in Dreux du Radier's L'Europe Illustre (1777) vol. v. of Greek palaeography were laid in the Palaeographica Graeca produced by Montfaucon in 1708, which, besides establishing the principles of a new science, comprised a list of no less than 11,630 MSS. In 1715 he completed the Catalogue of the Bibliotheca Coisliniana, a library belonging to the Duc de Coislin, the prince-bishop of Metz, and including that of his grandfather, Séguier, the whole of which was afterwards bequeathed to the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and was ultimately incorporated in the Paris Library. His next great work, the Antiquité Expliquée, a vast treasury of classical antiquities, was published by subscription in ten folio volumes in 1719. Within two months the first edition of 1,800 copies (or 18,000 volumes) was sold off, and a new edition of 2,200 printed in the same year, followed by a supplement in five volumes. All the fifteen volumes were translated into English. The Russian nobleman, Prince Kourakin, had a complete set, sumptuously bound, and packed in a special case to accompany him on his travels in Italy. The work had been produced in haste, and the execution of the plates was far from perfect, but it supplied a comprehensive conspectus of all the antiquarian learning of the age, and it was long before it was in any way superseded. A grand scheme for the exposition of the civil and ecclesiastical archaeology of France was only partially completed in the five volumes on the Monuments de la monarchie française (1725-33). Montfaucon had published St Athanasius in 1698, and Origen's Hexapla in 1713; his great edition of Saint Chrysostom in thirteen folio volumes, begun in 1715, was finished in 1738. In the following year he produced in two folio volumes his Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum, including all the catalogues of Europe, which the author had collected in the space of forty years. In 1741 he had gathered materials for the continuation of his vast work on French archaeology, the second part of which was to deal with the churches of France. When he read a paper on this subject at the Academy of Inscriptions in the December of that year, a foreign member, who then saw him for the first time, asked him his age, and received the reply: 'In thirteen years I shall be a hundred'. Two days later an unforeseen attack of apoplexy carried off in a few hours the last of the great scholars of the Congregation of Saint-Maur. His final resting place is in the same chapel of the abbey-church that contains the remains of his great predecessor, Mabillon. In his early surroundings at the château in Languedoc there had been little to suggest that he would become a great scholar. One of his brothers, who was an officer, writes him a letter beginning: 'vous êtes insupportable, mon cher frère, avec vos racines grecques". He not only became one of the best Greek scholars since the Revival of Learning, but he also learnt Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldee and Coptic, and only failed to learn Arabic. The secret of his wide learning, and of the large number of volumes that he produced, is revealed in a memorandum drawn up at the age of eighty-five, in which he states that, for the last forty-six years, he had always spent thirteen or fourteen hours a day in reading or writing. In learning, and in powers of work, he rivalled Mabillon, whom he excelled in his wider interest in classical antiquities, as well as in greater animation of manner. He had a happy wit, and a keen appreciation of the work of younger men. The scholars of his immediate circle were informally known as the 'Academy of the Bernardins', and the best of his pupils were proud to call themselves his sons. In 1719, when he was made a member of the Academy of Inscriptions, he had already produced forty-four folio volumes. He had scholarly friends in all Europe; he was known to Englishmen as hominum et amicorum optimus. One of the most frequent visitors at the abbey was the poet and diplomatist, Matthew Prior, plenipotentiary in Paris in 17125. Another of the numerous foreign frequenters of his rooms was the future author of a great work on Sicily, Philippe d'Orville of Amsterdam (1726). Among the most learned and accomplished of his Italian correspondents were 1 E. de Broglie, i 205. 2 ib. ii 316. 3 Cp. his own account of his life and works, printed in E. de Broglie, Bernard de Montfaucon et les Bernardins (1891), ii 311–323. • ib. i 22. 5 ib. i 137f. In 1700 Prior had vainly applied on behalf of the Cambridge Press for the use of the 'Greek matrices, cut by order of Francis I' (p. 175 supra). Cp. MSS de la Bibliothèque du Roi, 1787, 1 xciii f; Nichols, Lit. Anecd. iv 663 f; Wordsworth, Schol. Acad. 383. 6 ib. i 277-283. Muratori and Albani'. One of his younger friends at the abbey was Dom Vincent Thuillier (1685-1736), who, besides editing the posthumous works, and writing a summary of the controversy with the Abbé de Rancé, produced a French translation of the whole of Polybius at the request of an eager strategist, the Chevalier de Folard, who had been inspired with an interest in the art of war by reading the Commentaries of Caesar. The Chevalier's commentary on Polybius, which accompanied the Benedictine monk's translation, included so many personal reflexions on his military contemporaries, that the first volume alone was allowed to be published in France (1727), while the remainder saw the light in Holland'. Among the greater literary enterprises of the Benedictines of the Congregation of SaintMaur, those connected in different degrees with classical scholarship are the earlier volumes of the twelve on the Histoire Litéraire de la France (1733-63), a great work resumed by the Institut de France in 1814; the Art de vérifier les dates in three folio volumes (1783-87); and Toustain and Tassin's Nouveau Traité de diplomatique in six quartos (1750-65). Their other works are mainly connected with the History of France and its Provinces". Among the French Latinists of the eighteenth century we find three members of a single family. The first of these, Claude Capperonnier (1671—1744), editor Capperonnier of Quintilian (1725) and the Rhetores Latini (1756), took part in the revision of the Latin Thesaurus of Robert Estienne'. Claude's nephew, Jean (1716—1775), edited Caesar and Plautus, and Sophocles, with the scholia (1781). It was his transcript of the Paris MS that was used by Ruhnken in his edition of the Platonic Lexicon of Timaeus (1754). Lastly, Jean Augustin (1745-1820) edited Virgil, Justin, Eutropius etc., and the Academica of Cicero (1796). The second and third of the Capperonniers were librarians in Paris, and all the three had friendly relations with scholars in the Netherlands. |