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cyclopædists, the whole world of philosophy and science. Therefore it was that Cardinal Merlin, when he deigned to visit it, remarked:
“There is no man whose brain is equal to containing all the knowledge which is piled upon these shelves. Happily it doesn’t matter.”
Monseigneur Cachepot, who worked there often when a curate in Paris, was in the habit of saying:
“I see here the stuff to make many a Thomas Aquinas and many an Arius, if only the modern mind had not lost its ancient ardour for good and evil.”
There was no gainsaying that the manuscripts formed the more valuable portion of this immense collection. Noteworthy indeed was the unpublished correspondence of Gassendi, of Father Mersenne, and of Pascal, which threw a new light on the spirit of the seventeenth century. Nor must we forget the Hebrew Bibles, the Talmuds, the Rabbinical treatises, printed and in manuscript, the Aramaic and Samaritan texts, on sheepskin and on tablets of sycamore; in fine, all these antique and valuable copies collected in Egypt and in Syria by the celebrated Moïse de Dina, and acquired at a small cost by Alexandre d’Esparvieu in 1836, when the learned Hebraist died of old age and poverty in Paris.
The Esparvienne library occupied the whole of
