The Man of Forty Crowns/Chapter XII
CHAPTER XII.
THE GOOD SUPPER AT MR. ANDREW'S.
We supped at Mr. Andrew's yesterday, together with a Doctor Sorbonne, with Monsieur Pinto, the celebrated Jew, with the chaplain of the Protestant chapel of the Dutch ambassador, the secretary of the Prince Gallitsin of the Greek Church, a Calvinist Swiss captain, two philosophers, and three ladies of great wit.
The supper was a very long one; and yet, so polite it must be owned we are grown—so much is one afraid at supper to give any cause of offence to one's brethren, that there was no more disputing upon religion than as if not one of those at table had ever had any. It is not so with the Regent Coge, and the ex-Jesuit Patouillet, and with all the animals of that kind. Those pitiful creatures will say more stupidly abusive things in one pamphlet of two pages than the best company in Paris can say agreeable and instructive ones in a supper of four hours. And what is stranger yet, they dare not tell a man to his face what they have the impudence to print.
The conversation turned at first on a piece of pleasantry in the "Persian Letters," in which it is repeated, after a number of grave personages, that the world is not only growing worse, but that it is becoming depopulated, so that if the proverb should have any truth in it, that "the more fools there are, the more laughter," laughing is likely to be soon banished from the face of the earth.
The Doctor of Sorbonne assured us that, in fact, the world was almost reduced to nothing. He quoted the Father Petau, who demonstrates that in less than three hundred years the descendants of one of the sons of Noah (I forget whether it was Shem or Japheth), amounted to six hundred and twelve millions three hundred and fifty-eight thousand true believers within two hundred and eighty-five years after the universal deluge.
Mr. Andrew asked, why in the time of Philip le Bel, that is to say, about three hundred years after Hugh Capet, there were not six hundred and twenty-three thousand millions of princes of the royal family?
"It is," said the Doctor of Sorbonne, "because the stock of faith has greatly decreased."
A great deal was said about Thebes and its hundred gates, and of the million of soldiers that issued out of those gates with the twenty thousand chariots of war.
"Shut the book there," said Mr. Andrew: "Since I have taken to reading I beg to suspect that the same genius that wrote Garagantua used of yore to write all the histories."
"But, in short," said one of the company, "Thebes, Memphis, Babylon, Nineveh, Troy, Seleucia were great cities once, and now no longer exist."
"Granted," answered the secretary of the Prince Gallitsin; "but Moscow, Constantinople, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Lyons (which is better than ever Troy was), and all the towns of France, Germany, Spain, and the North were then deserts."
The Swiss captain, a gentleman of great knowledge, owned to us that when his ancestors took it into their heads to quit their mountains and their precipices to go and take forcible possession, as was but reasonable, of a finer country, Cæsar, who saw with his own eyes the list of those emigrants, found that their number amounted to three hundred and sixty-eight thousand, inclusive of the old, the children, and the women. At this time the single canton of Berne possesses as many inhabitants, which is not quite the half of Switzerland, and I can assure you that the thirteen cantons have above seven hundred and twenty thousand souls, including the natives who are serving or carrying on business in other countries. From such data gentlemen of learning make absurd calculations and they base fallacious systems on no better footing.
The question next agitated was whether the citizens of Rome, in the time of the Cæsars, were richer than the citizens of Paris in the time of Monsieur Silhouette?
"Oh," says Mr. Andrew, "this is a point on which I have some call to speak. I was a long time the Man of Forty Crowns, but I conceive that the citizens of Rome had more. Those illustrious robbers on the highway pillaged the finest countries of Asia, of Africa, and of Europe. They lived splendidly on the produce of their rapines; but yet there were doubtless some beggars at Rome. I am persuaded that among those conquerors of the world there were some reduced to an income of forty crowns a year, as I formerly was."
"Do you know," said a learned member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-lettres, "that it cost Lucullus, for every supper he gave in the saloon of Apollo, thirty-nine thousand three hundred and twelve livres of our money; but that the celebrated epicurean Atticus did not expend above two hundred and thirty livres a month for his table."
"If that be true," said I, "he deserved to be president of the Miser-society, lately established in Italy. I have read, as you have done, in Florus, that incredible anecdote; but, perhaps Florus had never supped with Atticus, or else his text, like so many others, has been corrupted by copyists. No Florus shall ever make me believe that the friend of Cæsar and of Pompey, of Cicero and of Antony, all of whom were often entertained at his house, got off for something less than ten louis d'or a month. But thus exactly 'tis that history is written."
Madam Andrew, for her part, told the learned member of the Academy that if he would keep her table for ten times as much, she would be greatly obliged to him.
I am persuaded that this evening at Mr. Andrew's cost him as much as the monthly expense of Atticus. As for the ladies, they expressed a doubt whether the suppers of Rome were more agreeable than those of Paris. The conversation was very gay though leaning a little to the learned. There was no talk of new fashions nor of the ridiculous part of any one's character or conduct, nor of the scandalous history of the day.
The question upon luxury was discussed and searched to the bottom. It was mooted whether or not luxury had been the ruin of the Roman Empire; and it was proved that the two empires of the east and west owed their destruction to nothing but to religious controversies and to the monks; and, in fact, when Alaric took Rome, its whole attention was engrossed by theological disputes; when Mahomet took Constantinople the monks defended much better the eternity of the light of Mount Tabor, which they saw on their navel, than they defended the town against the Turks.
One of our men of learning made a very significant remark. It was that those two great empires were annihilated, but that the works of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid still exist.
From the age of Augustus they made but one skip to the age of Louis XIV. A lady put the question why it was that with a great deal of wit there was no longer produced scarcely any work of genius?
Mr. Andrew answered that it was because such works had been produced in the last age. This idea was finely spun, and yet solidly true. It bore a thorough handling. After that they fell with some harshness upon a Scotchman, who had taken it into his head to give rules to taste, and to criticise the most admirable passages of Racine, without understanding French. But there was one Denina still more severely treated. He had abused Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws" without comprehending him, and had especially censured what is the most liked and approved in that work.
This recalled to my mind Boileau's making a parade of his affected contempt of Tasso. One of the company advanced that Tasso, with all his faults, was as superior to Homer as Montesquieu, with his still greater imperfections, was above the farrago of Grotius. But there was presently a strong opposition made to these false criticisms, dictated by national hatred and prejudice. The Seignior Denina was treated as he deserved, and as pedants ought to be by men of wit.
It was especially remarked, with much sagacity, that the greatest part of the literary works of this age, as well as of the conversations, turned on the examination of the masterpieces of the last century, in which we are like disinherited children, who are taking an estimate of their father's estate. It was confessed that philosophy had made great progress, but that the language and style was somewhat corrupted.
It is the nature of all these conversations to make transitions from one subject to another. All these objects of curiosity, of science, and of taste, soon vanished, to give way to the great scene which the Empress of Russia and the King of Poland were giving to the world. They had been just raising up and restoring the rights of oppressed humanity, and establishing liberty of conscience in a part of the globe of a much greater extent than the old Roman Empire. This service done to human kind, this example given to so many courts, was mentioned with the applause it deserved. Healths were drunk to the philosophical empress, to the royal philosopher, and to the philosophical primate, with the wish of their having many imitators. Even the doctors of Sorbonne admired them, for there are some persons of good sense in that body, as there were formerly some men of wit among the Bœotians.
The Russian secretary astonished us with a recital of the great establishments they were forming in Russia. It was asked why people were, in general, more fond of reading the history of Charles XII., who passed his life in destroying, than that of Peter the Great, who consumed his in creating? On this we concluded that weakness and a frivolous turn of mind are the causes of this preference; that Charles XII. was the Don Quixote, and Peter, the Solon of the North; that superficial understandings prefer a wild, extravagant heroism to the great views of a legislator; that the particulars of the foundation of a town are less pleasing to them than the rashness of a man who, at the head of only his domestics, braves an army of ten thousand Turks; and that, in short, most readers love amusement better than instruction. Thence it is that a hundred women read "The Thousand and One Arabian Nights" for one that reads two chapters of Locke.
What was not talked of at this supper—of which I shall long retain the remembrance? It was also in course to say a word of the actors and actresses, that eternal subject of the table-talk of Versailles and of Paris. It was agreed that a good declaimer was as rare as a good poet. For my part, I must own that Plato's banquet could not have given me more pleasure than that of Monsieur and Madame Andrew.
Our very pretty gentlemen and our very fine ladies would, doubtless, have found it dull, and been tired with it. They pretend to be the only good company; but neither Mr. Andrew nor I ever willingly sup with that kind of good company.