[113] [Raphael durbin, Michel lange, Leonard vince, Albert durer, are Tory's versions of these names.]
[114] The description of the volume in Part 2 (p. 87 infra), places this promise in the dedicatory letter.
[115] Histoire de l'Imprimerie, p. 98.
[117] Champ fleury, 'avis au lecteur.'—See also fol. 1 verso: 'And so I will write in French according to my own humble style and mother tongue, nor fail, albeit I am of lowly and humble parents, and poor in paltry goods, to give pleasure to the devoted lovers of goodly letters. Herein it may be I shall seem a new man, for that no one has heretofore been known to teach the fashioning and quality of letters by writing in the French language; but, desirous to cast some light on our language, I am content to be the first little pointer to arouse some noble mind which shall put forth greater efforts, as did the Greeks and Romans of old, to establish and ordain the French language by fixed rules for pronouncing and speaking well. God grant that some noble lord may be pleased to offer pledges and worthy gifts to those who shall be able to do this well.'—François I himself was the noble lord referred to.
[122] This volume contains also: Epistre du seigneur Elisee Calense, natif Damphrate, quil envoya a Rufin ... translatee .... par maistre Geofroy Tory de Bourges.
[123] The year 1531 did not begin until Easter Sunday, April 9.
[127] [A libraire juré was a bookseller who had taken the oath to follow the rules prescribed by the University.]
[129] The reform went even further than Tory suggested, for orthographic accents were invented, which have no other purpose than to distinguish words of the same sound but of different meaning; and therein it disregarded logic, for it not only did not distinguish in this way all words of the same sound (son, for example, which has three totally different meanings, received no accent), but it placed accents on words which had but one meaning,—déjà, for example; of what use is the grave accent on the a? Moreover, it placed accents in certain cases on words which in other cases have none. Thus it wrote 'votre ami et le nôtre,' and 'notre ami et le vôtre.'
[131] It is printed at the end of his book, which has some similarity to Tory's. The full title is: Lesperon de discipline pour inciter les humains aux bonnes lettres, etc. On the title-page are the arms of Savoy, to indicate the nativity of the author, who was born in La Bresse, which then belonged to the House of Savoy.
[132] See in Appendix II, the Latin verses printed on the verso of the title of Lesclaircissement de la langue françoise, an English work reprinted in 1852 at M. Génin's instance.
[133] This error has been made by many writers. The creation of king's printer was so far from being identical with the foundation of the Imprimerie Royale, that there continued to be functionaries bearing that title even after the foundation of the Imprimerie du Louvre, in 1640, as we shall see later (Appendix IX).
[134] Jean de la Barre, chevalier, Comte d'Étampes, counsellor and chamberlain in ordinary to the king, first gentleman of his chamber, and keeper of the provostry of Paris, granted the licenses to print at this time.
[135] The license had no sooner expired than the work was reprinted, as may be seen by a copy of an edition of 8 leaves, octavo, in gothic type, dated 1531, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
[137] A much stranger omission is that of de la Barre's signature, which had to be added by hand to every copy, at the foot of the license.
[138] [The saint-augustin was a 13-point type, so called because it was used in 1467 to print St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei. The philosophie was 10-point.]
[139] See his little book entitled Les Trois Ilots de la Cité; octavo, 1860 (an extract from the Revue Archéologique).
[142] [The écu au soleil was a coin issued under Louis XI and Charles VIII, with a sun above the crown. The livre tournois was worth 20 sous.]
[144] Concerning the libraires jurés and non jurés, see Chevillier, Origine de l'imprimerie de Paris, part 4.
[146] See Part 2, §§ III and IV.
[147] This most necessary reform spread very rapidly. The year had not ended when another Paris printer, Antoine Augereau, published a small treatise on the subject, entitled: Briefve doctrine pour deuement escripre selon la proprieté du langaige françoys. ['Brief instructions for writing the French language properly.'] This curious work, which is printed with the Miroir de très chrestienne princesse Marguerite de France, in an octavo volume, 1533, informs us among other things that the final E which requires the acute accent was at that time called masculine, and that the word feminine was applied to it when it did not take the accent. These are, as we see, the terms used by Tory. Hence doubtless the term féminine, which is still applied to-day, in French poetry, to silent rhymes. (See Appendix V.)
[148] Archives de l'Empire, carton S, no. 18.—See also Les Trois Ilots de la Cité, by M. Adolphe Berty, p. 15.
[150] The existence of Tory's bindery is proved by the numerous bindings with the Pot Cassé, not only of books from that artist's presses, to which I have already referred, but of books printed by others. I will mention particularly a lovely book of Hours, octavo, on vellum, printed by Herman Hardoin about 1527, and preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
[151] Olivier Mallard the printer was probably a relative of Jean Mallart the writer, whose name appears about the same time in the accounts of François I: 'To Jehan Mallart, writer, for writing unes heures [a book of Hours] on parchment, presented to the king to be illuminated, XLV livres as a gift, charged upon the deniers de l'espargne à l'entour du roy.' (From a roll not dated, but circa 1538, published by M. de Laborde, Renaissance des Arts, vol. i, p. 924.) These Mallards were probably of Norman origin, for there were about the same time several booksellers of that name at Rouen. One of them, indeed, Jean Mallard, had the Pot Cassé for his sign in 1542. He was probably a brother of Olivier, who had authorized him to adopt that symbol. (See Heures a l'usage de Rouen, octavo, gothic type, 1542.) I am indebted for this information to the learned author of the Manuel du Bibliophile normand, M. Ed. Frère.
[152] It was this publication, no doubt, that led Papillon to say that Tory died in 1536. (Traité de la gravure sur bois, vol. i, p. 509.)
[153] Bibliothèque Nationale.
[154] 'Caussarum in suprema Parisiorum curia patronus.' This mouth-filling phrase presumably means avocat in the Parliament of Paris.
[155] Bibliothèque Nationale.
[156] Crapelet, Études pratiques, etc., p. 48.
[157] In Appendix VI will be found [an English version of] M. Crapelet's [French] translation. I have given the original text in my work on the Estiennes, pp. 11 ff.
[158] See Part 3 (Iconography), under 1541 and 1542.
[159] The rent of these premises, which was only 16 livres in 1420, and 22 in 1498, was raised to 160 livres in 1551, to 200 in 1567, and to 400 in 1605. (Les Trois Ilots de la Cité, by Adolphe Berty, p. 15). It seems that the raising of rents in Paris is not a modern invention.
[160] Histoire de l'Imprimerie, p. 110.
[161] His mother, Iolande Bonhomme, widow of Thielman Kerver, first of the name, also lived on rue Saint-Jacques, at the sign of the Licorne (Unicornis).
[163] Bibliothèque Nationale.
[164] In the preceding year, an analogous book was published at Rome, under this title: Libro di M. Giovanbattista Palatino, cittadino Romano, nel quel s'insegna a scrivere ogni sorte lettera, antica et moderna, di qualunque natione, con le sue regole et misure, et essempi: et con un breve et util discorso de le cifre, etc. Quarto, Rome, 1548; with 15 plates.
[165] It might perhaps be interesting to publish this book to-day (it is now very rare), scrupulously following the first edition, as has been done in the case of Palsgrave's Lesclaircissement de la langue françoise.
[166] The floriated letters engraved by Tory which appear in the course of the book, and of which the entire alphabet is given on the verso of folio 78 of the first edition, are replaced in the second by letters of an entirely different make.
[167] Histoire de l'Imprimerie, p. 99.
[168] It will be seen that I apparently had most excellent grounds for saying in my first edition that Tory lived until after 1550. Could one imagine that a historian of Berry, a townsman of Tory and friend of Jean Toubeau, could blunder so stupidly concerning the date of our artist's death? La Caille even makes him live until the close of the sixteenth century.
[170] [Tory's signature referred to consists in the double, or Lorraine, cross found on nos. 5 and 10.]
[173] One of our most skilful binders, M. Capé, used this design in his bindings. An example may be seen on a copy of the Hours (quarto) of 1527 in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
[174] It goes without saying that in the numerous quotations which I shall make from these books I shall do away with abbreviations and supply punctuation. To do otherwise would be to give the reader of to-day, who is unfamiliar with the tachygraphy of the Middle Ages, simply a succession of undecipherable puzzles. It is a difficult task to restore the Latin texts according to the first impressions. I have taken it upon myself, so that the reader may have the pleasure of reading without difficulty. What I have said must be my apology for such errors as I may have made in my work of restoration.
[175] Bibliothèque Mazarine.
[176] Gilles de Gourmont was in fact the first printer in Paris who had Greek type. See my Les Estienne, pp. 62, 67.
[177] I have arranged these verses in lines, although in the book the lines are indicated simply by capital letters; and I warn the reader that several words were changed by Tory in order to adapt the verses to his subject. [The changes are in fact considerable, especially in the third passage, which is made up of parts of five lines, with several changes, one of which results in an entire reversal of the meaning. The English versions of these passages are adapted from Long's translation of the Æneid. For the Latin original, see Appendix X, g.]
[178] Proper. ii, ad Mæcenatem. [The translations from Propertius are those of Cranstoun.]
[179] Doubtless we should read 'iv no.' for there was no sixth of the nones of December. The fourth of the nones fell on Dec. 2. But perhaps we should read 'vj id.'; the sixth of the ides of December fell on Dec. 8.
[182] Jan. 10, 1508, new style.
[185] Following the course pursued in the Psalterium Quincuplex, published shortly before by Henri Estienne, Tory proposed to write with a cedilla the last e but one of the third person plural of the perfect tense of verbs of the third conjugation (emere, contendere, etc.), to distinguish it from the infinitive. In our day the circumflex accent has been adopted for this purpose; but accented letters did not exist in Tory's time, and he sought to utilise, in the interest of the metre, the only distinctive sign at the disposal of typography, the e with the cedilla, which was then generally used for æ, in imitation of the manuscripts of the Middle Ages. Tory also proposed to spell with s, instead of x, certain words like mixtum; 'for,' he said, 'misceo has miscui in the perfect; and so, by analogy, we must say mistum.'
I will not comment here on some other observations of the same sort made by Tory in this same note to the reader; I will say simply that they all tend to prove his erudition and peremptorily contradict the extraordinary assertion of a certain Abbé Joly, who, in a huge folio, entitled Remarques critiques sur le Dictionnaire de Bayle, and published in 1740, observes that Tory was 'very ignorant,' without adducing a single fact in support of his opinion. In the Menagiana (vol. iv, p. 84 of the 12mo edition of 1729) Tory is rebuked, to be sure, for forging Latin words, after the example of the author of the Songe du Poliphile; but this is a less serious charge, and is not a proof of ignorance; on the contrary it proves misuse of knowledge. Geofroy Tory, says the author, attracted by the style of the Poliphile, composed seven epitaphs filled with words most worthy of a place in that work, 'such as murmurillare, insatianter, hilaranter, pederaptim, velocipediter, ægrimoniosius, avicipes, conspergitare, venustulentissus, vinulentibibulus, apneumaticus, and collifrangibulum, which he represented as ancient words, and which the excellent Catherinot, in his epitaph of this same Tory, did not fail to guarantee to be such.'—See what Catherinot has to say of Tory's Epitaphs in his epitaph of Tory, p. 44 supra. [Tumulos aliquot ludicros veterrimo stylo latine condiderit.]
[186] This is the correct reading, not Hongoti, which M. Renouard mistakenly adopts (Ann. des Estienne, 3d ed., p. 6, 2d col., no. 3; and p. 276), having failed to notice the line over the o in the second syllable of the word. However, this is the only place in which this Jean Hongont is mentioned, and nothing is known of him save that he was associated with the first Henri Estienne in the publication of this edition of the Cosmography of Pope Pius II, otherwise called Æneas Sylvius, edited by Tory. This book is in the Bibliothèque Mazarine.
[187] October 10, 1509.
[188] See infra, Part 3, § III, sub nomine Bade.
[189] Bibliothèque Mazarine.
[191] As to this adage, see the Collection of Erasmus (folio, Basle, 1574), p. 302: Aristophanis et Cleantis lucerna.
[192] Claudian, xv, 385: Minuit præsentia famam.
[193] As to this adage, see the Collection of Erasmus, ubi sup., p. 134 a: Non absque Theseo.
[194] Plautus, Casinus, Act V, 4, 1: Ubi tu es, qui colere mores Massilienseis postulas.
[196] The answer seems to be bat.
[197] [See p. 265 infra.]
[199] May 9, 1510.
[200] Silvestre, no. 974.
[201] On folio 26 of the first edition there is a small plan of Rome, doubtless a reminiscent work of Tory's, which is lacking in the second and third editions.
[202] Vol. vii, p. 548, no. 411.
[203] Catal. bibl. Bunav. vol. i, p. 417 a.
[204] Vol. i, col. 810, under 'Berosus.'
[207] For example, here are two riddles by Tory, the labour of solving which, I leave, as he did, to the reader:—
Godofredus To. Bi.
Idem.
[208] This book may be found in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, and at the Arsenal.
[210] In original, Cordatus. His house [in Bourges] is now used as the hôtel de ville.
[211] As to this gentleman, see page 4, supra.
[212] February 27, 1510, or rather, 1509, for it is hardly probable that the bulky volume was printed in four months. See the dedication in question, on page 4, supra. The book may be found in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.