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Updated: June 1, 2025
"He was that curious, a regular Paul Pry!" explained the servant to John Steele, in narrating the incident on the latter's return to London. "Seemed specially taken by the reports of the old trials you have on the shelves, sir. 'What an interesting collection of causes célèbres! he kept remarking.
He often gave me, on awaking, vivid descriptions of these imaginary scenes, which he remembered in every detail of composition, effect, and color, and which he longed, though hopelessly, to reproduce in painting. He was now writing in French a life of Turner for the series of "Les Artistes Celebres," published by the "Librairie de l'Art."
Superior in tragic horror, because unrelieved by the general picture of contemporaneous events, but quite inferior as a work of imagination, is the comparatively short sketch of Vittoria Corrombona's life and death contained in a collection of Italian stories called "Crimes Célèbres," by Stendal, where it keeps company with other tragedies of private life, which during the same century occupied with their atrocious details the tribunals of justice in Rome.
In the fourteenth volume of that very amusing work, Les Causes Celebres, a work which is said to have been the favorite reading of Voltaire, there is a striking history of a girl under age, who was tempted by pious artifice to settle herself in a convent, in express opposition to parental authority.
"The insularity of the English that you speak of is not worse than the insularity of the French. When I wrote my 'Life of Turner' for the 'Artistes Celebres' series, I was asked to reduce the MS. by one third, for the reason that the thicker numbers were only given to great artists. The sale was very moderate, as so few French people care anything about English art."
All our literature of that nature must, however, yield to the French Causes Célèbres, a term rendered so significant by the value and interest of the book it names, as to have been borrowed by writers in this country to render their works attractive.
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