or in their vernacular[1]. M. Daunou[2] quotes some curious examples from the French literature of the three centuries before our own. Thus Vertot, in his Révolutions romaines, entered into competition with Dionysius, Livy and Plutarch, by inventing a fourth version of the appeal made to Coriolanus by his mother in the Volscian camp. Mézerai could make Joan of Arc address her executioners in a harangue full of violent invective and sinister prediction; and this when the contemporary record of her trial existed, with its notice of the rare and broken utterances which belonged to her last hours[3]. By degrees a controversy arose on the question whether a historian is entitled to invent speeches for his persons, and the literary world was long divided upon it. Isaac Voss[4] and Mably[5] were among the more distinguished champions of the oratorical licence; among its opponents were Voltaire—whose
- ↑ E.g. Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Mézerai.
- ↑ Cours d'Études Historiques, vol. vii. p. 466 ff.
- ↑ As M. Daunou gravely observes: "La plus simple réflexion suffit pour concevoir que les Anglais, tenant en leur pouvoir la malheureuse Jeanne, ne lui auraient pas permis, à sa dernière heure, de débiter publiquement toutes ces sottises" (p. 476). The authentic records of her trial and execution are contained, he adds, in vol. iii. of the Notices et Extraits des Manuscrits de la Bibliothèque du Roi. It is an extraordinary example of the rhetorical taste of the age that Mézerai should have preferred to declaim, when he might have told a true story of the deepest pathos.
- ↑ Ars Historica, 20.
- ↑ De la manière d'écrire l'Histoire, Works, vol. xii. 452—461.
