Out of the Flames

by Lawrence Goldstone

  Soon, however, a debate began over whether to keep the nation's heritage intact or begin history anew. Radicals began a movement, later called Vandalisme Révolutionnaire, that attempted to purge France of anything that harkened back to the rot that was the monarchy. Archives and family records of nobles were burned, deeds and town records that supported property claims of nobles destroyed. It was only a matter of time before the radicals got around to books.

  In 1792, a mass of portfolios, books, and papers that had belonged to the nobility were taken from the library and burned at the place Vendôme. Rumblings began that the entire contents of the library, an institution of the monarchy, should be put to the torch.

  That it didn't happen was largely due not to a French patriot, but rather a Belgian bookworm, l'Abbé Rive's old assistant, Joseph Van Praet.

  Van Praet was so apolitical that although he had worked for aristocrats for years, his life was never in danger, even at the height of the Terror. Instead, he ensconced himself at the Bibliothèque de la Nation (soon to be renamed the Bibliothèque Nationale) and not only saved the books they had but used the breakdown of the aristocracy to acquire more—a lot more. Van Praet brought thousands of rare and priceless books, manuscripts, and documents to the library during the Revolution and thousands more during the reign of Napoléon as the Grande Armée swept across Europe, gobbling up aristocratic libraries as it went. (He eventually had to give some of those back after Napoléon's defeat but managed to squirrel away the majority of the most valuable volumes.) Van Praet stayed at the Bibliothèque Nationale until his death in 1837 and was so instrumental in building the nation's collection that the private reading room in the rare book section of the national library's new François Mitterand Center is named for him.

  Even Van Praet couldn't save everything. Some material had to be fed to the mob. At Van Praet's suggestion, however, a distinction was made between tilres-monuments, those items that were important to France, and papiers vaniteux, papers or works that merely aggrandized the nobility. Then he showed a remarkably deft hand at getting virtually everything of bibliographic importance placed in the first classification.

  AFTER THE BIBLIOTHÈQUE ROYALE, the second most prolific purchaser at the Lavallière auction was the Imperial Library of Vienna. This was not a public institution but rather the personal collection of a Hapsburg, Joseph II of Austria. The Imperial Library had purchased 350 volumes, of which about fifty were French incunabula, all very rare. The prize that Joseph had sought most, however, had eluded him. It was he who had been the underbidder for the “example unique” copy of Christianismi Restitutio.

  Joseph was grouchy at failing to obtain the book—kings are not used to being denied what they want. His disappointment eventually came to the attention of a member of his court, Count Sámuel Teleki de Szek, himself a book collector of some renown.

  Count Teleki, as it happened, was in a position to do something about it.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THERE IS NO GREATER example of the influence of Voltaire than the reign of Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Hungary. Joseph's was a regime modeled on the principles of toleration, reason, and fairness expounded by the great French philosopher, and never have theory and the best intentions been put so plainly into practice and failed so dismally.

  Joseph was the eldest son of the empress Maria Theresa, whose father, Charles III, cheated of a male heir, had rammed through an edict authorizing women to inherit the crown, thus ensuring unbroken Haps-burg domination of the Holy Roman Empire, or what was left of it, at any rate. Maria Theresa's domain encompassed Austria, Hungary, and the Netherlands. She inherited the crown in 1740 and ruled for forty years, respected by her peers, feared by her enemies, and beloved by her people. She treated both her children and her empire with maternal solicitude. (It was this concern for her children's future security that led her to marry her daughter, Marie Antoinette, to the great French king Louis XVI; luckily she did not live to witness the outcome.)

  Joseph, stifled from adolescence by overmothering, rebelled in order to give himself a separate identity. Whatever she was, he wasn't. Maria Theresa was a devout, intolerant Catholic who believed that any liberalizing of religion would lead to political anarchy and the destruction of the ruling family. Joseph became a child of the Enlightenment who distrusted the Catholic Church and sought to replace its influence with the moral authority of the state. She was a pragmatist who courted the aristocracy in order to control it. He sought a leveling of the class structure, universal schooling, and an end to serfdom. She saw books as agents of dissent and passed the most stringent censorship edicts possible in order to keep foreign thought out of her empire. He made sure he read extensively, traveled widely, promoted French and German culture, and amassed a private library with extensive sections devoted to science, medicine, and philosophy.

  For sixteen years after he was crowned king of the Romans at age twenty-one in 1764—a title noteworthy for its grandeur if not for its actual authority—Joseph had chafed under the restrictions imposed upon him by his mother, who held on to all the real power. It wasn't until she died in November 1780 that Joseph was at last free to act. With a series of sweeping edicts he implemented a reform program astonishing for its boldness and breadth.

  No stratum of society was left untouched by Joseph's new ideas. He abolished serfdom, liberalized the penal code so it applied fairly to aristocrats as well as peasants, and abolished capital punishment. He imposed the Edict of Toleration that gave Protestants the same rights as Catholics (“My Empire… has not made victims like Calas and Sir-ven,” he wrote) and even sought protection and relief for Jews. A great believer in education, Joseph set about reforming and reorganizing all the schools in his empire; he allowed scholars to study books prohibited by the Index librorum and swept away the restrictions on sales of scientific and foreign books in Vienna. He retained tariffs on imported goods but lowered those on domestic ones in order to encourage local industry; closed monasteries and appropriated the wealth for the state; and attempted to impose uniform regulations on all local bureaucracies. A great admirer of Voltaire's friend Frederick the Great—his mother's archenemy—Joseph decreed that German, not Latin, would be the one official language of the empire, to be used in all government transactions, even though less than a quarter of the population spoke German, and that quarter was not the ruling quarter.

  If his sole purpose had been to upset, unsettle, and confuse every man, woman, and child in his realm, he could not have succeeded more admirably. So much change effected so quickly across so many borders and affecting so many different peoples and nationalities was bewildering. Opposition arose from nobles and peasants alike. The Netherlands deposed him in absentia, Belgium announced its independence, and the serfs, sensing their opportunity, rose in armed rebellion in Transylvania and had to be put down forcibly.

  IN THIS ATMOSPHERE OF uncertainty, those groups on the fringes of society, like the Unitarian community in Cluj, the capital of Transylvania, felt the insecurity of their position most acutely. Yes, Joseph had issued the Edict of Toleration, but would it hold? Did it apply to them, or just to Lutherans and Calvinists? Would it lead to violence against them? The Unitarian Church had survived the Turks, the rein-troduction of Hapsburg rule in 1690, the Jesuits, and the repressive policies of Maria Theresa, but would it survive Joseph's liberalism? The congregation looked around for a means by which to buttress their security.

  It so happened that at the time there lived in eastern Hungary, on the very border of Transylvania, a nobleman of some influence by the name of Count Sámuel Teleki de Szek. Count Teleki was the lord-lieutenant of Küküllô and Bihar counties, not far from Cluj, and had in fact been born in Marosvasarhely, in the same province, about fifty miles away.

  The Telekis were, and still are, one of Hungary's most distinguished families. Countess Blanka Teleki was a heroine of the Hungarian fight for independence in 1848. Another Teleki was an African explorer who in 1886, at h
is own expense, mounted a yearlong expedition deep into the interior of northern Kenya. He discovered two large lakes, which he named after the Hapsburg crown prince Rudolph and his wife Stephanie. There is an István Teleki who is active in a political campaign to secure basic human rights for the Hungarian ethnic minority in Transylvania. Perhaps the most famous member of the family was Count Pál Teleki. He was a senior official of the International Boy Scouts who was honored by President Franklin Roosevelt, served as the Hungarian delegate to the peace conference following World War I, and then became prime minister. He was recalled to lead the country in 1938 but committed suicide two years later rather than cooperate with Hitler.

  Count Sámuel, the lord-lieutenant, was born in 1739. As a young man, he had been sent abroad for his schooling and attended not only the Sorbonne but also the very best universities in Protestant strongholds such as Basel and Utrecht. When he returned to the family estates in the 1760s, Count Sámuel began a campaign to reform public education, providing a broader, more cultured approach. He even dipped into his own pocket to provide financial aid for local scholars and students studying abroad. In 1774 he was summoned to court and appointed to the lord-lieutenant position by Maria Theresa as part of her program to co-opt the Hungarian aristocracy. When Maria Theresa died, Joseph kept Teleki on as part of the Hungarian bureaucracy.

  But above all Count Sámuel, like the Duc de Lavallière and Joseph himself, was a discerning, educated, and impassioned bibliophile.

  He had begun collecting books during his school years in Europe, with the goal of amassing one of Europe's great private libraries. He developed a network of dealers, book scouts, and other collectors that he would maintain throughout his life. Through agents, he purchased books from as many as twenty-five European cities. His collection was oriented to early printed texts and the writings of the Enlightenment and included the work of Aldus, Froben, and Estienne. He even married another collector, a countess named Zsuzsanna Bethlen de Iktár, although her passion for books was probably not the only reason for the alliance—Gábor Bethlen had ruled Transylvania in the early 1600s with help from the Turks.

  At the time of Joseph's accession to the throne, the Teleki library was fast growing to be the largest and most prestigious in the country. It was well known throughout Hungary and Transylvania that the count was interested in old books.

  The Unitarian congregation at Cluj, worried about the future, turned to Count Teleki. Either as a bribe or in gratitude for protection, the head of the congregation, Stephen Agh, gave Sámuel Teleki the single most important and valuable item the congregation possessed. He gave him their copy of Christianismi Restitutio.

  IT MUST HAVE BEEN LIKE opening a package from some distant relation and finding not a coarse, grotesquely patterned, handknitted scarf, but a long-lost Vermeer. Christianismi Restitutio was by this time no obscure little volume. It had only been three years since the Duc de Lavallière's auction, and everybody knew the story behind the book, its rarity, and its value. Indeed, it was common knowledge that the Lavallière copy, now safely and permanently ensconced in the Biblio-thèque Royale in Paris, was the only surviving copy in the world.

  But not anymore. Now Count Teleki held another copy in his hand.

  The temptation to keep it, to make it the centerpiece of his library, must have been powerful. But it is dangerous to advertise that you own something coveted by your sovereign, and, in the end, Count Sámuel made a wise move. He graciously presented the book to Joseph, with his compliments.

  Joseph was very pleased indeed. Now that was a gift. According to the head librarian at the Royal Library at Vienna, where Joseph deposited the book, Count Teleki “was recompensed for his generosity with the gift of a splendid diamond.” The following year, Teleki was summoned once more to Vienna, this time to be appointed chancellor-assistant of Transylvania, a position that required his attendance at court. And in 1791, just after Joseph's death, Count Teleki became chancellor of all of Transylvania.

  When Count Teleki died in 1822his library exceeded forty thousand volumes. Although he did not have Christianismi Restitutio, among his books were volumes illustrated by Hans Holbein the younger, Rubens, and Dürer, as well as numerous illuminated atlases, maps, and albums. There were also incunabula, rare prints, and one-of-a-kind editions. All of them went into the Teleki Library at Marosvasarhely (now Tirgu Mures in Romania), one of the first Hungarian public libraries, which the Count had founded in 1802. He left the collection to the people of Transylvania—an immeasurable gift to his country.

  As for Joseph II, he died a broken man, just ten years after his mother. Faced with insurmountable political obstacles, he had had to rescind all of his idealistic edicts except the abolition of serfdom. The great experiment in enlightenment had failed—“Here lies Joseph, who could succeed in nothing,” he wrote bitterly from his deathbed.

  Through it all, the Unitarian church at Cluj survived. It would not be an overstatement to say that Servetus bought them that survival with Christianismi Restitutio.

  INTEREST IN THE BOOK was spurred by the Lavallière auction and the discovery of a second surviving copy. In 1789, the year before Joseph II died, a German scholar, translator, and bibliophile named Christoph Gottlieb von Murr asked the king's permission to use the newly discovered Vienna copy as the basis for a reprint. Joseph, ever interested in the advancement of knowledge and pleased at the publicity that a reprint made from his copy would generate, readily agreed.

  Murr's interest seems to have been bibliographic rather than theological or medical. He had already produced a scholarly essay on the provenance of the two known copies. Murr's notion was to create a facsimile edition, indistinguishable from the original save for a tiny “1790,” the year of publication, on the last page.

  There had been facsimile editions before, although not produced in the spirit of academic advancement. In 1721, in Ratisbon, Germany, a prominent and enterprising Lutheran clergyman named Georg Ser-pilius began secretly to reproduce both Errors of the Trinity and Two Dialogues on the Trinity. Serpilius did not, however, identify his reprints. In fact, they were intended to be all but indistinguishable from the originals, and they were, except for Serpilius's inexplicable use of a single rather than double dash on the title page.

  Reprints hot in hand, Serpilius had then contacted book collectors and prominent Unitarians and told them that he had heard of the existence of two extremely rare books by the Spanish heretic Michael Servetus, and that he was willing to act as middleman if the collector wished to purchase them. If the collector agreed, Serpilius sold the reprints as originals. Since the counterfeits were not discovered for some years and there is no record of Serpilius ever having been caught, the scam seems to have been successful.

  Murr's reprint, sold as such, became for collectors the next best thing to owning the unobtainable genuine original. The print run seems to have been quite small, since soon afterward it became almost as difficult to acquire a Murr edition as one printed in 1553. There are perhaps twenty left in the world today, virtually all of which are in national libraries or university collections.

  Murr may have been a great scholar, but he obviously underestimated the difficulty of translating book knowledge into practical applications, and it cost him dearly. In 1811, at age seventy-eight, after reading a medical manual, he inexpertly attempted to use a catheter on himself and died in both extreme pain and acute embarrassment.

  AFTER MURR'S REPRINT HAD been snapped up by collectors, Chris-tianismi Restitutio once again seemed doomed to become nothing more than a bibliographic curiosity. Not only were there no more copies of the book to be had, but interest in Servetus himself was fading. The three hundredth anniversary of his execution passed quietly, even among Unitarians, and his contribution to the founding of their movement had become more unspoken than explicit.

  So quiescent had Servetus scholarship become that the city of Geneva finally felt safe to release records of the trial, sequestered for more than three c
enturies. Voltaire had been denied access to these same transcripts when he had wished to write further about Servetus and Calvin in the wake of Essai sur les moeurs, but now they were available to any scholar who wished to have a look.

  In 1877, a Scottish physician and medical historian named Robert Willis used those records to produce the first serious historical record of Servetus's life and trial in English. Willis had compiled a highly respected translation of the writings of William Harvey (from the Latin) thirty years before and had been interested in Servetus ever since. For the new book, Willis used not only the Geneva records but also those of the Vienne trial, which had been transcribed in 1749 by l'Abbé d'Ar-tigny. The result was a compelling and heartbreaking account of a brave and intelligent man doomed by conscience. In his epilogue, Willis included a bibliographic history of the two surviving copies of Christianismi Restitutio and also speculated as to whether a third copy would ever show up.

  On April 27, 1878, just five months before his death, Willis received a letter from a correspondent named Sir William Turner. Turner had written to a number of academic libraries, inquiring as to whether or not they had any Servetus materials that he might examine. John Small, the head librarian at the library of Willis's own alma mater, the University of Edinburgh, had replied that he thought they might.