The Devil's Details (8 page)

Madame Necker tempered her praise with some critical remarks, the most interesting of which, for our purposes, was the criticism of his treatment of women. “To hear
you
talk, all their virtues are artificial; were you the man, sir, who ought to have spoken so of women?”
⁵⁵
This comment is not couched in merely general terms; some residue of personal resentment lingers. Gibbon responds as soon as possible; with the very next edition he inserts a new footnote into his first volume, one that goes out of its way to praise the wife of a particularly unpleasant emperor. That emperor, Maximin, did not simply exile or execute his enemies; some were crudely clubbed to death, others were turned over to wild beasts, but others, most imaginatively, were “sewed up in the hides of slaughtered animals.” But Empress Paulina, the footnote claims, “sometimes brought back the tyrant to the way of truth and humanity.”
⁵⁶
A further exculpatory effort was made by the former wooer in subsequent volumes when he portrayed “female virtues more generously,”
⁵⁷
a fact Gibbon made sure to point out to his Suzanne.

The hopes of the young Gibbon and the young Curchod, their subsequent disappointments and resentments, the lingering attraction to each other that both of them clearly felt, none of that would interest us now except for the light it cast on Gibbon's annotative habits. The personal and political are joined, the private and the public faces indistinguishable. Our picaresque footnote has become, like Tom Jones, an English squire. Now he is prepared to become a scholar under the tutelage of Leopold von Ranke. This unfortunate development comes next.

T
HE EMPIRE BUILDERS
of nineteenth-century England took enormous satisfaction in their work; they could walk up to their library's globe of the earth, spin it, and see that their labors of mind and body encircled it. Everywhere lay the outlines of British colonies or ex-colonies. “The sun never sets, harrumph harrumph, on the British Empire!” the globe spinner might say, and the port-splashed, contented voice would be the same as the one used to admire a gourmand's ten-course meal or a fine cigar. To such well-fed men the disintegration of the Empire was scarcely conceivable; it was everywhere and forever.

Footnotes would have occasioned similar contented voices should the men have browsed through their library, trailing wisps of smoke, pulling out and opening books at random: Lord Macaulay's
History of England
, perhaps, or Lieutenant Colonel Mundy's
Our Antipodes: Residence and Rambles in The Australasian [sic] Colonies with A Glimpse of the Gold Fields
, or Miss Jane Porter's romance,
Scottish Chiefs
—though one supposes empire builders might not be interested in heroic Scots. Still, Miss Porter's work saw international success, and was even published in the former colonies of America so a copy might find its way into a library of the upper class. In any case, these and the other books in any well-heeled English gentleman's library would attest that footnotes were everywhere: “The sun harrumph, etc., etc.”

These days, of course, we are more impressed with the fall of empires than with their rise, and, indeed, the decline of the footnote's scope and power began even as it appeared most securely triumphant—surely typical of empires.

One man's name particularly deserves to be affixed to the footnote's decline: Leopold von Ranke.
*
Ranke was a scholar
and
a German, two terms that became nearly synonymous in the nineteenth century. He was devoted to research; one of his readers has said that Ranke's prefaces to his books were “enthusiastic travel reports by a traveler who visited, not city after city, but library after library.”
¹
Ranke himself makes clear that he preferred burrowing among dark archives to idly drinking and taking in the sun in some outdoor café. “How quickly one studies the day away,” he crooned, as if he were an archivist's Wordsworth and documents were so many daffodils.
²
Like every scholar, however, he developed a complicated relationship with footnotes; he needed them, of course, but he resisted them when he could and, at times, sabotaged them. Early on he told his publisher that he included citations only because a young author needed to prove his reliability but that he had “carefully avoided going in for real annotation.”
³
He once meticulously counted up the footnotes in a predecessor's chapters in order to show that the citations could convey a false sense of scholarly support—twenty-seven references in chapter 104, he tells us, and twenty-seven more references to the same source in chapter 105. All fifty-four footnotes send us to the same source, and a doubtful one at that.

The unreliable annotator Jean Charles Leonard Sismonde de Sismondi was Swiss, not German, and used French as a first language, but Ranke's purpose was clearly to raise general questions about the effectiveness of citations and not just about the reliability of non-German scholarship.
⁴

To write history “
wie es eigentlich gewesen
,”
⁵
or “history as it had really been,” was Ranke's credo, or at least the credo that subsequent historians (who also presumably wanted their accounts to be “
wie es eigentlich gewesen
”) decided was Ranke's. Ranke wanted to be “scientific, perhaps”; certainly he hoped to be accurate. A well-qualified contemporary historian has argued, however, that Ranke was just as concerned to provide a good tale as to provide scientific authority. “… Ranke's free employment of dramatic devices,” Peter Gay writes, “places him in the camp of those historians who treat their craft as a branch of the storytelling art.”
⁶
Unfortunately, Ranke failed to see the dramatic possibilities of footnotes; to him, they were simply interruptions required by the exigencies of the historian's craft, a failure of imagination that him led him to adopt several questionable practices.

First, he apparently did not always try to put his footnotes where they would clearly indicate the source of his facts and judgments; instead, he tried to hold off annotating until he came to a place where a note would not break the flow of his narrative. An exasperated reader called him on that. The reader complained that such consolidation of notes and the delay in their insertion made for imprecise annotation; Ranke's book was “inchoate, sentimental” and mostly would please only “learned ladies.”
⁷
Ranke grumbled a reply in a footnote: “I cite for those who want to find, but
not
for those who look in order not to find.”
⁸
He did not explain why any scholar should fail to make it as easy as possible to find the source of a quotation; a scholar's research surely should not be game of hide-and-seek—though a sense of play and a child's capacity to wonder (and wander) are essential to the scholar, of course.

Ranke also took to sequestering much of his most interesting commentary at the end of a book. His multivolume
History of the Popes
, for example, allocates 274 of its 1,205 pages or about 10 percent of its space to 165 appendices. No one would argue that all of that material should be run along the bottoms of the pages, but some of it clearly should. To give one demonstration: The Council of Trent, as Ranke says, “engrosses a large portion of the history of the sixteenth century”;
⁹
indeed, his
History of the Popes
necessarily keeps returning to it. Ranke draws on two accounts of it, which are “directly opposed to each other,”
¹⁰
one of them by a certain Paolo Sarpi and the other by Pallavicini. At the time Ranke wrote no consensus had been reached as to whose word was more to be trusted; some church historians called Sarpi mendacious and Pallavicini honest, some reversed the adjectives. Sorting this out might well have been confined to an appendix, particularly if the publisher happens to be a parsimonious type; but surely the personal interpolation that occurs in the appendix of Ranke's deserves to be directly under the text: “On approaching these voluminous works [Pallavicini's and Sarpi's], we are seized with a sort of terror.”
¹¹
Nothing in any of the restrained, entirely professional footnotes that accompany Ranke's text on the Council of Trent does the job of this single sentence. The reader cannot escape its clear warning of troubled waters ahead; to stick it in the back of the book is the scholarly equivalent of dragging a lighthouse well into the interior so its flashing beacon will not disrupt the smooth sailing of pleasure cruises. Ranke continues for several paragraphs more, emphasizing just how “formidable” is his “task rendered by the fact we have to be on our guard at every step, lest we should be falsely directed by one or the other, and drawn into a labyrinth of intentional deceptions!”
¹²
No sentence that earns an exclamation point should be kept at a distance from the text; nor should the appendix be summing up: “Even in these folios, from which industry itself recoils in terror, the presence of a poet makes itself felt.”
¹³
To move from terror to poetry in the space of a few paragraphs is a splendid sleight of hand; it should be done center stage, not backstage.
*
Nothing makes clearer that the historian's facts are melted by interpretation on the skillet of the writer's temperament.

We should not be dogmatic. When an asterisk is affixed to a paragraph about a relatively insignificant event—an invasion of Poland, for example, of which there have been so many—and when the asterisk takes us to a footnote saying simply, “See Appendix, Nos. 66, 67, and 68,”
¹⁴
and when appendix no. 66 begins, “I find nothing to add to the contents of these documents, which I have already used for the text ….”
¹⁵
—well, even the most devoted fan of the footnote might think this is one the author could have skipped.

Ranke's reputation spread to England and America and around the world. The
History of the Popes
was translated into English five separate times in the nineteenth century. The American Historical Association elected him its first honorary member. George Bancroft, the great American historian, called him “the greatest living historian.” “Probably no historian in the nineteenth century,” it has been said more recently, “has had an influence on the development of historical scholarship equal to that of Leopold von Ranke.”
¹⁶
Unfortunately, this means his influence on the footnote has been nearly as great; gradually scholars have adopted Ranke's restricted view of notes. The loss it entailed should be emphasized with an example. Both Ranke and that earlier, formidable annotator Pierre Bayle happened to have covered the career of David, the Goliath slayer. Bayle does it in about ten of his expansive pages devoted to the biblical hero—pages that generate ten extended footnotes easily employing more words than the text itself. Branching off from the text and the footnotes are some fifty-five margin notes, most of them citations of sources but a few providing additional commentary. The drama created by such a multiplicity of voices has been demonstrated before, but a small reminder might be in order.

After the beheading of Goliath, Saul had to ask a general for the name of the Israelites' hero, according to Bayle's reading of the Bible. Immediately, Bayle in effect shakes his head in disbelief. Reference mark [f] takes us to the margin for a brief citation; [B] takes us to commentary at the bottom of the page. Our own head bobs, mimicking the gesture of disbelief and, more important, reinforcing it. [B] is a typical, sly digression of Bayle's. “It is somewhat strange that Saul did not know David that Day,” the footnote begins, “since that young Man had [played] several times on his Musical Instruments before him, to disperse those black Vapours
[sic]
that molested him.”
¹⁷
Thus the shake of the head: but of course Bayle doesn't leave it at that; Bayle goes after his source, the Bible, by indirection. “If such a Narrative as this should be found in Thucydides … all the critics would unanimously conclude, that the Transcribers had transposed the Pages, forgot something in one Place, repeated something in another, or inserted some preposterous Additions in the Author's name.”
¹⁸
God's “word” has been safely (or somewhat safely) put in doubt at a time when religious belief was a matter of life and death; the double standard that some of Bayle's colleagues used when considering biblical and classical sources has been challenged at a time when scholarly disputes could turn violent. [C] continues on for some further length, but the point is made; Bayle has once again used the footnote to stir the dramatic pot.

Compare Ranke's single footnote with his ten pages on David—pages that admittedly are lacking the space afforded Bayle. As the text follows David's triumphant rise to power and his tumultuous rule over the Israelites, a single footnote appears. This note likewise questions authority and in its way is useful, but it saps the drama of the moment instead of increasing it. An Amalekite appears before David to inform him of Saul's death; the Amalekite admits that “at the fallen king's entreaty, he had given him the death-blow.”
¹⁹
For that, the overly honest messenger is put to death himself. An asterisk pops up. “As is well known, there is at this point, between the accounts in the last chapter …,” the dry voice of the scholar begins, and one pays attention to only bits of it, really as if a bored mechanic were explaining just what had been fixed in your car—you know it's important to listen but how the voice drones—“certain discrepancy … somewhat arbitrary expedient … a pretended claim ….”
²⁰
One simply wants to jump into one's car and drive briskly home—or in this case to jump back into the narrative and find out where David is headed next.

Ranke lacks the true annotator's flair; his voice becomes distant, less animated when he descends to the bottom of the page. Scholars imitated Ranke, unfortunately, as the nineteenth century moved into the twentieth; their desire to appear scientific gradually undermined the notion of wide-ranging footnotes able to fit into the narrative of a novel as well as of a history, notes that could be as important to a casual memoir as to a scientific report, that were willing to play a starring role or a character part or a walk-on, and that refused to be typecast. Not that other models were unavailable; they could be found scattered over half the globe.

Another German of the same era, Wolfgang Menzel, was keeping the annotating slyness of Gibbon very much alive. Menzel had brought out a three-volume
History of Germany, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time
well before Ranke had finished his
Nine Books of Prussian History;
its footnotes remain a delight. When he arrives at the Seven Years' War, the German historian takes great satisfaction in a French defeat, to the point of gloating. “The Prussians take ten thousand prisoners,” he tells us, but the “booty chiefly consisted in objects of gallantry belonging rather to a boudoir than to a camp.” That would have satisfied most celebrants, but Menzel adds, “The French army perfectly resembled its mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour.”
²¹
A fear of appearing smug may have moved Menzel to pause; he inserts an asterisk. Below, the footnote introduces us to a certain Seidlitz, a Prussian “who covered himself with glory on this occasion ….” He w as “the best horseman of the day.” An unexceptional note, so far, but then with one sentence, one brief digression, Menzel changes everything: “[Seidlitz] is said to have once ridden under the sails of a windmill when in motion.”
²²
The war, a bloody, futile, ugly war, has been turned into a kind of odd sporting event of horsemanship and obstacle courses. Our perspective shifts for a moment; making fun of the French becomes just the high spirits of a winning tennis player running up to the net, shouting, or a defensive back trash-talking his tackled opponent.
*