1841.
$
Biographical Notice of P. Prémare.
673
the aid of which, he could, for the future, make rapid progress in the study of Chinese. Unfortunately, Fourmont had also drawn up a grammar, or to speak more correctly, had translated that of Varo from the Spanish. The fruits of the labor he had expended, and the merit which he believed he had acquired, all seemed to him anni- hilated in a moment, by the announcement of a book, with which he well knew, his own could not bear a comparison.
-
It is worth the while to see with what unaffected grief he tells of that event; for such it really was to him. He hastened to deposit, for himself, in the Royal Library, before the arrival of his friend's work, the manuscript of the Grammatica Sinica, so as to have it quoted and commented upon by the Abbé Bignon; and when Pré- mare's Notitia came to hand, he by these precautions had prepared the way to compose for himself a comparative examination of the two works, and to make it appear that in all important points they agreed, although his own was the better of the two. He then publish- ed the result of this comparison in the preface to his own grammar.
Prémare was no longer living, when that book appeared; but be- fore his death, he had been informed of the precautions which Four- mont took, to prevent his Notitia from being much known.
"You say (he writes to him in 1733) that they have done all they could to get my Notitia from your hands. If it is from envy, and to suppress yours, that is unjust; if it is to see and become acquainted with it, that is laudable. Only the terms, to get it from your hands, do not please me. When I sent it to you, I knew in whom I confided, and I never dreamed that you would be the only one to read it. I made it in order to render the study of Chinese easy to future mis- sionaries, and to all the savans of Europe, who are, like you, curiou to search into Chinese antiquities.”+
But Fourmont survived his friend, and the work of the latter was lost from view, and remained forgotten, until in spite of the keeper, I found; in the cabinet of oriental MSS., the original of the Notitial Linguæ Sinicæ, and brought it to remembrance by publishing my obligations to Prémare. The autograph manuscript, which is in the Royal Library, is in three small volumes in quarto, and not in five as Fourmont said, written on Chinese paper doubled. The Latin part is in many places difficult to read. From that original, a very exact copy has been made and again from that a second, which has pass-
See the circumstances of that plagiarism, in Rémusat's Elemens de la Grammaire Chinoise, pref. p. 14.
A letter written to Fourmont, from Macao, Oct. 5th, 1733.
VOL. X. NO. X11.
85