The Paris Years

Abstract

After disembarking at Marseilles, Campanella wrote a letter in Latin to the Provençal scholar Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc on 29 October 1634, informing him of his arrival on French soil and alluding in a laconic manner to the grave matters that had forced him to abandon Rome so precipitously - without even having had time to bid farewell to his friends.1 Peiresc had contacted Campanella by letter the previous year, in order to ask for his opinion of Herbert of Cherbury’s De veritate, a letter in which Peiresc had expressed his admiration to the Dominican friar for ‘such exquisite work and such sublime thoughts.’2 Having received the letter in which Campanella manifested his own lively desire to meet as soon as possible with such a patron and protector of the learned, Peiresc hurried to send him a litter that brought him to his home in Aix, where he hosted him for about ten days. As Gassendi (who would himself also be invited to Aix for the purpose of meeting the Dominican) would later recall, Peiresc welcomed the exile with a generosity and affection that elicited from Campanella the deepest emotion and gratitude. When, after several days, Campanella resumed his journey to Paris, he was overcome with emotion upon receiving a sum of money. He confessed that, if in the past he had had the capacity to hold himself back from tears even during the most cruel tortures, he could not hold them back now after such a generous gesture from a friend.3 In a passage from the Oeconomica, he would later affirm that he who gives his own money ought to be thought of as a greater friend than he who offers his own life. This is what Peiresc, glory of the French as well as of philosophers and patron of famous men, had done.4