Libertine Erudition: José Marchena’s Fragmentum Petronii and the Power of False 1

Joaquín Álvarez Barrientos

In his book Questions de littérature légale, Charles Nodier sets out a cat- egorisation or typology of forgeries, one of which he labels “la supposi- tion des passages,” or supposititious passages. These supposed passages, if contexts and paratexts prove suitably convincing, have many features which make them credible. For the most part this can be explained by the fact that forgers play on the desire of the scientific community to possess originals as well as new works by well-known writers, and also specifically because, in addition to the supposed discovery, there is a known author whose reputation and oeuvre have to be completed. The need to fill in gaps led to the invention of supposed letters by the authors of the texts edited, which were published as appendices to their complete works in order to round out their image and complete the list of their writings. It also led to a filling-in of gaps in already known but incomplete texts.

José Marchena (1768–1821) and the Practice of Falsification

This is precisely what was carried out by José Marchena, a Spanish literary figure who was born in Utrera in the province of Seville on 18 Novem- ber 1768 and who died in Madrid on 31 January 1821. He studied Latin and Humanities in Madrid and Salamanca; in the latter university he met other important figures of the period such as Juan Meléndez Valdés, a Francophile like himself, and Ramón Salas, a cultural radical with liberal ideas. In Salas’s home they debated and translated the latest literary and philosophical texts, such as those by Adam Smith and others, authors whose writings were not part of the university curriculum. Marchena published the periodical El Observador (The Observer), which soon closed

1 This chapter forms part of the Proyecto de Investigación del Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia: El otro Parnaso: falsificaciones literarias españolas, HUM2007-60859/FILO. It was translated by Begoña Lasa. The traslation of this paper would not have been possible without the disinterested help of my good friend Professor Philip Deacon, University of Sheffield. 2 joaquín álvarez barrientos after clashes with the censorship apparatus; he was also persecuted for other works for which he was responsible until he finally fled to France to support the Revolution. There he worked as a propagandist for news- papers and pamphlets which were introduced clandestinely into Spain, an activity that led to a his recruitment for the French Foreign Ministry. He remained in France, suffering the vagaries of fortune, until he returned to Spain as part of Napoleon’s army in the role of secretary to General Murat. An untiring propagandist, Marchena edited the Correo Político y Militar of Córdoba and prompted Joseph Bonaparte’s expedition to Andalusia. After the defeat of the French forces, he abandoned Spain, remaining in France until 1820, when a liberal government came to power in Spain; he died in 1821. He translated Molière, Rousseau, Voltaire, Ossian, and Volney, among others, and wrote important literary and philosophical works, such as an Essai de Théologie, defending atheism, and Lecciones de filosofía moral y elocuencia, which includes an outstanding political his- tory of Spanish literature. More importantly, he produced forgeries, such as a fragment of the Satyricon of Petronius, which I will treat later. As far as we know, this example of learned libertine literature was not repeated in any of his other works, but his interest in forgeries remained. For example, he prepared the Ossian poems by Macpherson for publication in the journal Variedades de Ciencias, Literatura y Artes in 1804, although they had already been trans- lated and published, and it would appear that his version had notes. To date, the text has not resurfaced, but it provides proof of his interest in the activities of the Republic of Letters; it was also perhaps an attempt to impress Napoleon, who proclaimed himself Emperor that same year and who enjoyed the poetry of the supposed Gaelic bard. Rather different is his pseudo-Catullus, which appeared in 1806 under the title Fragmentum Catulli, ex Parcarum carmine fatidico, in poemate de Thetidis ac Pelei nuptiis; the work lacks publication details but was first pub- lished in Paris; in 1807 and 1808 two further editions appeared in Jena and Vitoria. According to the 1806 Journal Générale de la Littérature Française, the Catullus text was printed by Dabin and Firmin Didot. The 1807 edition was the work of Heinrich Karl Abraham Eichstaedt, a professor from Jena, who added 20 new lines of his own in addition to pointing out errors in the fragment. The Vitoria edition exhibits certain variants with respect to the 1806 text while asserting its authenticity in the following note: It would be pointless to explain where or how this fragment came to light: the style makes clear that it is not false. The first line of verse of this frag- ment in the ancient manuscript containing it was placed after the one in