Note 82 — Chapter IX · THE REIGN OF PHILIP II

The character of these apostilles, always confused, wordy, and awkward, was sometimes very ludicrous; nor did it improve after his thirty or forty years’ daily practice in making them. Thus, when he received a letter from France in 1589, narrating the assassination of Henry III, and stating that “the manner in which he had been killed was that a Jacobin monk had given him a pistol-shot in the head” (la façon que l’on dit qu’il a etté tué, sa etté par un Jacobin qui luy a donné d’un cou de pistolle dans la tayte), he scrawled the following luminous comment upon the margin. Underlining the word pistolle, he observed, “this is perhaps some kind of knife; and as for ‘tayte,’ it can be nothing else but head, which is not tayte, but tête, or teyte, as you very well know.”—Gachard.d It is obvious that a person who made such wonderful commentaries as this, and was hard at work eight or nine hours a day for forty years, would leave a prodigious quantity of unpublished matter at his death.