What memoir is this? This can't be a memoir that Gastone himself wrote in the third person, right? Presumably another party, who? (Someone who definitely had some juicy gossip...)
No, not GG! He hated writing. At one point, an ambassador reported:
Often His Highness cannot bring himself merely to sign a letter already written by his secretary, who has told me with much feeling that many letters His Highness receives, even from distinguished personages, are left unanswered, because he refuses to sign them.' This was not due to cunning, he observed, but to a peculiar horror ofhis writing -table.
The guy, unsuccessfully, tried to get GG to take up writing as a hobby so that he would tone it down with the prostitutes and gambling.
What Acton says about the memoir is this (it's a bit complicated):
Bibliotechina Grassoccia, a rare series of volumes published by the Giornale di Erudizione in Florence, edited by Filippo Orlando and Giuseppe Baccini, contains brief accounts of the following, drawn from an unpublished MS in the Moreniana entitled Storia della nobile e reale casa de' Medici: ... Vita di Gio. Gastone I Settimo ed ultimo Granduca della R. Casa de Medici, con la lista dei provvisionati di Camera , dal volgo detti i Ruspanti. 1886.
(Of this a translation by Harold Acton, with introduction by Norman Douglas, was privately printed for subscribers by G. Orioli, Lungarno Corsini, Florence, 1930.)
I had already tried to find that volume: the 1886 one is available online, in fairly poor font which makes me less than optimistic about OCR + Google Translate, and the 1930 translation "privately printed for subscribers" means only 365 copies were printed, which means you will pay hundreds of dollars for one bound in red leather and gilt edged pages and signed by the authors, which is not at all what we're after here.
So I dropped that line of investigation. If I learn Italian, I might try the 1886 one, but. Someone still has to learn German and French. :P
Re: Harold Acton: Last of the Medici I: How to make really bad marriages
No, not GG! He hated writing. At one point, an ambassador reported:
Often His Highness cannot bring himself merely to sign a letter already written by his secretary, who has told me with much feeling that many letters His Highness receives, even from distinguished personages, are left unanswered, because he refuses to sign them.' This was not due to cunning, he observed, but to a peculiar horror ofhis writing -table.
The guy, unsuccessfully, tried to get GG to take up writing as a hobby so that he would tone it down with the prostitutes and gambling.
What Acton says about the memoir is this (it's a bit complicated):
Bibliotechina Grassoccia, a rare series of volumes published by the Giornale di Erudizione in Florence, edited by Filippo Orlando and Giuseppe Baccini, contains brief accounts of the following, drawn from an unpublished MS in the Moreniana entitled Storia della nobile e reale casa de' Medici:
...
Vita di Gio. Gastone I Settimo ed ultimo Granduca della R. Casa de Medici, con la lista dei provvisionati di Camera , dal volgo detti i Ruspanti. 1886.
(Of this a translation by Harold Acton, with introduction by Norman Douglas, was privately printed for subscribers by G. Orioli, Lungarno Corsini, Florence, 1930.)
I had already tried to find that volume: the 1886 one is available online, in fairly poor font which makes me less than optimistic about OCR + Google Translate, and the 1930 translation "privately printed for subscribers" means only 365 copies were printed, which means you will pay hundreds of dollars for one bound in red leather and gilt edged pages and signed by the authors, which is not at all what we're after here.
So I dropped that line of investigation. If I learn Italian, I might try the 1886 one, but. Someone still has to learn German and French. :P