S.A. Bent, comp. Familiar Short Sayings of Great Men. 1887.

Clement XIV.

[Giovanni Ganganelli, Pope of Rome, born near Rimini, 1705; succeeded Clement XIII., 1769; suppressed the order of the Jesuits, 1773; founded the Clementine Museum; died 1774.]

I have not been pope long enough to forget good manners.

When told, after holding his first reception on his elevation to the papacy, that he should not have returned the bows of the ambassadors.

Cardinal de Bernis, the French literary ecclesiastic, who told Cardinal Fleury that he would “wait” (vide), was said to be very much pleased at Ganganelli’s elevation. “I can easily believe it,” replied the latter: “poets ought to love metamorphoses,” alluding to those of Ovid.

When asked by a lady if he did not fear the indiscretion of his secretaries, the Pope replied, pointing to the fingers of his right hand, “No, madam, and yet I have three.”

Of Houdon’s strikingly life-like statue of St. Bruno, who founded the order of the Silent Carthusians, near Grenoble, where the Grande Chartreuse was afterwards built, Clement XIV. made a remark almost as celebrated as the statue itself, which is now in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli at Rome: “He would speak, did not the rules of his house impose silence.”

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