Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/354



OHAN CHRISTIAN CUNO (born in Berlin) also kept a diary—of four thousand folio pages, bound in four volumes in morocco. Otherwise the manuscript would scarcely have been sold to a dealer in second-hand books and eventually found its way to a learned Brussels librarian in the middle of the nineteenth century.1 Cuno's life, though it had vivid ups and downs, since he began as a soldier and ended as a merchant and banker, would not have concerned very many people except that late in 1768 he met Emanuel Swedenborg and put that in his diary too.

Cuno was interested in theology and he had read Conjugial Love, which caused in him "an irresistible curiosity to make the acquaintance of the author." He confessed that the title of the book made him think the author was insane, as did the claims of the latter to have been in the other world, but "occasionally I found him uttering such thoughtful things, as I had never before heard from academical desks and pulpits, and which never before had entered my thoughts." Therefore he looked for the author and decided to give an account in his diary "of the most singular saint who has ever lived, Mr. Emanuel Swedenborg."

Cuno did not rush to know Swedenborg, however, before he had inquired "most particularly" about his character from the Swedish merchants in Amsterdam, especially from the highly respected Joachim Wretman, with whom Swedenborg dined nearly every Sunday. As the result was most favorable to Swedenborg, Cuno called on him, having first met him in a French bookshop in Amsterdam. In Swedenborg's two comfortable rooms, Cuno almost at once asked him if he had no valet to wait on him in his old age and to accompany him on his travels. "He answered that he needed no one to look after him, because his angel was ever with him . . ."

Cuno comments, "If another man had uttered these words he would have made me laugh; but I never thought of laughing when this venerable man, eighty-one years old, told me this; he looked