Historians are gossips who tease the dead.

The line is a sharp epigram about the moral asymmetry of writing history: the historian can probe, speculate, and insinuate about people who can no longer answer back. Calling historians “gossips” suggests that historical narrative can slide from evidence into rumor, personality, and scandal—especially when it “teases” reputations for wit or effect. Read this way, the remark is less an attack on all historical inquiry than a warning about the temptations of storytelling: the dead are uniquely vulnerable to being reduced to anecdotes, motives imputed without proof, and private lives mined for entertainment. It also hints at Enlightenment skepticism toward received accounts and the need for critical standards in historiography.