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 SAINTE-BEUVE
 
 *^
 
 ESSAYS ON MEN AND 
 WOMEN BY C. A. SAINTE- 
 BEUVE 
 
 EDITED, WITH CRITICAL MEMOIR 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM SHARP 
 
 LONDON 
 
 DAVID STOTT, 370 OXFORD STREET, W. 
 1892
 
 SECOND THOUSAND.
 
 TO 
 MONSIEUR PAUL BOUEGET. 
 
 MY DEAR PAUL BOUEGET, I would have you accept the 
 dedication of this little volume as the expression, however 
 inadequate, of the rare debt of pleasure I owe to you as 
 poet, as novelist, and as critic. But over and above this, it 
 seems fitting I should couple the name of the author 
 of the brilliant and suggestive ' ' Essais de Psychologic Con- 
 temporaine " and the more recent " Portraits d'Ecrivains " 
 with that of the pioneer of modern literary criticism, of 
 criticism as a fine art that I should associate here your 
 name and that of Sainte-Beuve, that delicate analyst and 
 dainty forager among the cultivated flowers and wildwood 
 blooms of literature the "naturalist of minds," as he 
 called himself. 
 
 Permit me, then, to inscribe to you this short prefatory 
 essay, where I present, for English readers, as simply and 
 concisely as practicable, the significant facts in the life of 
 the master-critic, and certain dominant traits physiog- 
 nomic characteristics, so to say of his achievement in 
 literature, an achievement at once so great in extent and 
 so complex in its nature. How winsome and graceful, even 
 now, even in translation, are those "Portraits," with their 
 delicate aroma of rare culture, with their ever-recurrent, 
 vivid, flashing fancies and inspirations. 
 
 I can but regret the insufficiency of my acknowledgment ; 
 but you have read how it was the wont of the Islanders 
 naively to offer the foreign traffickers from oversea their 
 rude iron in exchange for wrought gold. Your friend, 
 
 WILLIAM SHARP. 
 LONDON, Midsummer 1890.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR, . 
 
 I'AGB 
 
 . vii 
 
 
 ... 16 
 
 ROUSSEAU, . 
 
 . 48 
 
 JOUBERT, . . . 
 
 66 
 
 GUIZOT, . 
 
 . 83 
 
 MADAME ROLAND, . 
 
 . . 101 
 
 MADAME DE SOUZA, 
 
 147 
 
 MADAME DE DURAS, 
 
 166 
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER, 
 
 . i3 
 
 MADAME GUIZOT, . 
 
 . . . 212 
 
 MADAME DE REMUSAT, 
 
 . 245 
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT, . 
 
 277 
 
 THE ABBE GALIANI, 
 
 . 3"
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. 
 
 AMONG the innumerable apt sentences with one of which 
 an essay upon Sainte - Beuve, the sovereign critic, might 
 fittingly be introduced, I doubt if there be any better than 
 this: "I have but one diversion, one pursuit: I analyze, 
 I botanize, I am a naturalist of minds. What I would fain 
 create is Literary Natural History." He was, and is, 
 unquestionably the foremost ' ' naturaliste des esprits : " in 
 literary natural history he is at once the Buffon and 
 Humboldt, the Linnaeus and Cuvier, the Darwin even, 
 of scientific criticism. It is conceivable that the future 
 historian of our age will allot to Sainte-Beuve a place 
 higher even than that which he holds by common consent 
 of his cultured countrymen, even than that claimed for 
 him by one or two of our own ablest critics, Matthew 
 Arnold, in particular, and Mr. John Morley. He was not 
 a great inventor, a new creative force, it is true ; but he 
 was, so to say, one of the foremost practical engineers in 
 literature, he altered the course of the alien stream of 
 criticism, compelled its waters to be tributary to the main 
 river, and gave it a new impetus, an irresistible energy, 
 a fresh and vital importance. 
 
 ' During the ten or twelve years in which I have been a 
 systematic reader of Sainte-Beuve, I have often wondered if 
 his literary career would have been a very different one from 
 what we know it, if he had been born ere the parental tides 
 of life were already on the ebb. Students of physiology are 
 vii
 
 viii SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 well aware of the fact that children born of parents beyond 
 the prime of life are, in the first degree, inferior in physique 
 to those born, say, to a father of thirty years of age and to 
 a mother five-and-twenty years old; and, in the second 
 degree, that the children of parents married after the prime 
 of life, are, as a rule, less emotional than those born of a 
 union in the more ardent and excitable years of youth. The 
 present writer admits that he is one of the seemingly very 
 few who regard the greatest of literary critics as also a true 
 poet, not a great, not even an important, but at least a 
 genuine poet, whose radical shortcoming was the tendency 
 to produce beautiful verse rather than poetry, but the best 
 of whose metrical writings may confidently be compared 
 with those of any of the notable contemporary lesser poets 
 of France. And it is because in the "Life, Poems, and 
 Thoughts of Joseph Delorme," in "Les Consolations," in 
 the " Pense'es d'Aout," I for one find so much which is 
 praiseworthy, which is excellent even, that I have often 
 wondered if, his natal circumstances having been other 
 than they were, the author who has become so celebrated 
 for his inimitable Causeries du Lundi might have become 
 famous as a poet. That the keen subjectivity of emotion 
 which is at the base of the poetic nature was his may be 
 inferred from a hundred hints throughout his writings : he 
 was very far from being, what some one has called him, 
 a "mere bloodless critic, serenely impartial because of his 
 imperturbable pulse." To cite a single example: in one of 
 his "Notes et Kemarques," printed in M. Pierrot's ap- 
 peudical volume (Tome xvi me .) to the collected Cau&eriea 
 du Lundi, he says, A propos of his novel " Volupte*," 
 "Why do I not write another novel ? To write a romance 
 was for me but another, an indirect way of being in love, and 
 to say so." It was not " a mere bloodless critic " who penned 
 that remark. But, withal, in his poetry, in his essays, in 
 his critiques, in the episodes of his long and intellectually 
 active life, it is obvious to the discerning reader that 
 Sainte-Beuve rarely attained to the white-heat of emotion 
 for any length of time : that a cold wave of serene judg-
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. h 
 
 ment, of ennui often enough, speedily dissipated the in- 
 toxication of spiritual ardour. But in those white-heat 
 moments he touches so fine a note, reaches so high a level, 
 that one realizes the poet within him is not buried so 
 deep below his ordinary self as the common judgment 
 would have us believe. Had Mile. Augustine Coilliot not 
 been past forty when she gave her hand to the cultivated, 
 respected M. de Sainte-Beuve, Commissioner of Taxes at 
 Boulogne -sur-mer, and had he, then in his fifty-second 
 year, been more robust in health (he died a few months 
 after his marriage), their child might have inherited just 
 that impulse of passionate life, to the absence of which 
 perhaps we owe the critic at the expense of the poet. But 
 the century has been rich in poetic literature, while there 
 have been few eminent critics, till Sainte-Beuve no French 
 critic, great by virtue of the art of criticism alone. It ia 
 only since the advent of Sainte-Beuve, indeed, that criticism 
 has come to be accepted as an art, that is in France ; for, 
 among us, criticism, as distinct from conventional book- 
 reviewing, can at most be said just to exist. 
 
 The Mile. Augustine Coilliot referred to was the daughter 
 of a Boulogne sailor who had married an Englishwoman, 
 and the writers of biographical articles have been fond of 
 tracing to this Anglo-Saxon strain the great critic's strong 
 predilection for English poetry. It may, however, be 
 doubted if the fact that his grandmother was English 
 had much to do with Sainte-Beuve's love of Wordsworth, 
 Coleridge, Southey, and Cowper. Earnestness, austerity 
 even, always deeply appealed to him ; he loved Pascal and 
 Bossuet better than Villon or the Abbe" Galiani ; and this 
 love would in any case have led him to the British poets 
 who are pre-eminently the exponents of earnest reflection 
 upon human life. Besides this, Sainte-Beuve the elder 
 was a man of culture, of a serious bias of mind, an admirer 
 of Shakespeare in the original, and probably, therefore, 
 of other English authors ; and again, Boulogne, even 
 at the beginning of the century, was much frequented 
 by visitors from the other side of the Channel, and its
 
 x SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 schools contained many young Anglo-Saxons sent thither 
 to learn French. Only once, so far as I can recollect, and 
 that incidentally, does he allude to the strain of English 
 blood in him, though with the non-existence of any service- 
 able index to his voluminous writings it is impossible to 
 make any such assertion with assurance. The absence of 
 allusion would, with so scrupulous a literary analyst as 
 Sainte-Beuve, indicate that he laid no stress whatever upon 
 the circumstance. 
 
 Mile. Coilliot was of an old bourgeois family which, 
 though it held a reputable position in the lower town, was 
 accustomed to straits of poverty.. She had not even the 
 smallest dowry to bring to the man who married her, 
 and this was one reason why M. Sainte-Beuve (de Sainte- 
 Beuve, he maintained, though his son discarded the aristo- 
 cratic prefix, partly from a conviction that the family had 
 no right to it, partly from republican scruple) postponed 
 marriage for a goodly space of time after he had won 
 the already middle-aged Augustine's consent to a betrothal. 
 He himself was also a native of Picardy, having been born 
 at Moreuil : a person, indubitably, of exceptional culture, 
 genial, sympathetic, a student, a man of the world. Sainte- 
 Beuve was convinced that he owed his most distinctive 
 traits not to his mother but to his father, though, as a 
 posthumous child, the sole intellectual communion with 
 the latter which he enjoyed was through the discriminative 
 and suggestive annotations which the " Commissioner " was 
 wont to make upon the margins of many of the books in 
 his well-selected library. A few months (not a few weeks, 
 as sometimes affirmed) after his marriage, M. Sainte- 
 Beuve died suddenly ; and within three months from that 
 event, that is on December 23rd, 1804, his wife gave birth 
 to a son, who, in remembrance of both his parents, was 
 christened Charles Augustin. In the invaluable auto- 
 biographical fragment which was found among his papers 
 on the morrow of his death, Sainte-Beuve states that he 
 was brought up by his widowed mother, who had been left 
 with sadly straitened means yet not in extreme poverty,
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xi 
 
 and by a sister of his father, who united her slender income 
 to that of Mme. Sainte-Beuve, and so enabled the small 
 family of three to live in comparative comfort. The boy 
 was carefully educated at the lay school of a M. Ble"riot, 
 and was particularly well grounded in Latin. His intel- 
 lectual development was rapid. He had scarcely entered 
 upon his teens before he had become a stiident, and his 
 mother, sympathetic and intelligent if not actively intel- 
 lectual, gave him every encouragement. It was at this 
 time that he read many of the books which bore his 
 father's marginalia ; and no doubt the mere circumstance 
 of annotation impressed him with the importance of the 
 subject-matter. Some ten years or so later he alluded, in 
 one of his poems, to his father and his indirect influence 
 upon him : 
 
 " Mon pere ainsi sentait. Si, n& dans sa mort m6me, 
 Ma memoire n'eut pas son image supreme, 
 II m'a Iaiss6 du moins son &me et son esprit, 
 Et son gout tout entier 4 chaque marge ecrit." 
 
 What is even more noteworthy is his consciousness of his 
 educational shortcomings when, in his fourteenth year, he 
 realised that he was not likely to learn anything more at 
 M. Ble"riot's school. " I felt strongly how much I lacked :" 
 and in this persuasion he urged his mother to take, or send, 
 him to Paris. It was not an easy thing for the widow to 
 do, but she managed to send him to the capital (September 
 1818), and to arrange for his board with a M. Laudry, a 
 man of some note, who had formerly been a professor at 
 the College of Louis-le-Grand, and was a mathematician 
 and philosopher. At the house in the Rue de la Cerisail 
 of this esprit libre, this free-thinker, as Sainte-Beuve calls 
 him, the young scholar met several men of high standing 
 in the world of letters, among them certain eminent 
 students of science. He seems to have been noticed by 
 them, though he did not quite relish being treated as a 
 hobbledehoy, "as a big boy, as a little man." He was an 
 instinctive student : to learn was as natural to him as to play 
 is easy for most boys, and yet he does not seem to have been
 
 xii SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 devoid of the gaiety and even abandon of youth. At the 
 College of Charlemagne, at the end of the first year of his 
 attendance, he took part in the general competition, and 
 succeeded in carrying off the highest prize for history ; and 
 in the following year, at the Bourbon College, he gained 
 the prize for Latin verse, and had the further distinction 
 of a Governmental award, in the form of a medal, as a 
 special recognition of his scholarly achievements. One of 
 his school friends, Charles Potier, the son of the eminent 
 actor, and himself afterwards successful on the stage, has 
 put on record his recollection of how he and Sainte-Beuve 
 acted the familiar old parts of the clever and the stupid 
 boy ; how while he dug or hoed the garden-plot which 
 had been allotted to them, the other Charles sat idly by, 
 obliviously engaged in some book or indolently abstracted ; 
 and how, in return, he was helped by his friend in the 
 uncongenial task of class-exercises. Sainte-Beuve was free 
 to spend his evenings as he chose, and he voluntarily 
 studied medical science, at first with the full intention of 
 becoming a physician, later with the idea of making the 
 philosophical study of physiology and chemistry his speci- 
 alities, and, finally, simply for the value of the training and 
 its bearing upon that new science of literature which he 
 was one of the earliest to apprehend as a complex unity. 
 The lectures of Messieurs Magendie, Robiquet, and Blain- 
 ville, respectively upon physiology, chemistry, and natural 
 history, interested him profoundly. "I went every evening 
 to these lectures at the Athtnte, off the Palais Royal, from 
 seven to ten o'clock," he says in his autobiographical 
 fragment, "and also to some literary lectures." It wag 
 natural that this preoccupation with strictly scientific study 
 should bias his mind to the materialistic school of thought ; 
 and one is not surprised to learn, on the authority of 
 D'Haussonville, his biographer, that in his own judgment 
 he had reached his true ground, "mon fonds veritable," in 
 the most pronounced eighteenth-century materialism. It 
 is, however, interesting and suggestive to note that even at 
 that time Sainte-Beuve was dominated by his exceptional
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xiii 
 
 mental receptivity ; that he was swayed this way and that by 
 the intellectual duality which has puzzled so many of his 
 readers. Daunou and Lamarck were his prophets ; by them 
 he swore, their words contained the authentic gospel ; but 
 the same week, perhaps, as that in which he proclaimed his 
 enfranchisement from the most abstract Deism, he would 
 announce his conviction that a Supreme Power controlled 
 the tides of life, as when he wrote to his friend, afterwards 
 the Abbe* Barbe, distinctly asserting his recognition of God 
 as "the source of all things." The mystic in him was always 
 side by side with the physiologist, the unflinching analyst, 
 just as the poet was ever comrade to the critic. It is to 
 this, indeed, that Sainte-Beuve owes his pre-eminence, to 
 this tli at is to be traced the fundamental secret of his spell. 
 In later life he was fully conscious of his indebtedness to 
 those early medical and scientific studies ; and many will 
 call to mind his famous defence of the Faculty, in the 
 Senate of the Second Empire, when an attempt was made 
 to limit the medical professors in Governmental institu- 
 tions in the free expression of their views. The very 
 least he could do, he declared, was to give his testimony 
 in favour of that Faculty to which he owed the philo- 
 sophical spirit, the love of exactitude and of physio- 
 logical reality, and "such good method as may have 
 entered into my writings." As a matter of fact, his early 
 scientific training was of the highest value. It is possible 
 that, with his strong religious bias, if he had been educated 
 at an ecclesiastical seminary he would have become one of 
 the great company led by Pascal and Bossuet, a spiritual 
 comrade of his contemporaries Lamennais and Lacordaire ; 
 that, but for his liaison with radical materialism, the Art, 
 the Science of Criticism, would have remained half-formless 
 and indeterminate, and waited long for its first great master. 
 His several scientific excursions led to his following 
 the regular course in the study of medicine ; and, with the 
 goal of a medical career in view, he was an assiduous 
 student till 1827, when he was in his twenty-third year. 
 At that date an event occurred which determined his
 
 xiv SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 particular line of energy. But before this he had already 
 begun to write. These tentative efforts, in verse and prose, 
 conventional though they were, encouraged him to believe 
 that he had the literary faculty, though even then his sense 
 of style was so developed that he realized how wide was the 
 gulf between mere facility and a vital dominating impulse. 
 His mother, who had come from Boulogne to watch over 
 her son, saw these literary indications with an annoyance 
 which grew into alarm ; for at that time the literary career 
 was rarely a remunerative one, and, moreover, her heart 
 was set upon her son's success as a physician or collegiate 
 professor of medicine. It was not, as a matter of fact, till 
 his election to the Academy, that she admitted the wisdom 
 of his early decision ; and even then she complained, and 
 not without justice, of the terrible wear and tear of an 
 unceasingly active literary life. lime. Sainte-Beuve, who 
 lived with her son till her death at the goodly age of eighty- 
 six, seems to have been an intelligent and sympathetic 
 rather than an intellectually clever woman ; and though hei 
 always affectionate Charles loved and admired her, it would 
 not appear that he enjoyed with her any rare mental com- 
 munion. 
 
 The youth who at the College of Charlemagne had gained 
 the History prize attracted the particular attention of his 
 professor, M. Dubois. A friendship, as intimate as practic- 
 able in the circumstances, ensued ; and when, in 1824, M. 
 Dubois founded the Globe, the journal which ere long became 
 so famous and so influential both in politics and literature, 
 he asked Sainte - Beuve to join the staff as an occasional 
 contributor. This was a remarkable compliment, for the 
 young student was quite unknown, and had done nothing 
 to warrant such an honour ; so it is clear that M. Dubois 
 must have had a strong opinion as to the young man's 
 capabilities. Sainte - Beuve was all the more gratified 
 because the staff of writers who had promised their practical 
 support comprised men so famous as Guizot and Victor 
 Cousin, Jouffroy, Ampere, Me'rime'e, De Broglie, and Ville- 
 main. It was not long before the Globe became a power in
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xv 
 
 Paris, and thereafter throughout France and northern 
 Europe : even the great Goethe read it regularly, and 
 alluded to it in terms of cordial praise. It was regarded 
 as the organ of the principal exponents of that earlier 
 Romantic movement which made the latter years of the 
 Restoration so brilliant, and worked like powerful yeast 
 through contemporary thought and literature. Politically, 
 it was the mouthpiece of those who were characterised as 
 les Doctrinaires. Naturally the young medical student, 
 who had scarce unsheathed his virginal literary sword, was 
 not among the first contributors. When M. Dubois did 
 entrust to him several short reviews, he did not allow 
 these to appear without, on his own part, scrupulous 
 revision. They did not attract any particular notice : few 
 were curious as to the personality of the critic whose articles 
 appeared above the initials "S.B." But the editor soon 
 discovered that his youngest contributor was quite able to 
 stand alone so far as literary craftsmanship was concerned. 
 One day he delighted the novice by saying to him, "Now 
 you know how to write ; henceforth you can go alone." 
 Confidence helped style, and Parisian men of letters 
 read with appreciative interest the new recruit's articles 
 on Thiers' "Histoire de la Revolution" and Mignet's 
 "Tableau" of the same epoch. He may be said to have 
 definitively gained his place as a recognised literary critic 
 by the time that he had published his able and scholarly 
 review of Alfred de Vigny's "Cinq Mars." It was still 
 before he had finally given up a medical career that, by 
 means of a review, he formed a new acquaintanceship which 
 was to prove of great importance to him, and not only as a 
 man of letters. One morning, late in 1826, he chanced to 
 call upon M. Dubois, who was engaged in turning over the 
 pages of two volumes of " Odes and Ballads," which he had 
 just received. The editor of the Globe asked Sainte-Beuve 
 to review them, having first explained that they were 
 by an acquaintance of his, "a young barbarian of talent," 
 interesting on account of his forceful character and the 
 incidents of his life Victor Hugo. The volumes were duly
 
 xvi SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 carried off, read, re-read, and reviewed. When the critic 
 took his MS. to his editor he told the latter that this 
 Victor Hugo was not such a barbarian after all, but a man 
 of genius. The review appeared in the issue of the Globe 
 for the 2nd of January 1827 ; and it is interesting to know 
 that among the earliest foreign readers of it was Goethe, 
 who on the 4th expressed to Eckermann his appreciation of 
 Hugo, and his belief that the young poet's fortunes were 
 assured since he had the Globe on his side. And of course 
 the author of " Odes et Ballades" was delighted. He called 
 upon M. Dubois, enthusiastically expressed his gratification, 
 maugre the few strictures upon his poetic and metrical 
 extravagances which the article contained, and begged for 
 the address of the writer, which to his surprise he ascer- 
 tained to be in the same street as that wherein he and 
 his beautiful wife Adele had their apartments. The latter 
 were at No. 11 Rue Notre Dame des Champs, while Sainte- 
 Beuve and his mother resided in simpler and much smaller 
 rooms on the fourth floor at No. 19. The critic was out 
 when the poet called, but a return visit was speedily made. 
 No doubt Sainte-Beuve was not the man to regret any use- 
 ful experience, and yet one may question, from knowledge 
 of the man in his later years, if, could he have relived and 
 at the same time refashioned the drift of his life, he would 
 have made that eventful call. From it, indirectly, arose 
 his "one critical crime," that of wilful blindness to short- 
 comings because of the influence of a personal charm ; and 
 to it, also, was duo the "romantic" prose and poetry of the 
 morbid and supersensitive Joseph Delorme. Poetically, in 
 a word, he would not have had what he calls somewhere 
 his " liaison avec 1'ecole poe"tique de Victor Hugo." On the 
 other hand, he owed much to his intimacy with the Hugos 
 and their circle, which at that time comprised Alfred de 
 Vigny, Lamartine, Musset, and other ardent representatives 
 of Jeune France. The recollection of his critical reception 
 of Alfred de Musset was always, in late years, one of Sainte- 
 Beuve's thorns in the flesh. But the accusation which has 
 been made, that he was chagrined by the poet's manner to
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xvii 
 
 him when they first met, and that the critic allowed his 
 personal resentment to bias his judgment, is ridiculous. I 
 was surprised to see something to this effect in some recent 
 critical volume. Surely the writer must, for one thing, have 
 forgotten that passage in "Ma Biographic" (Nouveaux 
 Lundifi, Tome xiii.) where the author expressly recounts 
 the circumstances.* 
 
 Sainte-Beuve was impressed by Victor Hugo's genius and 
 captivated by his personal charm ; and, at the same time, 
 he was fascinated by Madame Hugo. He became an 
 intimate friend ; visited No. 11 whensoever he willed ; 
 saw the poet at least twice daily; praised, admired, wrote 
 about the beautiful Adele and, indeed, became so en- 
 thusiastically friendly that the brilliant group which 
 formed Le Cdnade (the Guest- Chamber), a club of kindred 
 spirits in the several arts, must have thought that their 
 latest recruit was qualifying to be the prophet of woman's 
 supremacy in all things. As a matter of fact, the Hugo 
 circle was not fettered by severe social conventionalities ; 
 yet even the self-confident Victor made objections when he 
 found his numerous friends, from the polished Alfred de 
 Vigny and the sentimental Lamartine to "Musset 1'Ennuye " 
 and the brilliant light-hearted essayist, whom Monselet 
 
 * " Quelques biographes veulent bien ajouter que c'est alors que je 
 fus presente a Alfred de Musset. Ces messieurs n'ont aucune idee des 
 dates. Musset avait alors a peine dix-huit ans. Je le rencontrai un 
 solr chez Hugo, car les families se connaissaient ; mais on ignorait chez 
 Hugo que Musset fit des vers. C'est ce lendemain matin, apres cette 
 eoir6e, que Musset vint frapper a ma pofte. II me dit en entrant : 
 ' vous avez hier recit6 des vers ; eh bien, j'en fais et je viens vous les 
 lire.' II m'en recita de charmants, un peu dans le gout d' Andre 
 Chenier. Je m'empressai de faire part a Hugo de cette heureuse 
 recrue poetique. On lui demanda desormais des vers a lui-meme, et 
 c'est alors que nous lui vimes faire ses charmantes pieces de I' ' An-ialouse 
 et du Depart pour la chasse (le Lever)." After this explicit statement 
 that at the Hugo's no one knew that the youthful Musset wrote verse ; 
 that the latter sought out the critic, read him some of his poems, 
 which his courteous auditor found charming ; and that Sainte-Beuve 
 made haste to announce to Hugo that a promising poetic recruit had 
 come to the fore ; after this, it is absurd to allude to Sainte-Beuve as 
 prejudiced against Musset from the first on account of pique. 
 L
 
 x viii SAIN TE-BE UVE. 
 
 afterwards with so much justice called "the smiling critic" 
 (la critique souriant), addressing his wife as Adelc, as freely 
 as they called each other Alfred or Victor or Charles, as 
 frequently as they applied one to the other the term 
 "master." In France every writer is called cher maitre by 
 some other author. As for Sainte-Beuve, his complaint was 
 so severe that, though he laughed at it afterwards as a 
 flirtation with Romanticism, it might best be called 
 Addalsme. This one-sided passion was no doubt the 
 mainspring of the sufferings, thoughts, and poesies of thu 
 melancholy Joseph Delorme, that Gallic counterpart of the 
 much more unendurable Werther. True, something of 
 Sainte-Beuve's deeper melancholy of "seriousness" may 
 have been due to his remote English strain, and his 
 splenetic temperament to the fact that his mother 
 passed several dolorous months between his birth and the 
 death of her husband. It seems strange that so acute 
 a critic of literary physiology should not have seen 
 that his "spleen" was due more to want of outdoor 
 life and to incessant mental preoccupation, and (in tho 
 "Joseph Delorme" period) to what I have in persiflage 
 called Adelalfwie, than to the circumstance of his mother 
 having borne him during months of widowhood, or to 
 that of his grandmother having been an Englishwoman. 
 Although he was never married, Sainte-Beuve was of a 
 susceptible nature. There is absolutely no warrant for tho 
 belief that he was so deeply in love with Adele Hugo 
 that his whole life was affected by the blight of unre- 
 quited affection. On the contrary, if he was the critique 
 nouriant in the world of literature, he was the critique rjai 
 in the affairs of life. 
 
 For a time everything prospered with Le Cenacle. Then 
 one member and then another grew lukewarm or directly 
 seceded. Sainte-Beuve slowly diverged from the views ho 
 had allowed himself to expound, overborne as he had been 
 by the charm of Victor and the fascination of Madame 
 Hugo. The already famous poet does not seem to have had 
 any particularly high appreciation of his critical friend as a
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xix 
 
 man of letters ; indeed, Sainte-Beuve was commonly re- 
 garded as nothing more than, at most, a conscientious and 
 able critic, with genuine enough but mediocre original 
 powers. In the first flush of intimacy, however, Hugo was 
 as immoderate in his praise of his new acquaintance as 
 was his wont in the matter of superlatives.* But when the 
 "eagle," the "royal meteor," ceased from the making of 
 critical honey, when, in giving a present of a book, he no 
 more inscribed above his signature on the flyleaf such 
 pleasant phrases as, "To the greatest lyrical inventor 
 French poetry has known since Ronsard" but, instead, 
 uttered such words as "theatricality," "violence," 
 "eccentricity," then there was a cooling of enthusiasm. 
 
 But about this time, and indirectly owing to the Hugo 
 connection, two important things happened. A journal- 
 istic, a literary career was opened to Sainte-Beuve. He at 
 once availed himself of the chance : so eager was he, indeed, 
 that he left his surgeon's case at St. Louis' Hospital, where 
 he had been a day-pupil, and it is said that he never went 
 back for it. His vocation was in the art of literature, not 
 in the science of medicine. As soon as he realised this, 
 and saw his way to a possibility of living by the pen, he 
 not only busied himself as a journalist, but prepared to 
 undertake an ambitious literary task, a work of real magni- 
 tude. Probably if it had not been for Victor Hugo and 
 Sainte-Beuve's ardent if transient romanticism, the admir- 
 able studies on "The French Poetry of the Sixteenth 
 Century" would not have been written then, at any rate, 
 
 * la Mr. Frank T. Marzials' admirable " Life of Victor Hugo " 
 there is the following allusion to Sainte-Beuve: "There is one of 
 {Hugo's] odes, written in December 1827, and inscribed 'To my friend, 
 8.B.,' in which he addresses that young gentleman as an 'eagle,' a 
 'giant,' a 'star,' and exhorts him to make the acquaintance of light- 
 ning, and to roll through the realms of thought like a ' royal meteor* 
 with trailing locks. We, who chiefly know a later Sainte-Beuve, can 
 scarcely recognise him in the character of a [poetic] comet ; and, even 
 then, he himself . . . must sometimes have smiled at these grandiosa 
 epithets. Sitting somewhat apart in the shadow, and rhyming a 
 sonnet to a white cap, or an eye of jet this is how he lives in Alfred 
 de Mussct's reminiscences, and I take it the sketch is truer to nature."
 
 xx SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 and in the form in which we know them. The critic had 
 been impressed by the enthusiasm of Hugo and his circle 
 for the early poets. He read, studied, and came to the 
 conclusion that these were unworthily neglected. He dis- 
 cerned in them, moreover, the poetic ancestors of the 
 enthusiastic members of Le C6na.de: both were uncon- 
 ventional, individual, comparatively simple. The series of 
 studies which, as the result, appeared in the Globe, 
 delighted the writer's friends and attracted no little share 
 of literary attention ; but it was not till the publication 
 of them collectively in book form that Sainte-Beuve's name 
 became widely known as that of a scholarly and above 
 all an independent critic. It was the prevalent literary 
 vogue to decry the pre- classicists, or, at least, to affirm that 
 there was little of abiding worth prior to Moliere, Racine, 
 and Comeille. By insight, critical acumen, felicitous 
 quotation, and a light and graceful while incisive style 
 (not, however, characterised by the limpid delicacy and 
 suppleness of his best manner, as in the Causerics du 
 Lundi), he won many admirers and did good service to 
 literature, and particularly to literary criticism. 
 
 From this time forward Sainte-Beuve's career was a 
 prosperous one, chequered now and again indeed, but in 
 the main happy and marvellously fruitful. For some years 
 he dreamed of poetic fame ; gradually he realized that his 
 well-loved " Life, Poetry, and Thoughts of Joseph Delorme," 
 his "Consolations," and his "August Thoughts" would 
 never appeal to a public outside the literary world of Paris, 
 and even there that they were assured of mere respect at 
 most ; and finally, he became convinced that it was neither 
 as poet nor as novelist, but as critic, that he was to win the 
 laurels of fame. To the last, however, he had a tender 
 feeling for his poetic performances, and there was no surer 
 way to his good graces than admiration of his poems. The 
 most unsympathetic critic cannot regret Sainte - Beuve's 
 having devoted so much time and so many hopes to those 
 springtide blossoms of a summer that never came. At the 
 least, thoy helped their author to a wide sympathy, to a
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xxi 
 
 deep insight, to that catholicity of taste which enabled him 
 not only to enjoy for himself, but to interpret for others, the 
 essential merits of a great number of poets, writers so 
 absolutely distinct as Virgil and Vector Hugo, Villon and 
 William Cow per, Dante and Firdausi, Theocritus and 
 Molierc, lluiisard and Racine, and so forth. 
 
 When Dr. Veron founded in 1829 the Revue de Paris, 
 the predecessor of the more famous Revue des Deux 
 Mondes, he made haste to enrol Sainte-Beuve among his 
 contributors. Ho thought it possible that the poet might 
 make a great name, but he was quite convinced that the 
 critic would become a prince of his tribe. The result of his 
 trust was more than satisfactory. Although Sainte-Beuve 
 was only five or six and twenty when he wrote his articles 
 on Boileau, Racine, La Fontaine, Rousseau, Andre" Chenier, 
 and others, how admirable they are, and how well worth 
 perusal even at the present date. In style, it is true, 
 they are graceful and scholarly rather than winsome with 
 individual charm, for the latter does not become a 
 characteristic of his work till he has reached the noon of 
 his maturity ; but, even with this qualification, they are 
 unquestionably delightful reading. 
 
 In the summer of 1830 Sainte-Beuve was in Normandy, 
 at Honfleur, on a visit to his friend Ulric Guttinguer, when 
 the July Revolution overthrew many institutions besides 
 that of the old monarchy. With the advent of Louis 
 Philippe arose schism among the brilliant staff of the 
 Globe. Some maintained that the hour had come in 
 which to cry "Halt" to further innovations; one or two 
 wavered and talked of compromise ; the more strenuous 
 affirmed that there was as pressing need of progress as ever. 
 Among the progressists was Sainte-Beuve, who had hurried 
 back to Paris. The Globe became the organ of the Saint- 
 Simonians ; and though Sainte-Beuve never identified him- 
 self with the school of Saint-Simon, he fought valiantly as 
 a free-lance by the side of its exponents. But, before this 
 change in the destiny of the paper (for, after the split, it 
 abruptly lost its place in the van of Parisian journals, and
 
 xxii SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 was sold at a loss to a sanguine experimentalist, who in 
 turn speedily disposed of it to the Saint-Simonians), a 
 tragi-comedy, in which Sainte-Beuve and his former good 
 friend M. Dubois were the chief actors, occurred. The 
 clash of opinions at the editorial office begat heated 
 discussions, reproaches, taunts even. Dubois reminded 
 Sainte-Beuve, in not very complimentary terms, of how 
 he had given him a lift into the literary world : the critic 
 made a scathing reply. The blood of all the Dubois boiled 
 in the veins of the worthy editor, and he challenged Saiute- 
 Beuve to mortal combat. So high did feeling run that the 
 matter was really a serious one ; though we may hesitate 
 to accept the great critic's after-statement, that he went to 
 the duel with the full intention of killing his adversary. 
 It was the Joseph Delorme lying latent in Charles Augnstin 
 Sainte-Beuve who made this affirmation. The preliminaries 
 of the duel were arranged with all circumspection ; both 
 antagonists made their wills and felt alternately heroic an<< 
 despondent ; and at last the hour came. It was a chill and 
 wretched morning, for the rain came down in a steady pour. 
 What was the astonishment of M. Dubois and the seconds 
 of both principals to see Sainte-Beuve take up his position 
 with his pistol in his right hand and his unfolded umbrella 
 upheld by his left. To the remonstrances of the seconds, 
 he protested that he was willing to be shot, if need be 
 but to be drenched, no ! (Je veux bien tre tu6 ; mais 
 mouilU, non.) Four shots were exchanged, and editor and 
 critic remained unhurt. Neither their ill-success nor the 
 rain damped their bloodthirstiness, however, and if it had 
 not been for the firm remonstrances of the seconds, who 
 declared that the demands of honour had been amply 
 satisfied, one or other of the combatants would have suffered 
 for his folly. Happily, this was Sainte-Beuve's sole martial 
 experience. As one of his detractors long afterwards 
 maliciously remarked, thenceforth he confined himself to 
 stabbing with the pen, and to destroying literary reputa- 
 tions by a causerie. 
 Sainte-Beuve's renewed connection with the Globe was not
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xxiii 
 
 of long duration, however. He had no interest but one of 
 curiosity in the doctrines of the St. Simonians : neither 
 more nor less than he, pre-eminently the hedonist of modern 
 literature, felt in those of the enthusiasts who were bent 
 upon reconciling democratic and radical politics with the 
 most conservative Roman Catholicism. Although he knew 
 and admired Lacordaire, Lamennais, and Montalembert, 
 he refused to co-operate with them in the writing of articles 
 for their journalistic organ, L'Avenir. These eminent men 
 were not alone in their inability to understand Sainte- 
 Beuve's mental temperament. They thought that because 
 he seemed profoundly interested he was therefore a disciple. 
 But the foremost critic of the day was a man of a passionate 
 intellectual curiosity : his sovereign need was for new 
 mental intellectual impressions. It was his insatiable 
 curiosity into all manifestations of mental activity, as 
 much as his exceptional receptivity, elasticity of sympathy, 
 searching insight, and extraordinary synthetic faculty, that 
 enabled him to become the master-critic. His catholicity 
 of taste was his strength as, with others, it is often a 
 source of weakness. It was not through inability to 
 find anchorage in the sea of truth that his was a rest- 
 less barque, with sails trimmed for seafaring again as 
 soon as a haven was entered : it was because he was a 
 literary viking, consumed with a passion for mental 
 voyaging and remote explorations because he loved the 
 deep sea, and found that even the profoundest inlets, the 
 grandest bays, were too shallow for him to rest content 
 therein. 
 
 "No one," he says, "ever went through more mental vicissitudes 
 than I have done. I began my intellectual life as an uncompromising 
 adherent of the most advanced form of eighteenth-century thought, as 
 exemplified by Tracy, Daunou, Lamarck, and the physiologists : la est 
 man fonds veritable. Then I passed through the psychological and 
 doctrinaire school as represented by my confreres on the Globe, but 
 without giving it my unqualified adhesion. For a time thereafter I 
 had my liaison with the school of Victor Hugo, and seemed to lose my- 
 self in poetical romanticism. Later, I fared by the margins of St. 
 bimonism, and, soon thereafter, liberal-Catholicism as represented by 
 Lamennais and his group. In 1837, when residing at Lausanne, I
 
 xxiv SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 glided past Calvinism and Methodism . . , but in all these wanderings 
 I never (save for a moment in the Hugo period, and when under the 
 influence of acharin) forfeited my will or my judgment, never pawned my 
 belief. On the other hand, I understood so well both the world of books 
 and that of men that I gave dubious encouragement to those ardent 
 spirits who wished to convert me to their convictions, and indeed 
 claimed me as one of themselves. But it was all curiosity on my part, 
 a desire to see everything, to examine closely, to analyse, along with 
 the keen pleasure I felt in discovering the relative truth of each 
 new idea and each system, which allured me to my long series of 
 experiments, to me nothing else than a prolonged course of moral 
 physiology." 
 
 The short space at my command prevents my enlarging 
 upon the bint conveyed in the last phrase, except to sav 
 that it is directly indicative to Sainte-Beuve's fundamental 
 critical principle. To him criticism was literary physiology. 
 With him a series of critiques meant a series of studies of 
 (1) a writer as one of a group, as the product of the shaping 
 spirit of the time ; (2) a writer as an individual, with all his 
 inherited and acquired idiosyncrasies ; (3) a writer as seen 
 in his writings, viewed in the light of all ascertainabl 
 personalia ; (4) the writings themselves, intrinsically and 
 comparatively estimated. But, primarily, his essays were 
 as much studies of character, of moral physiology, as of 
 literary values. 
 
 After his withdrawal from the too sectarian Globe, Sainte- 
 Beuve joined the staif of the National. With the ultra- 
 Republican principles of that paper he had but a lukewarm 
 sympathy, but his friend Armand Carrel, the editor, assured 
 him that nothing would be expected from him save purely 
 literary contributions. For about three years (1831-4) lie 
 remained on the staff of the National, and it was in the 
 last year of the connection that he published his one novel, 
 "Volume." The book had a gratifying reception so far 
 as wide notice was concerned ; but it was generally 
 adjudged to be unwholesome in tone and somewhat too self- 
 conscious in style though so beautiful a nature and so 
 refined a critic as Eugenie de Guurin affirmed it to be a 
 notable and even a noble book. That the prejudice against 
 the author on account of it must have been strong, is
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xxv 
 
 evident from the fact that when it was suggested to Guizot, 
 then Minister of Public Instruction, that he should confer 
 upon Sainte - Beuve a professional post at the Normal 
 School, just vacant through the resignation of Ampere, 
 he refused to appoint a man, howsoever brilliantly qualified, 
 who had written such books as "Joseph Delorme" and 
 "Volupte"." Guizot was conscientiously scrupulous in this 
 matter ; and to show that he bore no personal ill-feeling, he 
 appointed Sainte- Beuve to the secretaryship of an historical 
 Commission, a post which the equally conscientious critic 
 resigned in less than a year, on the ground that it was 
 becoming or had become a mere sinecure. Another instanco 
 of his conscientiousness is his having declined, about the 
 same date, the Cross of the Legion of Honour a dis- 
 tinction he would have been proud to accept had he felt 
 assured that it -was offered in recognition of his literary 
 merits, but upon which he looked suspiciously because it 
 came when the Ministry of M. Mole and M. Salvandy, both 
 personal friends of his, was in power. Three years after 
 the publication of his novel, he issued the last of his 
 purely imaginative productions, the "Peusees d'Aout." 
 In the same year (1837) he went to Switzerland, and having 
 been invited' by the Academy of Lausanne to deliver a 
 course of lectures, he settled for a time in the pleasant Swiss 
 town. There he delivered in all eighty-one lectures, tho 
 foundation of his famous and voluminous work on Port 
 Royal (the story of the religious movement in the seventeenth 
 century known as Jansenism), which occupied him inter- 
 mittently for twenty years, is a monument of labour, 
 research, and scrupulous historic fairness, and, though the 
 least read, is one of his greatest achievements. 
 
 Both before and during his Swiss sojourn, and for about 
 ten years thereafter, Sainte-Beuve was a regular contributor 
 to the most famous magazine in Europe, the Ramie des Deux 
 Mondes, which had been founded in 1831, heir to the 
 defunct Revue de Pans. The first number contains an 
 article by him upon his friend George Farcy, a victim of 
 the July Revolution ; and thereafter appeared that long
 
 xxvi SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 and delightful series of "Portraits Litte"raires," studies of 
 contemporary as well as of deceased writers, which not only 
 gave him a European reputation as a leading critic, but 
 ultimately won him his election to the French Academy. 
 This signal good-fortune happened in 1845, on the occasion 
 of the death of Casimir Delavigne ; and the irony of circum- 
 stances was obvious to many in the fact that the eulogium 
 on the new "immortal" had to be pronounced by the 
 reluctant Victor Hugo, his immediate predecessor. It was 
 a memorable date, that 17th of February ; and if among 
 the many "immortals" who have been raised to glory 
 by the Academy there are relatively few whose fame will 
 be imperishable, there are not many with juster claims to 
 remembrance, though in widely different degrees, than th 
 two authors who were then elected to the coveted honour, 
 Prosper Merime'c and Sainte-Beuve. 
 
 His periodical articles and his books (including five 
 volumes of essays which he had contributed to the Revue de 
 Pans and the Revue des Deux Monties) brought him in a 
 very moderate income ; and it was not till 1840 that his 
 means were materially improved. In that year he was 
 appointed one of the keepers of the Mazarin Library. The 
 appointment meant not only an increase of income, but a 
 change of residence, for it comprised a suite of residential 
 apartments at the Institute. Up to this time Sainte-Beuve 
 had been living in two small rooms on the fourth floor of a 
 house in a remote street living extremely moderately, and 
 in a seclusion almost monastic ; indeed, he had even adopted 
 the ruse of calling himself Joseph Delorme. In his new 
 abode he was happy as well as comfortable, and thankfully 
 embraced the opportunity of study and leisurely composition 
 which his post afforded him. This pleasant state of affairs 
 came to an end after the Revolution in 1848. A ridiculous 
 charge of corruption was brought up against him by envious 
 and inimical journalists and political adversaries ; the 
 ultra-Republicans accused him of having accepted bribes, 
 hush-money, from the late Government. In vain Sainte- 
 Beuve protested, and vainly he demanded a searching
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xxvii 
 
 inquiry. The hint was taken up : everywhere he was 
 abused, condemned, scathingly ridiculed. Even when, at 
 last, the truth was revealed, and the greedy public learned 
 that the amount of Sainte-Beuve's indebtedness was 4, 
 and that that sum had been expended upon the alteration 
 of a smoking chimney in his department of the Library, 
 and the charge inadvertently entered in the official books 
 simply under the heading " Ste. Beuve," even then there 
 were many ungenerous souls who kept up the parrot cry 
 of contumely. It somewhat unfortunately happened that 
 about this time Sainte-Beuve left Paris, and of course there 
 was at once a shout of triumph from hig enemies. The 
 real reasons for his departure were primarily financial, 
 though no doubt he was not at all sorry to leave a city 
 which had for the time being become so disagreeable to him 
 moreover, his distaste for the political issues then in full 
 development was very strong. But after his resignation 
 of his post at the Mazarin Library, which he had given in 
 the heat of his indignation during the bribery controversy, 
 he found that he would have to do something at once fof 
 a living. The political turmoil of 1848 was unfavourable 
 for the pursuit of pure literature ; and despite his high 
 reputation, the editors whom he knew could not promise 
 him a sufficiency of remunerative work until the times 
 changed for the better. Accordingly, he very willingly 
 accepted the Professorship of French Literature at the 
 University of Liege, offered to him by M. Rogier, the 
 Belgian Minister of the Interior. Liege he found mono- 
 tonous and provincial, but he stayed there for some time, 
 and attracted more than local, more even than national 
 attention by his preliminary course of lectures on the 
 chronological history of French literature. There, also, 
 lie delivered the famous series on Chateaubriand and his 
 Contemporaries, which amply demonstrated his independ- 
 ence as a critic, though many of his judgments and reserva- 
 tions brought a veritable storm of reproaches and angry 
 recriminations about his ears. For a long time he was 
 called an ingrate, a hypocrite, a resentful critic inspired
 
 xxviii SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 by pique ; but ultimately it was acknowledged that he had 
 written the ablest and justest critique of the celebrated 
 egotist and poseur. The fundamental reason of the attacks 
 upon Sainte-Beuve was on account of his so-called incon- 
 sistency. True, among his early "Literary Portraits" 
 was a flattering essay on Chateaubriand, but he was then 
 under the magic charm of Madame Recamier, at whoso 
 house, Abbaye-aux-Bois, he heard read aloud in solemn 
 state numerous extracts from the famous writer's un- 
 published "Memoirs." Moreover, Chateaubriand had 
 inspired him with a temporary enthusiasm. When, with 
 fuller knowledge of the man and his writings and with 
 the "Correspondence" to boot, he found that he had been 
 mistaken, he said so. The commonplace mind detests 
 inconsistency with an almost rancorous hatred, oblivious 
 of the fact that, as Emerson has said, only fools never 
 change their views. 
 
 " Chateaubriand and his Literary Group under the 
 Empire" is the v/ork which marks the turning-point in 
 Sainte-Beuve's genius. Thenceforth he was, in truth, the 
 foremost critic of his time. In style as well as in matter, 
 his productions from this time are masterpieces ; and 
 though there are some essays which could now be dispensed 
 with, either because of the fuller light cast upon their 
 subjects by later students, or on account of certain short- 
 comings in the matter of prejudiced judgment, seven-tenths 
 of them may be read to-day with much the same pleasure 
 as they were perused two, three, or four decades ago. 
 
 Late in 1849 Sainte-Beuve, much to the chagrin of his 
 Belgian friends and admirers, left Liege and returned tc 
 Paris. He was still hesitating how best to employ his pen, 
 when he received a flattering but to him somewhat startling 
 offer from his friend, Dr. de Veron, editor of Le Constltu- 
 tionnel. This was to the effect that he should write a 
 literary article for that paper every week. The reason of 
 his perturbation was that hitherto he had always composed 
 in leisurely fashion, and for papers or magazines whose 
 readers were cultivated people, much more interested in
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xxix 
 
 literature than in politics and local news. Fortunately, 
 M. de Veron overruled his scruples, and so there began 
 that delightful and now famous series of literary critiques 
 which the writer himself entitled Causeries du Lundi. 
 He called them "Monday Chats," because each appeared 
 on a Monday. For five days every week he "sported his 
 oak," and occupied himself for twelve hours daily with 
 the study of his subject and the writing of his article ; 
 on the sixth he finally revised it ; Sunday was his sole 
 holiday from his task. By next morning he was deep 
 in the subject of the Causerie for the following week. It 
 was the need to be concise and simple that did so much 
 good to Sainte-Beuve's style. The charm of these Causeries 
 can be appreciated alike by the most cultivated and the 
 most casual reader. As two of his most eminent friends 
 said of them, they were all the better insomuch as he had 
 not had time to spoil them. From the end of 1849 to 
 almost exactly twenty years later he wrote weekly, in the 
 Constitiitionnel or the Moniteur, with a single considerable 
 interval, one of those brilliant, scholarly, fascinating 
 articles, collectively, a mass of extraordinarily varied work 
 now embodied in fifteen goodly volumes. 
 
 When the coup d'ttat occurred, Sainte-Beuve gave his 
 approval to the Empire. Thereby he won for himself 
 no little unpopularity. His first materially disagreeable 
 experience of this was when he proceeded to lecture at the 
 College de France, to the Professorship of Latin Poetry at 
 which he had been appointed. The students would have 
 none of him. He was an Imperialist, a Government payee, 
 he wrote in the official organ, Le Moniteur. He was 
 literally hissed from the lecture-room, whence he retired 
 in high dudgeon. Ultimately the lecture he had tried to 
 deliver, and those which were to have followed, were 
 published in a volume entitled "A Study on Virgil." The 
 single intermission to his regular literary work, already 
 alluded to, was during the four years when he held the 
 ' post of Maitre des Conferences at the Ecole Normale, at a 
 salary of about 240. When he again took up literary
 
 xxx SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 journalism, after his resignation of his professional post, it 
 was once more as a contributor to the Constitutionnel. He 
 now made a fair income, for his weekly contributions to 
 that journal brought him in, by special arrangement, an 
 annual salary of 624. The Causeriea were now called 
 Jfouveaux Lundis, "New Monday-Chats." In the main 
 this series (begun in 1861) is equal to the Causenes du 
 Lundi, though there are signs ever and again of lassitude. 
 This might well be. The work was a steady and serious 
 str.iin, and the great critic's health gradually became 
 undermined. In 1865, when he was in his sixty-first year, 
 he wrote : " I am of the age at which died Horace, 
 Montaigne, and Bayle, my masters : so I am content to 
 die." It was in this very year that good fortune came to 
 him, and greatly relieved the mental strain under which 
 his strength was waning. He was appointed to a Senator- 
 ship of the Second Empire, a position which secured him 
 an annual income of 1200. His senatorial career was a 
 dignified though not a brilliant one. He was ever on the 
 side of true freedom, and was so independent in his atti- 
 tude that he gave offence to those of his fellow-senators who 
 were Imperialists and resented his championship of religious 
 liberty. This muzzled wrath broke into clamorous fury at 
 an incident concerning which an absurd fuss has been 
 made. Sainte-Beuve had arranged to give a dinner to 
 some of his friends, on the occasion of Prince Napoleon's 
 departure from Paris, ar.d, to suit that gentleman, had 
 appointed Friday (which chanced to be Good Friday) as 
 the night. The Prince, Eilruond About, Gustave Flaubert, 
 Re"nan, Robin, and Taine duly joined their host and spent 
 a pleasant evening. But the jackals were on the trail. 
 A howl arose about a conspiracy to undermine the religious 
 welfare of the nation ; the diners were arraigned as impious 
 debauchees ; and Sainte-Beuve in particular was upbraided 
 for his " scandalous orgy." 
 
 One other and much more serious annoyance troubled 
 the latter years of Sainte-Beuve. This arose from his 
 writing for Le Temps (whither he had transferred his
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xxxi 
 
 Causeries, on account of a servile attempt to muzzle him 
 on the part of the temeritous directorate of the Monitevr) ; 
 and as Le Temps was hostile to the Government, M. 
 Rouher and his confreres in the Ministry, as well as the 
 whole Senate, thought it shameful that the critic should 
 write for that journal, and did all in their power to force 
 him into conformity with their views. But Sainte-Beuve 
 was firmly independent, and emerged triumphantly from 
 the ordeal. 
 
 For some years Sainte-Beuve had been in indifferent 
 health. At last he became ill indeed, and his malady 
 (the stone) caused him such extreme pain that he could 
 only stand or lie when he had writing to do, as to sit was 
 impossible. By the late summer of 1869 his case was 
 desperate. Ultimately a perilous operation was made, but 
 the patient sank under its effects. He died in his house 
 in the Rue Mont Parnasse, on the 13th of October, at the 
 age of sixty-four. Along with the biographical fragment 
 found on his desk on the morrow of his death, which 
 concluded with the celebrated words, "Voue" et adciine* & 
 mon metier de critique, j'ai tache d'etre de plus en plus un 
 bon et, s'il se peut, habile ouvrier" "Devoted with all my 
 heart to my profession as critic, I have done my utmost 
 to be more and more a good and, if possible, an able 
 workman;'' along with "Ma Biographic" were found 
 written instructions as to his funeral. He directed that 
 he should bo buried in the Cemetery of Mont Parnasse 
 beside his mother; that the ceremony should be as simple 
 as practicable, and without religious rites or even a friendly 
 oration. All due respect was paid to his wishes, and yet 
 seldom has a funeral been attended with greater honour. 
 It was not the Senator of the Second Empire who was 
 carried to the grave, but the greatest of French critics, 
 a writer of European renown. In the immense crowd 
 which formed the voluntary procession estimated at ten 
 thousand all political differences were forgotten : uncom- 
 promising Imperialists and equally uncompromising Re- 
 publicans walked in union for once, in company with nearly
 
 xxxii SAINTE-BEL'VE. 
 
 all who were distinguished in letters, science, or art. The 
 only words uttered above his grave were more eloquent in 
 their poignant simplicity than the most glowing exordium : 
 "Farewell, Sainte-Beuve ; farewell, our friend. 1 ' 
 
 IL 
 
 Sainte-Beuve's literary career may be studied in three 
 main phases. The novelist least claims our attention ; the 
 poet demands it ; while as a critic he appears as of supreme 
 importance. 
 
 " VolupteV' so far, but, to amuch greater extent, the "Vie, 
 Poesies, et Pensees de Joseph Delorme," may be taken as 
 embodying some of the positive nud many of the spiritual 
 experiences of Sainte-Beuve's life. We have his own 
 testimony to the fact that "Joseph Delorme" was "a 
 Jiretty faithful representation of himself morally, but not 
 in the biographical details." This alone would give a 
 permanent iuterest to the book, as it is admittedly in 
 some degree the autopsychical record of the most complex, 
 brilliant, protean spirit of our time. No one indeed has 
 yet limned Sainte-Beuve for us as he, for instance, has 
 revealed the heart, mind, and soul of Pascal. Neither 
 D'Haussonville, Ids biographer, nor any of his critics, 
 French and English, has done more than introduce us to 
 the author of so many inimitable Causeries ; none of them 
 has made us intimate with Sainte-Beuve himself, notwith- 
 standing the array of authentic facts and suggestive hints 
 which can now be marshalled. He is easiest to be dis- 
 cerned in his writings : not in this essay nor in that series 
 of essays, not in the grave pages of " Port Royal " nor in 
 the alluring byways of the "Lundis," neither in the 
 sensitive poet of " The Consolations " nor in the austere 
 pages of "Pensees d'Aout," not in that Gallic Werther, 
 Amaury, the hero of "Volupte"," not even in Joseph 
 Dfclorme, but in all collectively. One is always being 
 surprised in him. There is one man in Amaury, another
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xxxiii 
 
 in Joseph Delorme, a very different one in "Peuse'es 
 d'Aout," a still more distinct one in the " Nouveaux 
 Lundis," and in his single short tale, the charming 
 "Christel," there are hints of a personality whose 
 shadowy features rarely, if ever, haunt the corridors of the 
 " Causeries." As a matter of fact, Sainte-Beuve became 
 more and more reserved as he found himself deceived by 
 the glowing perspectives of youth. Often he was con- 
 sumed with a nostalgia for a country whence he was half- 
 voluntarily, half-perforce an exile, the country of the 
 Poetic Land where once he spent "six fleeting celestial 
 months, "* as a native of which he would fain be regarded 
 even in the remote days when he found himself an alien 
 among those whom lie yearned to claim as brothers. 
 Thenceforth the man shrank more and more behind the 
 writer. The real Sainte-Beuve was no doubt less recluse 
 in the days when he was a member of Le CinacU, when 
 lie was one of the sprightliest in the Hugo circle, and 
 laughed with de Vigny and sighed with Lamartine, debated 
 with Hugo, and flirted with Adele. But even then his 
 nature could not have been transparent to all, otherwise 
 Alfred de Musset would not have drawn his picture of 
 him as sitting somewhat apart in the shadow, rhyming a 
 sonnet to a demoiselle's cap, or a lyric to his mistress's 
 eyebrow. Truly, as he himself says, in the preface to his 
 " Podsies Completes," almost all of us have within our- 
 selves a second self ("nous avons presque tous en nous 
 un homme double "). 
 
 The "Vie, Po6sies, et Pense'es de Joseph Delorme" has 
 been put forward as an effort on the part of Sainte-Beuve 
 to introduce into France a poetic literature as simple, fresh, 
 and spontaneous as that of the naturalistic poets of 
 England, and of Cowper and Wordsworth in particular. 
 Readers of that notable book will find it difficult to 
 perceive any direct Wordsworthian influence, though the 
 author makes clear his great admiration for the English 
 poet and his school. Joseph Delorme, in fact, is a cousin- 
 * Causeries du Limdi, Tome xvi. 
 C
 
 xxxiv SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 gcrman to Don Juan, closely akin to Chateaubriand's 
 Rene", the French half-brother to Goethe's Werther. He is 
 the most literary of the family, but while ho is as senti- 
 mental as Rene, and as melancholy as Werther, he has not 
 the frank debonnaire licentiousness of Don Juan. He is 
 morbid in his thoughts and in his desires. The fellowship 
 of a Tom Jones would have done him good, the laughing 
 Juan, even, would have acted as a tonic. "The road of 
 excess leads to the palace of wisdom," says Blake ; but the 
 poet-visionary did not mean the kind of excess in which 
 the too introspective Joseph indulged. He said one good 
 thing, however, for which he will be remembered when he 
 spoke of his dread of marriage because of its restrictions 
 upon his " rather rude philanthropy " (a euphemism for 
 " free morals "), and defined it as une egoisme d, deux 
 personnes. 
 
 Rousseau and Goethe were the literary godfathers of 
 Joseph Delorme, who was born when the author of his 
 being was only five-and-twenty. The nature of the book 
 is indicated by a passage from Senancour's "Obermann," 
 which exactly strikes the key-note : " I have seen him, I 
 have pitied him ; I respected him ; he was unhappy and 
 virtuous. He had no transcendent misfortunes ; but, on 
 entering life, he found himself in a mesh of distastes and 
 satieties (' il s'est trouve' sur une longue trace de dugouts et 
 d'ennuis ') : there he is still, there he has dwelt, there he 
 has grown old ere age has come upon him, there he has 
 literally buried himself." The Adolphe of " Obermann," 
 indeed, is but a more melancholy and a more austere 
 " double " of Joseph. 
 
 The following lines are fairly representative of the domin- 
 ant sentiment of the book. 
 
 V(EU. 
 
 " Tout It jour du loisir ; river avec des larmts ; 
 Vers midi, me coucher a Vombre des grands charmet; 
 Volr la vigne courir sur mon toll ardnigt, 
 El mon, vallon riant sous le coteau boi*6;
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xxxv 
 
 Chaqve soir m'endnrmir en ma douce foJie, 
 
 Comme I'heureux niisseau qui dans man, pre s'oublie; 
 
 Ne rien voulolr de plus, ne pas me souvenir, 
 
 Vivre a me sentir vivre I . . . Et la mart pent venir." * 
 
 But a healthier note is often struck, as in the blithe 
 strain wedded to a pathetic thought, " Ce ciel restera bleu 
 Quand nous ne serous plus ; " often, too, one fresh and 
 haunting, as in 
 
 ' Et dans ses blonds cheveux, ses blanches mains errantes 
 Tels deui cygnes nageant dans les eaux transparentes." . . . t 
 
 The "Life, Poetry, and Thoughts " are worth reading; 
 the book contains much that is interesting, no little that is 
 suggestive, not infrequently thoughts, lines, and passages 
 of genuine beauty. But it can enthral only those who are 
 enjoying the exquisite sentimentalism of adolescence ; ere 
 long it will interest only the student of a certain literary 
 tpoch, the epoch begun by Rousseau, that finds its acme 
 in Byron, which knows its autumn in Werther, that has 
 its grave in the Rene* of Chateaubriand, its brief phan- 
 tasmal second life in Joseph Delorme. The poetry in it 
 is often sterile, and is frequently forced, self-conscious, 
 obtrusively sedate in imagery, occasionally even is markedly 
 derivative. "We find Sainte - Beuve the poet much better 
 worth listening to in " Les Consolations." In point of style 
 there is not very much difference, though a greater dexterity 
 is manifest, a more delicate metrical tact, perhaps also a 
 more unmistakably natural note. But there is no more 
 kinship between the author of "Les Consolations" and 
 
 *A WISH. 
 
 " Leisure all the livelong day ; to dream, with tears ; towards noon, 
 to rest in the shade of great elms ; to see the vine-branches trail over 
 my slated roof, and my own little valley smiling under its wooded 
 slope : to fall asleep each evening rapt in my sweet folly, as the happy 
 brook which loses itself in my meadow : to wish for nothing more, to 
 remember nought, in a word, to live as I would fain live ! . . . Then 
 death may come!" 
 
 t " Through her fair hair her white hands wandering, 
 
 Like two swans swimming in transparent waters." . . .
 
 xxxvi SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 Joseph Delorme than between Don Juan and Manfred. 
 The volume was the product of the religious mysticism 
 which underlay Saiute-Beuve's mental robustness a trait 
 which allured him often by dangerous pitfalls, but also 
 enabled him to understand so well the great religious 
 writers of whom he still remains the most sympathetic as 
 well as the most brilliant exponent. It seemed ultra- 
 saintly to some of those who read it on its appearance. 
 Be'ranger annoyed the author by some sly disparagement ; 
 Prosper Merime'e cynically smiled at what he took to be 
 a literary ruse ; Gustave Planche and others gleefully 
 whetted their vivisectionary knives. On the other hand, 
 it was for the most part well received by the critics, 
 and no cruel witticism like that of Guizot on its predecessor 
 (that Joseph Delorme was " a Werther turned Jacobin 
 and sawbones") went echoing through Paris. The public 
 remained indifferent, but the poet was gratified when 
 Chateaubriand wrote him a letter of praise, with a character- 
 istic " l5coutez votre genie, Monsieur ; " when Hugo and 
 Alfred de Vigny waxed enthusiastic ; when Be'ranger sent 
 an epistle of kindly criticism; and when Lamartine un- 
 bosomed himself as follows: "Yesterday I re-read the 
 'Consolations' . . . they are ravishing. I say it and I 
 repeat it : it is this that I care for in French poetry of this 
 order. What truth, what soul, what grace and poetry I 
 I have wept, I who never weep." (This must have amused 
 Sainte-Beuve, if not then, later. The sentimental Lamar- 
 tine was always weeping over one thing or another, and the 
 "J'en ai pleure, moi qui oncques ne pleurc," is as little 
 apt as though Mr. Pickwick were to say " I have smiled, 
 who never smile.") .... It was at this time, the period 
 wherein "The Consolations" were produced, that Sainte- 
 Beuve dreamed upon Latmos and believed that the goddess 
 whom he loved was going to reward his passion. The 
 "celestial months" passed, but they were ever an oasis 
 to which he delighted to return in memory. He even 
 wished, in later years, that those who desired to know him 
 should seek and find him, a happy Dryad flitting through
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xxxvii 
 
 the shadowy vales and sunlit glades of the woodlands of 
 song. No doubt the real Sainte-Beuve is as much in this 
 book of verse as in any other of his library of volumes, 
 but it is the Sainte - Beuve of a certain period, and even 
 then only one of two selves. "The Consolations" always 
 remained his favourite volume. It contains a great deal 
 of gracious and even beautiful verse, in style often clear as 
 a trout-stream, fresh and fragrant as a May-meadow, though 
 even here, as certainly with his other " poe'sies," one is 
 inclined to say of him, in the words of his own Joseph 
 Delorme, that he had not sufficiently "the ingenuousness 
 of deep faith, the instinctive and spontaneous cry of 
 passionate emotion." Some of the "Consolations" are 
 extremely Wordsworthian how closely, indeed, he could 
 enter into the spirit of the great English poet is evident 
 in the following free translation of that most lovely sonnet 
 beginning, " It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free" : 
 
 " (Test, un beau soir, un soir paisible et solennd; 
 A la fin du saint jour, la Nature en priere 
 Se tait, comme Marie a geitous sur la pierre, 
 Qui treniblante et muetle ecoutait Gabriel: 
 
 La mer dart; le soleil descend en paix du del; 
 Mais dans ce grand silence, au-des^us et derriere, 
 On entend I'liymne heureux du triple sanctuairc, 
 Et I'onjue immense ou gronde un tonnerre eternel. 
 
 blonde jeune filte, a la tele baissie, 
 Qui marches pres de moi, si ta sainte pensee, 
 Semble mains qui la mienne adorer cc moment, 
 C'est qu'aM sein d' Abraham vivaiit toute I'annee, 
 Ton ame est de pri&re, a chaque heure, baignee ; 
 C'est que ton cxiir recite un divin firmament." 
 
 This, of course, is but indifferent verse after the superb 
 original, but it shows both how Sainte-Beuve was inspired 
 by Wordsworth, and how ably he too could write, albeit 
 as a translator, in simple and unaffected strains. Although 
 the second, third, and fourth lines bear no resemblance to 
 
 " The holy time is quite as a Nun 
 Breathless with adoration. ....'"
 
 xxxviii SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 and the rest of the version is only in a lesser degree un- 
 literal, it must be borne in mind that the full beauty of 
 the original is untranslatable, and that the French poet 
 strove to convey to the French reader the same im- 
 pression as an English reader would gain from the English 
 sonnet. However, the importance of this and other experi- 
 ments is not to be overlooked. Many of the younger poets 
 owe much, directly or indirectly, to the lesson taught by 
 Sainte-Beuve in what a hostile critic has called his 
 " Anglo-French metrical essays." 
 
 Yet, while it is true that the man is perhaps to be seen 
 most clearly in his poetry, "it is in following the poet 
 that we find the man," as M. Anatole Franco says, 
 even here he is an evasive, an uncertain personality. The 
 strange mixture of a sensuousuess that is at times almost 
 sensual, a mysticism which would suit a religious enthusiast, 
 a clarity of thought and an exquisite sense of the beauty of 
 precision and artistic form, a frequent remoteness of shaping 
 emotion, coupled with keen perception of the sovereign value 
 of that resistless formative power which makes the creatures 
 of the imagination more real than the actual beings about 
 us,* all this, along with his complex style, which now is 
 simple, now is heated with fires unlit of the sun, and again 
 is involved, obscure almost, wrought to an excessive finish, 
 tourmentt, makes Sainte-Beuve the poet a profoundly 
 puzzling as well as interesting study. In his last volume 
 of verse, particularly, he is, as one of his critics has said, 
 " tourmente a 1'exces, souvcnt d'une (Strangete 1 qui de"con- 
 certe." But it is quite wrong to assert, as has been affirmed 
 more than once, that Sainte-Beuve's poetic melancholy, the 
 undertone of each of his three books, is assumed. One 
 writer in Le Temps (or Le. Figaro) recently found a proof 
 of this literary insincerity in some remarks made by the 
 critic in his old age, remarks treating lightly his former 
 mysticism, with an avowal that " his odours of the sacristy 
 
 * In his own words he sought to arrive " at that particularity and 
 at that precision which causes the creations of our wind to become 
 altogether ours and to be recognised as ours."
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xxxix 
 
 were really meant for the ladies." " I have been guilty of 
 a little Christian mythology in my time," he admitted, 
 " but it all evaporated long ago. It was for me, as the 
 swau to Leda's wooer, merely a means to reach fair readers 
 and to win their tender regard." But this, quite obviously, 
 is mere badinage. If there be any truth in it at all, it 
 is one of those remote filaments of fact which go to the 
 weaving of the web of truth ; nothing more. His melan- 
 choly was a genuine sentiment, which found expression 
 differently at divers times. Even in his latest essays, 
 when his natural geniality is allowed free play, it is trace- 
 able in those occasional bitternesses and abrupt dislikes, 
 those half-weary and yet mordant " asides," which show 
 that the man was by no means wholly absorbed in the 
 critic. He himself, as we have seen, attributed this funda- 
 mental strain of sadness in his nature to his mother's 
 early widowhood. " My mother bore me in mourning and 
 grief," he says ; " I have been as it were soaked in sorrow 
 and bathed in tears and, well, I have often attributed 
 to this maternal grief the melancholy of my young years, 
 and my disposition to weariness of mind and spirit."* 
 
 * Vide " Correspondance de Sainte-Beuve :" Lettre a M. de Frabifere, 
 25th June 1862. 
 
 The " melancholy of my young years " must not be taken too literally 
 Sainte-Beuve's boyhood seems to have been a happy one. He had 
 love affairs when he was a small child, moreover, if we may take hi? 
 own word for it. In cue of his poems he has the following Boulogne 
 reminiscences : 
 
 " N'eus-je pas ma Camille, 
 Douce blonde nu front pur, paisible jeune fllle, 
 Qu'au jardin je suivais, la devorant des yeux? 
 N'eus-je pas Mathilde, au parler serieux, 
 Qui remplae.a Camille, et plus d'uue autre encore?" 
 
 " Had I not my Camille, sweet white-browed fair maid, calm damsel, 
 whom I followed to the garden, devouring her with my eyes? Had I 
 not Mathilde, who replaced Camille, and many others beside?" 
 " Oh, these nursemaids, these nursemaids ! " the precocious young rmie 
 may have thought, shaking his curly head, ere he went to play on the 
 sands or upon the old ramparts.
 
 xl SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 But, as M. France lias well said, it was another mother, 
 the Kevolution, who inoculated him with the malady of 
 the age that malady of which M. Taine, the most 
 brilliant of the disciples of Sainte-Beuve, has alluded to so 
 eloquently: "It was then that the malady of the age 
 appeared, the spiritual inquietude typified by Werther and 
 Faust, almost identical with that which, in a somewhat 
 similar time, agitated men at the beginning of the century. 
 I would call it the discontent with present horizons, the 
 vague desire after a higher beauty and an ideal happiness, 
 a pathetically sad aspiration towards the infinite. Man 
 suffers in doubting and yet he doubts : he tries to recapture 
 his lost beliefs, they are really in his hand." (Hist, de la 
 Lit. Anylaise, Tome iii.) This melancholy nature, induced 
 by the spirit of the age, derived now from this source and 
 now from that, and occasionally insincere, is most marked 
 in its least genuine aspects in the " Peuse'es d'Aout." There 
 is nothing in it so fine, in the poetry of melancholy, as the 
 "Lines" in the "Consolations" (inscribed to Mme. V. H. ; no 
 other, of course, than the immaculate Ade"le Hugo) beginning 
 
 "Pins fraiche que la vigne au bord d'un antre frais." 
 
 The chief poem in the collection, entitled " Monsieur 
 Jean," is an ill-considered attempt at a didactic novelette in 
 verse. The author did not so regard it : he believed that 
 he had wooed and won Musn Pedestris, and had given his 
 poetry the tone of serene wisdom. Jean is a natural son of 
 Jean Jacques Rousseau, and is a simple, gentle creature, 
 eager to expiate in his remote village, by piety and endless 
 good deeds, what he cannot but regard as the disastrous 
 glory of his father. But the poet's failure is a signal 
 instance of the folly of metrical didactics. "Jean " bored the 
 reading public, who combined in awarding the " Pensees 
 d'Aout" what its author called a really savage reception. 
 In this book, more than anywhere else in his poetical 
 writings, is true what Matthew Arnold said of him, that ho 
 lacked something of flame, of breath, of pinion : here, more 
 than elsewhere, his poems ctitoient la prose coasted peril-
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xli 
 
 ously near the land of prose. As a matter of fact, the book 
 was a complete failure : it caused the pendulum of his 
 poetic repute to swing back, and to be caught up and never 
 let go again. Moreover, its reception stifled the poet in 
 Sainte-Beuve. It is a poignant personal note that under- 
 lies his famous remark, "Everyone contains a dead poet 
 in his soul." 
 
 But, after all, even the most reluctant reader of Sainte- 
 Bcuve as a poet cannot, if he be minded to criticism, 
 afford to overlook this important section of the life-work 
 of the great critic. It is necessary, indeed, not only to an 
 understanding of the man but of the writer. For in these 
 Poesies CompUtes, to quote the words of a sympathetic 
 critic, "Se peint 1'ame la plus curieux, la plus sagace, et la 
 plus complique'e qu'une vieille civilisation nit jamais pro- 
 Juite" "is revealed the most inquiring, the most saga- 
 cious, the most complex spirit" to whom the age has given 
 birth. 
 
 It is not feasible here, in the limited space at my 
 command, to attempt any analysis of "Volupte"," Sainte- 
 Beuve's sole effort in fiction save the short tale " Christel." 
 Some day when a critical historian, curious as to the main- 
 springs of, let us hope, the long since cured maladie du 
 Kiecle, will occupy himself with the fortunes of Werther and 
 Rene', Adolphe and Amiel, he will not omit to include in 
 that strange company the amorously sentimental and senti- 
 mentally melancholic Amaury. For myself I admit I find 
 that youth quite as entertaining as either of the more famous 
 offspring of Goethe or Chateaubriand. 
 
 As a historian Sainte-Beuve showed remarkable aptitude, > 
 but it is as an historian of mental phases, episodes, and 
 general events, rather than of the ebb and flow of outer 
 weal, the conflict of kingdoms and the fortunes of inter- 
 iH'cine warfare, the rise of this house or that dynasty, the 
 ruin of cities and the growth of States. He could have been 
 neither a Gibbon nor a Niebuhr, neither a Guizot nor a 
 Mommsen, not even a Macaulay or an Ampere ; but he is in 
 the domain of historical literature what the author of "The
 
 xlii SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 History of the Rise of Morals in Europe " and " The History 
 of Rationalism " is in the sphere of ethical research, though, 
 of course, there is a radical distinction between the method 
 of Mr. Lecky and that of the author of " Port Royal." To 
 the accomplishment of this immense undertaking Sainte- 
 Beuve brought his inexhaustible patience, his almost unerr- 
 ing faculty of wise discrimination, his precise and scientific 
 method of analysis and exposition, and a style which gave 
 wings to words yoked to dry and apparently outworn 
 subjects. Still, the work is not one that will bo widely 
 read a generation hence. Only exhaustive and definitively 
 accurate detail could save from oblivion so lengthy a history 
 on so remote and secondary a subject ; and though in its 
 day "Port Royal" fulfilled the need even cf the student, 
 scholars now seek their information in the less ambitious 
 but more thorough "studies" of a score of specialists. It 
 may safely be said, however, that no student of Pascal, or 
 of the religious' movement in the seventeenth century, will 
 ever be able to dispense with Sainte-Betive's masterly work. 
 As the literary critic, as the first who brought into tho 
 analysis and exposition of literature the methods of exact 
 science, Sainte-Beuve must always have a high place in the 
 literary history of the nineteenth century. Ultimately, it 
 may be that his chief glory will lie in his having been the 
 pioneer of a new literary art, in his having been the torch- 
 bearer who gave light and direction to many, not heeding 
 much whether his torch, its service done, should thereafter 
 be seldom seen and rarely sought. His example has been of 
 almost inestimable value, and not among his countrymen 
 only. All of the foremost living critics of France, from the 
 eldest and most brilliant, Henri Taine, to Paul Bourget, 
 the late mile Hennequin, Ernest Tissot, and Charles 
 Morice, have learned much from him some a life-long 
 lesson, others guiding hints only. As for our own critics, 
 it is, broadly speaking, scarcely to be gainsaid that with 
 us criticism as an art has no acknowledged existence. 
 There are brilliant exceptions who prove the rule, but 
 they are few and their limitations are so marked as for the
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xliii 
 
 most part to deserve the epithet insular.* As for the 
 ordinary criticism in our journals and weekly papers, the 
 less said about it the better for our complacency, since 
 little of good as against a great deal of reprobation would 
 have to be uttered. A change must soon come. Personally, 
 I doubt if it will occur till our utterly mistaken and mis- 
 chievous system of anonymous reviewing whether in 
 magazines, weekly papers, or journals is given up in 
 favour of the more just, more valuable, in every way 
 better habit in vogue among our neighbours. It would 
 be ridiculous to urge that there is no sound and honest 
 criticism among us ; but it is hypocritical for those who 
 know better to pretend that unsigned critiques are as free 
 from jealousy, spite, and all uncharitableness, as, for the 
 greater part, these would be if it were not for the shield of 
 anonymity. It has come to this pass, that no one occupied 
 in the literary life ever thinks of paying attention to un- 
 signed reviews, be they in the foremost weeklies or in the 
 provincial press, unless the writers be known. Praise and 
 blame, enthusiasm and indifference each has to be accepted 
 suspiciously. The result is that literary criticism, instead 
 of being an interpreter and a guide, now to warn and now 
 to allure, is a maker of confusion, a will-o'-the-wisp of 
 judgment, and is no longer hearkened to or followed as of 
 yore. The real cure for this lamentable state of affairs is 
 the cultivation of the literary sentiment, of the feeling of 
 the sacredness of literature ; and, thereafter, of scrupulous 
 heed, both on the part of the critics and of the cultured 
 public, for the exemplification of criticism as an art. 
 Mere book -noticing, of course, like the poor, we shall have 
 always with us : a circumstance not incompatible with the 
 
 * I should like to draw attention here to one of the younger and 
 lesser known critics who are working towards a new science of 
 literary criticism : I allude to Mr. John M. Eobertson, whose "Essays 
 towards a Critical Method" (Fisher Vnmn) is one of the few English 
 studies in literary criticism deserving special attention. No one can 
 read this book of Mr. Robertson's, or ]rnile Hennequin's " La Critique 
 Scientifique," without realising how limitcdly apprehended this ntw 
 art of criticism is in England.
 
 xliv SA 1NTE-BE UVE. 
 
 growth and culture of literary criticism. But possibly the 
 best, perhaps the only feasible means to induce this fortu- 
 nate result, in the first instance, would be the universal 
 adoption of signed and responsible reviews. 
 
 In the ' ' Notes et Remarques " at the end of the sixteenth 
 volume of the Causertes du Lundi occurs the following : 
 "I have given no one the right to say He belongs to us 
 (II est den ndtres}." It is this absolute independence, this 
 many-sidedness of Sainte-Beuve, which is one of the secrets 
 of his success. He can be an intellectual comrade of every 
 poet, from the austere Dante to the gay Villon ; of every wit 
 and satirist, from Rabelais to Rivarol ; of every builder up 
 of ethical systems and every iconoclast of creeds, of the 
 ancient Latins and Greeks as well as of the modern Germans 
 and English ; and, moreover, at all times a comrade 
 with an eye to the exact value of and pleasure derivable 
 from his companion of the hour. Here, it seems to me, 
 is his strength and his weakness. He can be bon camarade 
 with every one, but he is never able to forget that he is the 
 observer of the thoughts, speech, action, and principles of 
 those with whom he fares. He has charming ruses for 
 evading detection. He will laugh gaily, he will smile, he 
 will allude to this or that scarcely pertinent matter, he will 
 altogether diverge from his subject, he will reintroduce it 
 casually, and possibly dismiss it lightly, and yet he will 
 have had but one aim in view from the outset, to analyse 
 and estimate the writings of his author, to discover the 
 shaping circumstances of the latter as an individual, to 
 strip him of what is extraneous, and reveal him as he really 
 i?, in a word, to portray him in one composite photograph, 
 to give us a likeness of the man as well as of the author 
 which shrill be none the less true because it resolves into 
 definite features the fleeting and indeterminate traits which 
 \\e perceive now in the one now in the other. He is 110 
 believer in the doctrine of the isolation of an author from 
 his writings ; it seems as absurd to him as it would be to 
 assert that no notice of the prism may be taken in a study 
 of the chemic action of light passing therethrough. But,
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xlv 
 
 on the other hand, the question arises it' Sainte-Beuve is 
 not apt to be misled by his own theory, having to make 
 positive affirmations based on facts necessarily in some 
 degree suppositions. Herein is the hidden reef of literary 
 psychology, and even so great a critic as M. Taine is 
 occasionally missuaded by semblances which he takes for 
 actualities. The elder writer is content to be a careful 
 scientific observer, and delights in artistic demonstration 
 of his newly perceived and otherwise accumulated facts : 
 M. Tainc, M. Bourget, and the later literary analysts go 
 further, and wish to reach down through facts to their 
 origins, and to the primary impulsion again of the influences 
 which moulded those origins and, finally, by cumulative 
 verification to transform hypothesis into demonstrable 
 truth. But, fundamentally, both means are identical ; the 
 basis of each is the adoption, for literary research, of the 
 method of exact science. Sainte-Beuve hated fixed judg- 
 ments ; he had none of the arrogances of his critical kindred. 
 He neither said himself, nor cared to hear others saying, that 
 a book was definitively good or definitively bad ; he love' 1 , 
 the nuances, the delicacies and subtleties of criticism, as 
 much as he disliked rigid formulas. Yet his studies in 
 literary psychology, as M. Paul Bourget would call them, 
 are not only acute but are generally profoundly conclusive : 
 it is his suave and winsome manner that makes many think 
 he is too complaisant to be critical, though he has himself 
 said, that in his "Portraits" the praise is conspicuous 
 and the criticism inobtrusive " dans mes Portraits, 
 le plus souvent la louange est exte"rieure, et la critique 
 intestine." The man himself continually evades us, but 
 the critic is always trustworthy. He has, to a phenomenal 
 degree, the delicate flair which detects the remotest perfume 
 amid a confusion of fragrances ; he knows how to isolate it, 
 how to detach it, how to delight us with it and then when 
 we are just upon the verge of deeper enjoyment he proves 
 that the scent is not so exquisite in itself after all, but owes 
 much to the blending of the exhalations of neighbouring 
 flowers and blossoms and herbs. While we are still wavering
 
 xlvi SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 between conviction and disenchantment, lie explains that 
 it has this peculiarity or that, because of the soil whence it 
 derives its nurture, n thin rocky earth or loam of the valley. 
 Then, finally, lest we should turn aside disappointedly, he 
 tells us something about it which we had but half noticed, 
 praises fragrance and bloom again, and with a charming 
 smile gives us the flower to take with us, perchance to 
 press and put away, like sweet-lavender or wild-thyme, a 
 hostage against oblivion of a certain hour, a certain moment 
 of fresh experience. 
 
 What range for one man to cover ! Let one but glance 
 at the contents of all these volumes : besides this novel, 
 these three collections of poems, here are seven volumes 
 of "Port Royal" (containing a multitude of vignettes 
 and sketches as well as carefully - drawn pictures and 
 portraits), fifteen volumes of the "Causeries du Lundi," 
 volumes upon volumes of "Nouveaux Lundis," "Portraits 
 Litte'raires," "Portraits des Contemporains," "Derniers 
 Portraits" and "Portraits des Femmes," this "Tableau 
 historique et critique de la Poe*sie Franchise et du Theatre 
 Francois au xvi e Siecle," these miscellaneous essays and 
 studies. Then those richly suggestive "Notes," and 
 "Thoughts," and " Remarks " must be added, and the recent 
 volume edited by M. Jules Troubat, Sainte-Beuve's latest 
 secretary and "good friend with qualifications," and an "In- 
 troduction" here and an " fitucle " there. Let us take up 
 M. Charles Pierrot's "Table Ge'ne'rale et Analy tique " (form- 
 ing the appendical volume to the Causeriea du Lundi), 
 and glance through his painstaking analyses. Sainte- 
 Bcuve, we find, has written no fewer than nineteen separate 
 studies on celebrities of the sixteenth century, among them 
 personages so distinct as Rabelais and Casaubon, Mario 
 Stuart and Montaigne ; seventy-four upon the great spirits 
 of the seventeenth century, including more than one careful 
 essayupon Pascal ; forty-three upon the men of the eighteenth 
 century, comprising Le Sage and Voltaire and Vauvenargues, 
 Rousseau and Diderot and Grimm, men of letters, men 
 of science, philosophers, priests, kings, and diplomatists;
 
 CRITICAL MEMOIR. xlvii 
 
 thirty, again, upon those who flourished in the reign of 
 Louis XVI., with vivid portraits of Malesherbes and Necker, 
 Rivarol and Beaumarchais, Condorcet and Bernardin de St. 
 Pierre ; eleven not less thorough 6tude,s upon the rarest 
 spirits of the Revolution, Mirabeau and La Fayette, Andre 
 Chenier, Mine. Roland ; and, at last, those brilliant essays 
 upon the makers of our own century, from Napoleon and 
 other generals on the one hand, and from Chateaubriand 
 and Joubert on the other, to Gustave Flaubert, and Taine, 
 and Theodore de Banville ; in all, one hundred and 
 five "portraits" of men and women of the most divers 
 genius. To these (close upon three hundred, including the 
 not infrequent two or even three essays upon one individual) 
 must be added the studies upon foreign writers of ancient 
 and modern times, Theocritus and Firdausi, Virgil and 
 Dante, Frederic the Great, Goethe, Gibbon, Cowper, not 
 to speak of a score or so of essays on various themes, 
 from "DuGe'nie Critique" in the "Portraits Litte*raires " 
 (Tome i.) to "Du Roman Intime" in the "Portraits dea 
 Femmes." 
 
 It will readily be understood, therefore, that the essays 
 which succeed these introductory words represent but a 
 fragment of the critical work of Sainte-Beuve. The reader 
 must be generous to the translators, moreover, for the 
 great critic's style does not lend itself to easy reproduction. 
 Yet, though something essential of the charm is lost, enough 
 remains to make a translation from him well worth while ; 
 the matter is there, though the charm of manner may 
 escape the ablest interpreter. I cannot honestly say that in 
 these essays Sainte-Beuve is quite as fascinating as in the 
 original ; yet they will certainly serve to give the English 
 reader not merely some comprehension of the intellectual 
 range and insight of Sainte-Beuve, but some idea also of his 
 grace of style and individual charm. They have been selected 
 with a view to show his many-sidedness, his genuine sym- 
 pathies with the most antagonistic types, his delightful 
 method, his guiding principle. 
 
 I should like to conclude with a selection from the
 
 xlviii SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 several hundred detached " Pensees" of Sainte-Beuve which 
 are often so beautiful, so clever, or so witty, which are 
 always so suggestive ; but that is impracticable now. Those 
 who would become more intimate with the man as well 
 us with the writer should turn, in particular, to the two 
 hundred and more "Notes ct Pensees" in the eleventh 
 volume of the Canneries du Lundi, and to the richly sugges- 
 tive posthumous collection, "Les Cahiers de Saintc-Beuve." 
 For "liuis," however, I may select one, peculiarly apt to 
 the great critic himself, as well as to the epoch. It is the 
 cxxvii. of the "Notes ct Pense'es : " "Great things may 
 be accomplished in our days, great discoveries for example, 
 great enterprises ; but these do not give greatness to our 
 epoch. Greatness is shown especially in its point of de- 
 parture, in its flexibility, in its thought." 
 
 WILLIAM SHARP.
 
 PASCAL. 
 
 IN writing some pages upon Pascal, I labour tinder 
 disadvantage ; it is that of having some time ago written 
 a large volume of which he was almost entirely the subject. 
 I shall try, in speaking now to a larger public, of a book 
 which ranks among the classics, to forget what I have 
 written of him that is of too special interest, and to limit 
 myself to what will interest the generality of readers. The 
 excellent work * which I have before me, and in which M. 
 Havet has noted all the anterior labours, will aid me in 
 this. 
 
 Pascal was great in heart as well as in mind, which great 
 minds not always are ; and all that he did in the sphere 
 (ordre) of the mind and in the sphere of the heart bears a 
 stamp of invention and of originality which attests force, 
 depth, and an ardent, and, so to speak, ravenous pursuit 
 of truth. Born in 1623 of a family full of intelligence and 
 virtue, liberally educated by a father who was himself a 
 superior man ; he had received some admirable gifts a 
 special genius for arithmetical calculations and mathe- 
 matical concepts, and an exquisite moral sensibility, which 
 made him a passionate friend of goodness and foe 6t evil, 
 greedy of happiness, but of a noble and infinite happiness. 
 His discoveries, even in childhood, are celebrated : wherever 
 he cast his eye, he sought and found something new ; it 
 was easier for him to make discoveries for himself than to 
 study after the way of others. His youth escaped the 
 levities and disorders which are the ordinary peril : his 
 
 * Edition nouvelle avec Notes et Commentaires, par M. E. Havet. 
 Dezobry, 1852. 
 
 A
 
 2 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 nature, he tells us, was very capable of tempests ; but they 
 spent themselves in the sphere of science, and especially in 
 the order of the religious sentiments. His excessive mental 
 labour had early rendered him subject to a singular nervous 
 malady, which developed still more his keen natural 
 sensibility. The acquaintance which he made with the 
 gentlemen of Port-Royal supplied an aliment to his moral 
 activity ; and their doctrine, which was something new 
 and bold, became for him a starting-point whence he se^ 
 out in his own original way for a complete reconstruction 
 of the moral and religious world. A sincere and passionate 
 Christian, he conceived an apology a defence of religion 
 by a method and by reasons which no one had yet dis- 
 covered, and which was to carry defeat to the very heart of 
 the sceptic. "When thirty years old he applied himself to 
 that work with the fire and precision which he put into 
 everything : new and graver physical disorders, which 
 supervened, prevented him from executing it continuously, 
 but he returned to it at every opportunity in the intervals 
 of his pains ; he threw upon paper his ideas, his views, his 
 flashes. Dying at thirty-nine (1662), he was unable to 
 arrange them in order ; and his Thoughts on Religion, pre- 
 pared by his family and friends, did not appear till seven 
 or eight years afterward. 
 
 What was the character of that first edition of the' 
 Thoughts ? One conceives it without difficulty, even 
 though he may not have the proof from the originals. 
 That first edition did not contain all that he had left ; only 
 the principal pieces were published in it, and in those that 
 were published, scruples of various kinds, whether doctrinal 
 or grammatical, caused certain passages to be corrected, 
 softened, or explained, in which the vivacity and impatience 
 of the author had been manifested in observations too blunt 
 or too concise, and in a decisive style which, in such a 
 matter, might be compromising. 
 
 In the eighteenth century, Voltaire and Condorcet seized 
 upon some of the Thoughts of Pascal, as in war one tries 
 to profit by the too advanced movements of a daring andi
 
 PASCAL. 3 
 
 rash hostile general. Pascal was only daring, not rash ; 
 but, since I have compared him to a general, I will add 
 that he was a general who was killed in the very moment 
 of his operation ; it remained unfinished, and, in part, 
 exposed. 
 
 In our day, in restoring the true text of Pascal, in giving 
 his phrases in all their simplicity, with their firm and pre- 
 cise beauty, and also with their defiant boldness, and their 
 everywhere singular familiarity, one has returned to a juster 
 point of view, not at all hostile. M. Cousin was the first 
 to urge that work of completely restoring Pascal, in 1843 ; 
 M. Faugere has the merit of having executed it in 1844. 
 Thanks to him, we have now the Thoughts of Pascal in 
 conformity with the manuscripts themselves. This is the 
 text which a very distinguished young professor, M. Havet, 
 has just published in his turn, accompanying it with all 
 the necessary helps, explanations, comparisons, comment- 
 aries ; he has given a learned edition, and one that is truly 
 classical in the best sense of the word. 
 
 Being unable to enter fully into the examination of 
 Pascal's method, I would like to insist here, after the style 
 of M. Havet, upon a single point, and show how, in spite 
 of all the changes that have supervened in the world and 
 in ideas, in spite of the repugnance which is more and 
 more felt to certain views peculiar to the author of the 
 Thoughts, we are to-day in a better position to sympathize 
 with Pascal than one was in the time of Voltaire ; how that 
 which in Pascal scandalized Voltaire, scandalizes us less 
 than the beautiful and heartfelt passages, which are close to 
 it, touch and ravish us. The reason is, that Pascal is not 
 simply a reasoner, a man who presses his adversary in all 
 directions, who defies him upon a thousand points which 
 are commonly the pride and glory of the understanding ; 
 Pascal is at once a soul which suffers, which has felt, and 
 which expresses its straggle and its agony. 
 
 There were unbelievers in the time of Pascal ; the 
 sixteenth century had engendered a sufficiently large number 
 of them, especially among the lettered classes ; they were
 
 4 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 pagans, more or less sceptical, of whom Montaigne is for 
 us the mcst graceful type, and whose race we see continued 
 in Charron, La Mothe-le-Vaycr, Gabriel-Naude. But these 
 learned and sceptical men, as well as the freethinkers, who 
 were simply intellectual people and men of the world, like 
 Theophile or Des Barreaux, took things little to heart ; 
 whether they persevered in their incredulity or were con- 
 verted at the hour of death, we do not perceive in them 
 that profound inquietude which attests a moral nature of a 
 high order, and a mental nature stamped with the seal of 
 the archangel ; they are not, in a word, to speak like Plato, 
 royal natures. Pascal is of this leading and glorious race ; 
 he has more than one sign of it in his heart and on his brow : 
 ho is one of the noblest of mortals, but he is sick, and he 
 would be cured. He was the first man to introduce into 
 the defence of religion the ardour, the anguish, and the 
 lofty melancholy which others carried later into scepticism. 
 
 "I blame equally," he says, "those who take part in praising man, 
 those who take part in blaming him, and those who make it a business 
 to amuse themselves ; and I can approve only those who seek the truth 
 with groans." 
 
 The method he employs in his Thoughts to combat 
 unbelievers, and especially to rouse the indifferent man, 
 and to excite desire in his heart, is full of originality and 
 novelty. One knows how he begins. He takes man in the 
 midst of nature, in the bosom of the infinite ; considering 
 him by turns in relation to the immensity of the heavens 
 and in relation to the atom, he shows him alternately great 
 and small, suspended between two infinities, between two 
 abysses. The French language has no more beautiful pages 
 than the simple and severe lines of that incomparable 
 picture. Looking at man inwardly as he has looked at him 
 outwardly, Pascal tries to show in the mind itself two other 
 .abysses, on one side an elevation toward God, toward the 
 morally beautiful, a return movement toward an illustrious 
 origin, and on the other side an abasement in the direction 
 of evil, a kind of criminal attraction to vice. This, no 
 doubt, is the Christian idea of the original corruption and
 
 PASCAL. 5 
 
 of the Fall ; but Pascal, as he employs it, pushes it to such 
 an extreme, and carries it so far, that he makes it in some 
 sort his own : at the very beginning, he makes man a 
 a monster, a chimera, something incomprehensible. He 
 makes the knot and ties it in an insoluble manner, in order 
 that, later, only a God, descending like a sword, can cut it. 
 
 In order to vary the reading of Pascal, I have given 
 myself the satisfaction of re - reading, along with his 
 Thoughts, some pages of Bossuet and of Fenelon. I have 
 taken Fenelon in the treatise On the Existence of God, and 
 Bossuet in the treatise On the Knowledge of God and of 
 One's Self; and without seeking to investigate the differ- 
 ence (if there be any) of doctrine, I have noticed, before all, 
 that of character and of genius. 
 
 Fenelon, as one knows, begins by seeking his proofs of 
 the existence of God in the general aspect of the universe, 
 in the spectacle of the marvels which manifest themselves 
 iu all the orders of creation ; the stars, the different elements, 
 the structure of the human body, all are to him a path by 
 which to rise from contemplation of the work and from 
 admiration of the art to a knowledge of the workman. 
 There is a plan, and there are laws ; then there is an 
 architect and a legislator. There are visible ends, then 
 there is a supreme design. After having confidently 
 accepted this mode of interpretation by external things and 
 the demonstration of God by nature, Fenelon, in the second 
 part of his treatise, enters upon another order of proofs ; 
 he admits of philosophical doubt touching things without, 
 and shuts himself up within himself to arrive at the same 
 end by another road, and to demonstrate God's existence 
 simply by the nature of our ideas. But in admitting the 
 universal doubt of the philosophers, he is not frightened by 
 this state of the case ; he describes it slowly, almost com- 
 placently ; he is neither hurried nor impatient, nor does 
 he suffer like Pascal ; he is not what Pascal in his search 
 appears at the very first, that lost traveller who yearns for 
 home, who, lost without a guide in a dark forest, takes 
 many times the wrong road, goes, returns upon his steps,
 
 6 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 is discouraged, sits down at a crossing of the roads, utters 
 cries to which no one responds, resumes his march with 
 frenzy and pain, is lost again, throws himself upon the 
 ground and wants to die, and reaches home at last only 
 after all sorts of anxieties and after sweating blood. 
 
 Fenelon, in his easy, gradual, and measured march, has 
 nothing like this. It is true that at the moment when he 
 asks whether all nature is not a phantom, and when, to be 
 logical, he puts himself in the position of absolute doubt, 
 it is very true that he says to himself: "This state of 
 suspense astonishes and frightens me ; it throws me within 
 myself, into a solitude that is profound and full of horror ; 
 it constrains me, it keeps me as it were in the air ; it cannot 
 endure, I admit ; but it is the only reasonable state." At 
 the moment when he says this, we see clearly, from the 
 very manner in which he speaks, and the lightness of the 
 expression, that he is not seriously frightened. A little 
 further on, addressing himself to reason, and apostrophizing 
 it, he demands of it : " How long shall I be in this state 
 of doubt, which is a kind of torment, and is, neverthe- 
 less, the only use I can make of reason?" This doubtj 
 which is a kind of torment to Fenelon, is never admitted as 
 a gratuitous supposition by Pascal ; and in reality it appears 
 to him the worst torture, that which is utterly abhorrent 
 and revolting to nature itself. Fenelon, in placing himself 
 in this state of doubt, after the manner of Descartes, assures 
 himself first of his own existence and of the actuality of 
 certain primary ideas. He continues in this way of broad, 
 agreeable, and easy deduction, mingled here and there with 
 little bursts of affection, but without any storms of soul. 
 One thinks he perceives, in reading him, a light, angelic 
 nature, which has but to let itself go, to remount of itself 
 to its celestial principle. The whole is crowned with a 
 prayer addressed to the infinite and good God, to whom he 
 abandons himself with confidence, if sometimes his words 
 have betrayed him: "Pardon these errors, Goodness, 
 who art not less infinite than all the other perfections of 
 my God ; pardon the stammerings of a tongue which cannot
 
 PASCAL. $ 
 
 abstain from praising you, and the failings of a mind which 
 you have made only to admire your perfection." 
 
 Nothing less resembles Pascal than this smooth and easy 
 way. We hear nowhere the cry of distress ; and Fenelou; 
 in adoring the cross, does not cling to it, like Pascal, as to 
 a mast in shipwreck. 
 
 Pascal, at the very outset, begins by rejecting the proofs 
 of God's existence which are drawn from nature: "I 
 admire," says he, ironically, " the boldness with which these 
 persons undertake to speak of God, in addressing their 
 discourses to the .ungodly. Their first chapter is devoted 
 to proving the existence of Deity by the works of nature.'' 
 Continuing to develop his thought, he maintain* that these 
 discourses, which attempt to demonstrate God's existence 
 by the works of nature, have really no effect except upon 
 the faithful and those who already, adore Him. As for the 
 other class, the indifferent, those who are destitute of living 
 faith and graces, " to say to these persons that they have 
 only to see the least of the things that surround them, and 
 they will see God revealed, and to give them, as complete 
 proof regarding that great and important subject, the course 
 of the moon or the planets, and to pretend that one has 
 finished his proof with such a discourse, is to give them 
 occasion to believe that the proofs of our religion are very 
 weak ; and I see, by reason and by experience, that nothing 
 is fitter to inspire them with contempt for it." 
 
 One may clearly judge by this passage how far Pascal 
 neglected and even rejected with disdain half-proofs ; and 
 moreover he showed himself here more exacting than the 
 Scripture itself, which says in a celebrated psalm : Codl 
 enarrant gloriam Dei : 
 
 " The heavons declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth 
 His handy -work," etc. 
 
 It is curious to remark that the slightly contemptuous 
 phrase of Pascal : "I admire the boldness with which," etc. , 
 was originally printed in the first edition of his Thoughts, 
 and the National Library has possessed for a short time a
 
 8 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 unique copy, dated 1669, in which one reads verbatim this 
 phrase (page 150). But soon the friends, or the examiners 
 and approvers of the book, were alarmed to see this ex- 
 clusive way of proceeding, which was found here in contra- 
 diction to the Sacred Books ; they took a proof before the 
 work was published ; they softened the phrase, and pre- 
 sented Pascal's idea with an air of precaution which the 
 vigorous writer never assumes, even with regard to his 
 friends and his auxiliaries. The single remark upon which 
 I wish to insist here, is the open opposition of Pascal to that 
 which will soon be the method of Fenelon. Fenelon, serene, 
 confident, and tormented by no doubts, sees the admirable 
 order of a starry night, and says with the Magi or the 
 Prophet, with the Chaldean shepherd : ' ' How powerful 
 and wise must He be who makes worlds as innumerable as 
 the grains of sand that cover the sea-shore, and who leads 
 all these wandering worlds without difficulty, during so 
 many ages, as a shepherd leads a flock ! " Pascal considers 
 the same sparkling night, and he perceives beyond it a void 
 which his geometrical genius cannot fill; he cries: "The 
 eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me." Like 
 a sublime and wounded eagle he flies beyond the visible 
 sun, and, athwart its pale rays, he goes to seek, without 
 attaining it, a new and eternal aurora. His plaint and his 
 dread come from finding only silence and night. 
 
 With Bossuet, the contrast of method would not be less 
 striking. Though in his Treatise on The Knowledge of 
 Ood, the great prelate would not address himself to the 
 young Dauphin, his pupil, and though he would spfak to 
 any reader whatever, he could not do otherwise. Bossuet 
 takes his pen, and sets forth, with a lofty tranquillity, the 
 points of doctrine, the double nature of man ; the noble 
 origin, the excellence and the immortality of the spiritual 
 principle that is in him, and his direct connection with 
 God. Bossuet teaches like the greatest of bishops ; he is 
 seated in his pulpit, he is reclining there. It is not a rest- 
 less nor a sorrowful person who seeks, it is a master who 
 Indicates and establishes, the way. He demonstrates and
 
 PASCAL. 9 
 
 develops the entire order of his discourse and of his concep- 
 tion without struggle and without effort : he experiences 
 no pains in proving his point. He only in some way 
 explores and promulgates the things of the mind, like a 
 sure man who has riot fought for a long time the internal 
 fights ; it is the man of all authorities and of all stabilities 
 who speaks, and who takes pleasure in viewing order every- 
 where or in immediately re-establishing it by his word. 
 Pascal insists upon the discord and upon the disorder 
 inherent, according to hin', in all nature. There, where 
 the other extends and displays the august method of 
 his teaching, he shows his wounds and his blood, and 
 so far as he is more extravagant, he resembles us more 
 nearly, he touches us more. 
 
 It is not that Pascal puts himself completely on a level 
 with him whom he reclaims and directs. Without being 
 a bishop or a priest, he is himself sure of what he says, he 
 knows his end in advance, and lets his certainty, his 
 disdains, his impatience, be plainly seen ; he scolds, he 
 rallies, he abuses the man who resists and who does not 
 hear ; but suddenly charity or frankness of nature gains 
 the day ; his despotic airs have ceased ; he speaks in his 
 own name and in the name of all ; and he associates himself 
 with the soul in pain, which is henceforth only the lively 
 image of himself and of us also. 
 
 Bossuet does not spurn the glimmerings or the helps of 
 the ancient 'philosophy, he does not insult it ; according to 
 him, all that which leads to the idea of the intellectual and 
 spiritual life, all that aids in the exercise and development 
 of the elevated part of ourselves, by which we are conformed 
 to the First Being, all this is good, and every time that 
 an illustrious truth appears to us, we have a foretaste of 
 that superior existence to which the rational creature is 
 originally destined. In his magnificent language, Bossuet 
 loves to associate, to unite the greatest names, and to weave 
 in some sort the golden chain by which the human under- 
 standing reaches to the highest summit. This passage of 
 sovereign beauty must be cited :
 
 ro SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 " He who sees Pythagoras, when ravished at having found tha 
 squares of the sides of an uncertain triangle, sacrifice a hecatomb 
 in thanksgiving ; he who sees Archimedes, intent on some new 
 discovery, forgetting to eat and drink ; he who sees Plato celebrate 
 the felicity of those who contemplate the beautiful and the good, 
 first in the arts, secondly in nature, and finally in their source and 
 their beginning, which is God ; he who sees Aristotle praise those 
 happy moments when the soul is possessed only of the knowledge 
 of virtue, and judge no other life to be worthy of being eternalj 
 and of being the life of God ; but (above all) he who sees the saints 
 BO ravished with that divine exercise of knowing, loving, and 
 praising God, that they never abandon it, and that they extinguish 
 all sensual desires in order to continue it during all the days of 
 their lives; he who sees, I say, all these things, recognises in 
 intellectual operations the principle and practice of a life eternally 
 happy." 
 
 That which leads Bossuet to God is rather the principle 
 of human greatness than the sentiment of misery. He has 
 a contemplation which rises gradually from truth to truth, 
 which has not to stoop incessantly from abyss to abyss. 
 He has just painted to us that spiritual enjoyment of the 
 highest kind, which begins with Pythagoras and Archi- 
 medes, passes on to Aristotle, and reaches and ascends 
 even to the Saints ; he seems himself, as seen in this last 
 example, only to have ascended a degree nearer to the altar. 
 
 Pascal does not proceed thus ; he strives to mark more 
 clearly, and in an impassible manner, the difference of the 
 spheres. He despises whatever there might have been in 
 the ancient philosophy that was gradual and introductory 
 to Christianity. The learned and moderate Daguesseau, in 
 a plan of a work which he proposed to write after the stylo 
 of the Thoughts, could say : " If one should undertake to 
 work up the Thoughts of Pascal, it would be necessary to 
 rectify in many places the imperfect ideas which he gives 
 in it of the pagan philosophy ; the true religion has no 
 neod to suppose, in its adversaries or in its rivals, faults 
 which are not theirs." Confronted with Bossuet, Pascal 
 may exhibit, at the first glance, some austerities and a 
 narrowness of doctrine which offend us. Not content to 
 believe with Bossuet and Fenelon, and with all Christians, 
 in an unseen God, he loves to insist upon the mysterious
 
 PASCAL. ' 11 
 
 character of that obscurity ;' he is pleased to declare 
 expressly that God wishes to blind some and to enlighten 
 others. He goes and dashes himself, at times, s'ahenrter 
 (that is his word), on rocks which it is wiser, as respects 
 reason, and even as respects faith, to go round than to lay 
 bare and openly announce ; he will say, for example, of the 
 prophecies cited in the Gospel: "You believe that they 
 are reported to make you believe. No, it is to keep you 
 from believing." He will say of miracles: "Miracles do 
 not serve to convert, but to condemn." Like a too intrepid 
 guide in a mountain journey, he purposely keeps close to 
 the steeps and the precipices ; one would think that he 
 wished to defy giddiness. Pascal also, contrarily to 
 Bossuet, is smitten with affection for little churches, for 
 little reserved flocks of the elect, which leads to sectarian- 
 ism : "I love," he says, "the worshippers unknown to 
 the world and even to the Prophets." But along with and 
 amid these roughnesses and these asperities of the way, 
 what piercing words ! what cries that touch us ! what 
 sensible truths for all those who have suffered, who have 
 desired, lost, then re-found the way, and who have never 
 been willing to despair! "It is good," he cries, "to be 
 wearied and fatigued by the useless search for the true 
 good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Deliverer ! " 
 No one, better than he, has made men feel what faith is ; 
 perfect faith is ' ' God perceptible to the heart, not to the 
 reason. How far it is," says he, "from knowing God to 
 loving him ! " 
 
 This affectionate quality of Pascal, making its way 
 through all that is bitter and severe in his doctrine and 
 conduct, has so much the more charm and authority. The 
 touching manner in which that great mind, suffering and 
 praying, speaks to us of that which is most peculiar in 
 religion, of Jesus Christ in person, is fitted to win all 
 hearts, to inspire them with I know not what that is pro* 
 found, and to impress them for ever with a tender respect. 
 One may remain an unbeliever after having read Pascal, 
 but is no longer permitted to rail or to blaspheme ; and, in
 
 12 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 that sense, it remains true that he has vanquished, on one 
 side, the mind of the eighteenth century and Voltaire. 
 
 In a passage previously unpublished, and of which the 
 publication is due to M. Faugere, Pascal meditates upon 
 the agony of Jesus Christ, upon the torments which that 
 perfectly heroic soul, so firm when it wishes to be so, 
 inflicted upon Himself in the name and for the sake of all 
 men : and here, in some verses of meditation and prayer by 
 turns, Pascal penetrates into the mystery of that suffering 
 with a passionateness, a tenderness, a piety, to which no 
 human soul can remain insensible. He supposes all at once 
 a dialogue in which the dying Deity begins to speak, and 
 addresses His disciple, saying to him : 
 
 "Console thyself; thou wouldst not seek Me, If thou haJst not 
 found Me. Thou wouldst not seek Me, if thou didst not possess Me ; 
 then do not disquiet thyself." 
 
 "I thought of thee in thy agony ; I shed such drops of blood for 
 thee." 
 
 " Wouldst thou that it should always cost Me the blood of My 
 humanity, without thy shedding some tears ? . . . " 
 
 This passage should be read in full and in its place. 
 J. J. Eousseau could not have heard it, I dare believe, 
 without bursting into sobs, and perhaps falling upon his 
 knees. It is by such burning, passionate passages, in 
 which human charity breathes through the divine love, 
 that Pascal has a stronger hold upon us to-day than any 
 other apologist of his time. There is in that grief, in that 
 passion, in that ardour, more than enough to atone for his 
 harshnesses and extravagances of doctrine. Pascal is at 
 once more violent than Bossuet and more sympathetic with 
 us ; he is more our contemporary in sentiment. The same 
 day in which one has read Ckilde Harold or Hamkt, Rtn6 
 or Werther, one will read Pascal, and he will enable us to 
 cope with them, or rather he will make us perceive and 
 comprehend a moral ideal and a beauty of heart which they 
 all lack, and which, once caught sight of, is a despair also. 
 It is already an honour for man to have such despairs 
 regarding objects so high.
 
 PASCAL. 13 
 
 Some curious and some learned persons will continue to 
 study all of Pascal thoroughly ; but the resultant which 
 appears to-day good and useful for minds simply serious 
 and for honest hearts, the advice which I come to give 
 them after having read this last edition of the Thoughts, 
 is, not to pretend to penetrate too far into Pascal the 
 individual and the Jansenist, to content one's self with 
 divining him, and understanding him on that side, in some 
 essential points, but to confine one's self with him to the 
 spectacle of the moral struggle, of the tempest, and of the 
 passion which he feels for goodness and for a worthy happi- 
 ness. Dealing with him in this way, we shall sufficiently 
 resist his somewhat narrow, opinionated, and absolute logic ; 
 we shall lay ourselves open meanwhile to that flame, to 
 that soaring disposition, to all that is tender and generous 
 in him ; we shall associate ourst-lves without difficulty with 
 that ideal of moral perfection which he personifies so 
 ardently in Jesus Christ, and we shall feel that we have 
 been elevated in the hours which we shall have passed face 
 to face with that athlete, that martyr, and that hero of the 
 invisible moral world : Pascal is for us all that. 
 
 The world moves on ; it develops itself more and more 
 in the ways which seem most opposed to those of Pascal, 
 in the sense of positive interests, of physical nature investi- 
 gated and subjected, and of human triumphs through 
 industry. It is good that there should be somewhere a 
 counterpoise ; that, in some solitary closets, without pre- 
 tending to protest against the movement of the age, some 
 firm spirits, generous and not bitter, should say to them- 
 selves what is wanting to it, and in what direction it might 
 complete and crown itself. Such reservoirs of lofty thoughts 
 are necessary that the habit may not be absolutely lost, and 
 that the practical may not use up the whole man. Human 
 society, and, to take a plainer example, French society, 
 appears to me sometimes like an indefatigable traveller who 
 makes his journey and pursues his way in more than one 
 costume, very often changing his name and dress. Since the 
 Revolution (1789) we have been up and marching on : where
 
 {4 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 are we going? who will tell us? but we are marching on 
 incessantly. That Revolution, at the moment when one 
 believed it arrested under one form, rose and pushed on 
 under another : sometimes under the military uniform, 
 sometimes under the black coat of the deputy ; yesterday 
 as a proletary, day before yesterday as a citizen. To-day 
 it is, before all, industrial ; and it is the engineer who 
 leads and who triumphs. Let us not complain at all of 
 this, but let us recollect the other side of ourselves, that 
 which has so long formed the dearest honour of humanity. 
 Let us go and see London, let us go visit and admire the 
 Crystal Palace and its marvels, let us enrich it and make 
 it proud with our products : yes, but on the way, on the 
 returu, let some persons repeat to themselves with Pascal 
 these words which should be engraved on the frontispiece : 
 
 "All bodies, the firmament, the stars, the earth and its kingdoms, 
 are not worth so much as the smallest of minds ; for it knows all them, 
 and itself; and the bodies, nothing. All bodies together, and all 
 minds together, and all their productions, are not worth the least 
 movement of charity ; that belongs to an order infinitely higher. 
 
 "From all bodies together one could not succeed in producing one 
 little thought ;. that is impossible, and of another order. From all 
 bodies and minds one could not obtain one movement of true charity ; 
 that is impossible, and of another supernatural order." 
 
 It is thus that Pascal expresses himself in these brief and 
 concise Thoughts, written for himself, a little abrupt, and 
 which have sprung, as in a. jet, from the very spring. 
 
 The present editor, M. Havet, has treated me with so 
 much indulgence in a page of his Introduction, that, in 
 concluding, I am somewhat embarrassed in coming to 
 praise in my turn ; he appears to me, however, to have 
 proposed to himself and to have attained the principal end 
 which I have indicated, and his learned edition is a service, 
 rendered to all. The philosophic and independent char- 
 acter which he has been anxious to give it cannot alter its 
 value, and it rather adds to it in my eyes. Pascal's book, 
 in the state in which it has come to us, and with the 
 licence or the looseness of the recent restitutions, cannot be 
 lor any one an exact and complete apologetic work : it can.
 
 PASCAL. 15 
 
 be only an ennobling kind of reading, which brings back the 
 soul into the moral and religious sphere whence too many 
 vulgar interests cause it to fall away. M. Havet has been 
 constantly careful to maintain this lofty impression, and to 
 disembarrass it from the sectarian questions in which 
 Pascal's personal doctrines might involve it. His conclu- 
 sion sums up well the very spirit of all his labour: "In 
 general," says M. Havet, "we men of to-day, in our 
 manner of understanding life, are wiser than Pascal ; but if 
 we would be able to boast of it, we should be, at the same 
 time, like him, pure, disinterested, charitable."
 
 BOSSUET. 
 
 THE glory of Bossuet has become one of the religions of 
 France ; we recognise it, we proclaim it, we honour our- 
 selves by paying to it daily a new tribute, by finding new 
 reasons for its existence and for its increase ; we no longer 
 discuss it. It is the privilege of true greatness to become 
 more conspicuous in proportion as one draws away from it, 
 and to command attention at a distance. What is singular, 
 however, in this fortune and in this kind of apotheosis of 
 Bossuet, is that he becomes thus greater and greater to us, 
 while, for all that, we do not necessarily admit that he was 
 right in some of the most important controversies in which 
 he was engaged. You love Fenelon, you cherish his graces, 
 his noble and fine insinuation, his chaste elegances ; you 
 could easily pardon him what are called his errors ; and 
 Bossuet has combated those errors, not only forcibly, but 
 furiously, with a kind of roughness. No matter ! the loud 
 voice of the adversary transports you in spite of yourself, 
 and compels you to bow your head, without regard to your 
 secret allectiou for him whom he beats down. So with the 
 long and obstinate pitched battles which have been fought 
 upon the Gallican question. Are yon a Gallican, or are 
 you not? According to your belief, you applaud or you 
 heave a sigh at this part of his career, but his illustrious 
 course none the less, as a whole, maintains in your eyes its 
 elevation and its majesty. I shall dare to say the same 
 thing of the war without truce which Bossuet waged against 
 Protestantism in all its forms. Every enlightened Protest- 
 ant, while reserving the historic points, will acknowledge 
 with respect that he has never encountered two such adver- 
 
 16
 
 BOSSUET. 17 
 
 saries. In politics also, though one may not be very 
 partial to the sacred theory and to divine right, as Bossuet 
 revives and establishes it, one would be almost sorry if that 
 doctrine had not found so plain, so manly, so sincere a 
 spokesman, and one, too, so naturally convinced of its 
 truth. A God, a Christ, a bishop, a king, here, in its 
 entirety, is the luminous sphere in which the thought of 
 Bossuet expands and reigns ; this is his ideal of the world. 
 So, that there was in antiquity a people set apart, who, 
 under the inspiration and leadership of Moses, kept clear' 
 and distinct the idea of a creative and ever-present God, 
 directly governing the world, while all the surrounding: 
 peoples strayed away from that idea, which was obscure 
 to them, into the mists of fancy, or smothered it under 
 the phantoms of the imagination and drowned it in the 
 exuberant luxury of nature, this simple idea of order, of 
 authority, of unity, of the continual government of Provid- ( 
 ence, Bossuet among the moderns has grasped more com-i 
 pletely than any other prison, and he applies it on all 
 occasions without effort, and, as it were, by an invincible 
 deduction. Bossuet's is the Hebrew genius extended, 
 fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the acquisitions 
 of the understanding, but retaining some degree of sovereign 
 interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely where its 
 light ceases. In gesture and tone he reminds one of Moses ; 
 in his speech there are mingled some of the expressions of 
 the Prophet-King, bursts of intense and sublime pathos ; 
 it is a voice pre-eminently eloquent, the simplest, the 
 strongest, the bluntest, the most familiar, one that' 
 thunders with a peculiar suddenness. Even when he rolls 
 along with an unbending current and an imperious flood, 
 his eloquence carries with it treasures of an eternal human: 
 morality. It is in all these qualities that we regard him as; 
 unparalleled, and whatever the use he makes of his speech, 
 he remains the model of the highest eloquence and of the 1 
 most beautiful language. These truths are no longer novel : 
 how many times have we heard them ! The two works we 
 announce do no more than set forth and develop them, each 
 B
 
 i8 SAINTE-BEVVE. 
 
 in its own way. M. de Lamartine has traced in the first 
 pages of his study a portrait of Bossuet thus grandly con- 
 ceived. M. Poujoulat, in a series of Letters addressed to a 
 foreign politician, tries to show that Bossuet is not only 
 great in the celebrated works of his which one commonly 
 reads, but that he is the same man and the same genius in 
 his entire habit of thought, and in the mass of his pro- 
 ductions. A conscientious writer, accustomed to historical 
 labours, to those which touch upon the history of religion 
 in particular, M. Poujoulat writes with a pen that is as 
 grave as the thought.* He states that he has re-read in the 
 country the works of Bossuet, and that he has taken 
 pleasure, after each reading, in gathering his reflections in 
 the form of letters to a friend : one may profitably run over 
 with him the series of Sermons and Theological Treatises, 
 which all contain such real beauties. His work inspires 
 fsteetn. To comment on Bossuet is, in the long run, a 
 difficult and even dangerous task ; the citations which one 
 makes speak for themselves, and light up certain pages to 
 such an extent as to dim everything that adjoins them. M. 
 Poujoulat has very happily escaped this danger by a great 
 fidelity in exposition, and by a sincerity of belief which has 
 permitted him to enter into the discussion of principles. 
 Discussion, perhaps, is a good deal to say ; it is not 
 necessary, at least, to understand it in a historic or philo- 
 sophic sense ; it is evident that upon a multitude of points 
 which give occasion for it, M. Poujoulat writes with all the 
 confidence and all the security of French convictions, which 
 do not sufficiently suspect the nature and the force of the 
 objections put forth by a more independent and more 
 extensive critical science. But morally he regains his 
 superiority ; he labours constantly to render his comment- 
 ary useful by applying it to our own times, to ourselves, to 
 the vices of society, and to the disease of our hearts : 
 "Bossuet is especially the man of the age we live in," he 
 thinks ; and he gives the reasons for this opinion, which 
 
 * Lettres sur Bostvet a tin Hommf. d'Etnt, par M. Poujoulat, 1854. 
 Portrait de Bouitet, par M. de Lainartine, 1854.
 
 BOSSUET. 19 
 
 are rather honourable desires on his part, than facts manifest 
 to all. 
 
 It would be easy here to bring him into conflict with M. 
 de Lamartine, who, all the while that he admires Bossuet, 
 is of a contrary opinion ; but I may be permitted rather 
 to turn aside some time from the commentators and the 
 painters, that I may go straight to the master. Upon 
 Bossuet there is a work still to be done, a work which will 
 exhaust all that may be positively and precisely known of 
 him. M. de Bausset, forty years ago, gave an agreeable 
 History of Bossuet, rich even in details, and which, in 
 certain respects, will not be improved ; but in many 
 passages there is room for further researches, and for the 
 investigations which distinguished men of letters and 
 academicians then willingly spared themselves. To these 
 investigations and researches, at once pious and indefatig- 
 able, a scholar of our day, M. Floquet, has devoted himself 
 for several years, and the History of Eoxsuet which will 
 result from them, will soon appear. This will be a solid 
 and final basis for the study and admiration of the great 
 man. Meanwhile I have under my eyes an exceedingly 
 commendable work of a young man of merit, who died a 
 short time ago. The Abbe" Victor Vaillant, having to give 
 in to the Paris Faculty of Lettres, in 1851, his thesis as 
 doctor, chose for his theme, A Study on the Sermons of 
 Bossuet according to the manuscripts. He showed that 
 those sermons, so well appreciated by the Abbe" Maury at 
 the first moment of their publication (1772), had not been 
 given to the public then, nor reprinted since, with all tlie 
 exactness which might have been demanded. Criticising 
 the first editor, Dom Deforis, with an extreme severity, 
 repeated and in part imitated by that of M. Cousin toward 
 the first editors of Pascal's Thoughts, the Abbs' Vaillant 
 applied himself afterward to something more useful, that is 
 to say, to discovering the chronological order of Bossuet's 
 Sermons and Panegyrics ; looking into the matter closely, 
 he succeeded in determining the dates of a good number of 
 them, at least approximate! y. From to-day, then, we may
 
 20 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 stud)' Bossuet confidently in his first manner ; we are able, 
 as in the case of the great Corneille, to follow the progress 
 and the march of that genius which went on magnifying 
 and perfecting itself, but which had no decline or decay. I 
 will try to give an idea of that first manner by some 
 examples. 
 
 Bossuet, born at Dijon on the twenty - seventh of 
 September, 1627, of a good and ancient plebeian family 
 of magistrates and parliamentarians, was reared there in 
 the midst of books and in the family library. His father, 
 who had entered the Parliament of Metz, lately created, 
 as dean of the councillors, left his children in the care of 
 a brother who was a councillor in the Parliament of Dijon. 
 Young Bossuet, who remained in his uncle's house, was 
 educated at the Jesuit College of the City. He distinguished 
 himself early by a surprising capacity of memory and 
 of understanding ; he knew Virgil by heart, as, a little 
 later, he knew Homer. "One comprehends less easily," 
 says M. de Lamartine, "how he was infatuated all his life 
 with the Latin poet Horace, an exquisite but refined genius, 
 the cords of whose lyre are only the softest fibres of the 
 heart ; an indolent voluptuary," etc. M. de Lamartine, 
 who has so well perceived the leading qualities of Bossuet's 
 eloquence and talent, has studied his life a little too lightly, 
 and has here supposed a difficulty which does not exist ; in 
 fact, there is no mention anywhere of that inexplicable 
 predilection of Bossuet for Horace, the least divine of all the 
 poets. M. de Lamartine must have inadvertently read 
 Horace instead of Homer, and he has taken occasion to 
 treat Homer, the friend of good sense, almost as badly 
 as he formerly treated La Fontaine.* It was Fenelon 
 (and not Bossuet) who read and relished Horace, more 
 
 * M. de Lamartine, let us say it once for all, is so careless in regard 
 to such matters of fact, he possesses in so high a degree the gift of 
 inaccuracy, that he has been able, in enumerating the friends of 
 Bossuet, in his final article (Constitutionnel, April 25, 1854), to write 
 freely : " Pellisson, precursor of Boikau ! La Bruyere, precursor of 
 Molierelll" One pardons him all that on account of his swan's 
 pea
 
 BOSSUET, 21 
 
 than any other poet, who knew him by heart, who quoted 
 him incessantly, who, in his correspondence, during his 
 last years, with M. Destouches, made a kind of pleasant 
 wager, that he would beat, refute, and incessantly correct his 
 friend with well-chosen quotations from the Satires or the 
 ]Epistlcs. Once more, Horace has nothing in particular to do 
 with Bossuet, and there is no occasion to implicate him on 
 his account. The great pagan preference of Bossuet (if one 
 may use such an expression) was naturally for Homer, and 
 next for Virgil : Horace, according to his judgment and 
 taste, came far behind them. But the book which soon 
 pre-eminently gave direction to the genius and calling of 
 Bossuet, and became his rule in everything, was the Bible ; 
 it is said that the first time he read it, he was completely 
 illuminated and transported. He had found in it the 
 source whence his own genius was going to flow, like one 
 of the four rivers in Genesis. 
 
 Bossuet was early destined to the church : tonsured 
 when eight years old, he was hardly thirteen when he was 
 made a canon of the cathedral at Metz. His childhood and 
 his youth were so regular and pure, and pointed so directly 
 to the church as his destination, that Lamartine says : 
 " There is no trace of a fault to be seen in his childhood, 
 or of an act of levity in his youth ; he seemed to escape 
 the frailties of nature without a struggle,. and to have no 
 other passion than love for the beautiful and the good (and 
 the true). One would have said that he himself respected 
 in advance the future authority of his name, of his 
 ministry, and that he was anxious that there should not 
 be a human spot to wipe away from the man of God, 
 when he should leave the world to enter upon the duties 
 of the tabernacle." Why does M. de Lamartine, who dis- 
 covers on his way these charming views and these glimpses 
 of a superior biographer, let them escape, through his 
 negligence, and almost immediately spoil them ? 
 
 Bossuet came to Paris for the first time in September, 
 1642. It is said that on the very day of his arrival he saw 
 the entry of the dying cardinal, who was returning to Paris
 
 22 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 after his avenging journey to the South, and was carried 
 in a moveable room covered with a scarlet cloth. To have 
 seen, but for a day, Richelieu all-powerful in his purple, 
 and to have seen, soon after, the Fronde, civil war and 
 anarchy let loose, was for Bossuet an abridged course of 
 political philosophy, from which he drew the true lesson : 
 better, surely, one master than a thousand masters, and 
 better still that the master should be the King himself, and 
 not the minister. 
 
 Entering upon a course of philosophy at the college of 
 Navarre, he shone there in the theses and public perform- 
 ances ; he was a prodigy and a school angel before becoming 
 the eagle we admire. It is known that, having been 
 extolled at the hdtel de Rambouilht by the Marquis de 
 Feuquieres, who had known his father at Metz, and who 
 continued his good will to the son, the young Bossuet was 
 conducted there one evening, to preach an improvised 
 sermon. In consenting to these singular exercises, and to 
 these tournaments where his person and his gifts were 
 challenged, and though treated as an intellectual virtuoso 
 in the salons of the hdtel de Rambouillet and the hdtel de 
 Nevers, Bossuet did not apparently subject himself to the 
 slightest charge of vanity, and there is no example of a 
 precocious genius which has been so praised and so caressed 
 by the world, which has remained so perfectly exempt from 
 all self-love and from all coquetry. 
 
 He went often to Metz, to rest in study and in a 'more 
 austere life from the successes and triumphs at Paris. 
 He there successively became subdeacon, deacon, arch- 
 deacon, and priest (1652). In Metz he remained wholly for 
 about six years, in order that he might diligently discharge 
 the duties of archdeacon and canon ; there he preached the 
 first sermons we have from him, and his first panegyrics. 
 There, too, made his first controversial attacks upon the 
 Protestants, who abounded in that province. In a word, 
 Bossuet conducted himelf like a young militant priest, 
 who, instead of accepting at first an agreeable post at the 
 centre and in the capital, loves better to inure and harden
 
 BOSSUET. 23 
 
 himself by can 1 } ing the arms of eloquence where duty and 
 danger lie, to the frontiers. 
 
 One of the earliest sermons of Bossuet, and one of those 
 which he preached in his youth at Metz, has been signalized 
 by the Abbe Vaillant : it is the sermon for the ninth 
 Sunday after Pentecost. In this sermon Bossuet wishes 
 to show at once the goodness and the rigour of God, the 
 tenderness and the severity of Jesus. He begins by exhibit- 
 ing Jesus as compassionate, and weeping over Jerusalem, 
 at the moment when He re-enters the city which is going 
 to betray Him ; then he will show Him irritated and im- 
 placable, avenging Himself, or letting His Father avenge 
 Him, upon the walls and upon the children of that same 
 Jerusalem. This sermon, preached "as God inspired 
 me," says Bossuet in concluding it, has in it something 
 youthful, vivid, and bold, and, in passages, something 
 hazardous and almost strange. He begins grandly and 
 with a noble similitude : "As one sees that brave soldiers, 
 in certain remote places, where the various chances of war 
 may have thrown them, do not neglect to march at the 
 appointed times to the rendezvous of their brigades ap- 
 pointed by the general ; so, the Saviour Jesus, when He 
 saw that His hour was come, resolved to quit all the 
 other countries of Palestine through which He had gone 
 preaching the word of life ; and knowing well that it was 
 the will of His Father that He should return to Jerusalem, 
 in order to undergo there, a few days after, the anguish of 
 the last suffering, He turned His steps toward that treacher- 
 ous city, that He might celebrate there that Passover, 
 which has been made for ever memorable by the institution 
 of His holy mysteries and by the shedding of His blood." 
 And it is then, while Jesus is descending the Mount of 
 Olives, that he represents Him as touched to the quick 
 in His heart with a tender compassion, and weeping over 
 the ungrateful city whose ruin He sees beforehand ; then 
 suddenly, without transition, and with an abrupt sally, 
 which may seem to indicate a still juvenile erudition, 
 Bossuet attacks the heresy of the Mardonitea, who, not
 
 24 SAIXTE'BEUVE. 
 
 knowing how to reconcile goodness and justice in one God, 
 divided the divine nature, and made two Gods : one, 
 purely idle and useless, after the manner of the Epicureans, 
 "a God under whose rule sins rejoice," whom one has since 
 called the God of honest people; and over against that 
 God, indulgent to excess, they framed another, purely 
 vengeful, purely wicked and cruel : and pushing the con- 
 clusion to the limit, they also imagined two Christs in the 
 image of the two Fathers. After having addressed the 
 heretic Marcion to his face (in the words of Tertullian), 
 "Thou dost not stray so far from the truth, Marcion, 
 . . " he enters upon his theme, and shows that this 
 compassion and this justice hoth subsist, but must not be 
 separated ; he proceeds in the same discourse to portray 
 the Saviour compassionate and the Saviour inexorable, the 
 pitying heart and then the angry heart of Jesus: "Hear, 
 first of all, the sweet and benignant voice of that Lamb 
 without spot, and afterward you shall hear the terrible 
 roarings of that victorious Lion born of the tribe of Judah : 
 that is the subject of this discourse." 
 
 In this exordium we see a singular fire, an ingenious 
 and exuberant imagination, a slightly subtle erudition, 
 which attacks at the outset a strange heresy ; as Chateau- 
 briand said, we see "the foam on the bit of the young 
 courser." 
 
 The first head of the discourse in which the orator 
 glorifies the goodness of Jesus, so consistent with his true 
 nature, is characterized by leaps and flights, by vivid and 
 impetuous terms, by significant words which force home 
 the thought ; a little archaism mingles with the style : 
 "And touching that (compassion), I recollect," says the 
 orator, "a little saying of Saint Peter's, in which he 
 very well describes the Saviour to Cornelius : ' Jesus of 
 Nazareth,' says he, ' a man approved of God, who went 
 about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed.' 
 Pertransit benefaciendo. ... God ! how beautiful 
 these words, and how eminently worthy of my Saviour ! " 
 He then unfolds the beauty of these words in a paraphrase
 
 BOSSUET. 25 
 
 or strophe full of joyousne.es. He calls to mind Pliny the 
 Younger glorifying his Trajan who travelled over the world 
 less by his footsteps than by his victories : " And what 
 does this mean, think you, to travel over provinces by 
 victories? Is it not to carry carnage and pillage every- 
 where ? Ah ! in how much more lovely a way did my 
 Saviour travel over Juclea ! He travelled over it less by 
 His steps than by His kindnesses. He went about in 
 all directions, healing the sick, consoling the wretched, 
 instructing the ignorant. It was not simply the places 
 at which He tarried that found themselves the better for 
 His presence : as many as were His steps, so many were 
 the traces of His bounty. He made the places through 
 which He passed remarkable by the profusion of His 
 blessings. In that little village there are no blind men 
 or cripples ; no doubt, said one, the kind-hearted Jesus 
 has gone that way." In all this part of the sermon there 
 is a youthfulness, a freshness of tenderness and of com- 
 passion, which is charming, and it has a flavour of his early 
 genius. 
 
 When he portrays to us Jesus desiring to clothe Himself 
 with a flesh similar to ours, and when he sets forth the 
 motives for this according to the Scriptures, with what 
 distinctness and saliency he does it ! He represents that 
 Saviour who seeks out misery and distress, as refusing to 
 assume the angelic nature which would have exempted 
 Him from this, leaping upon, in some sense, and striv- 
 ing to pursue, to apprehend, the miserable human nature, 
 clinging to it and running after it although it flies from 
 Him, although it is reluctant to be assumed by Him ; 
 desiring for Himself a real flesh, real human blood, with 
 the qualities and weaknesses of ours, and that for what 
 reason ? In order to be compassionate. Although in all 
 this Bossuet only makes use of the terms of the apostle, 
 and perhaps of those of Chrysostom, he employs them with 
 a delight, a luxury, a gust for reduplication, which denote 
 vivacious youth : " He has apprehended the divine nature, 
 says the apostle ; it flew away, it did not wish for the
 
 *6 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 Saviour ; what did He do ? He ran after it with headlong 
 speed, leaping over mountains, that is to say, the angelic 
 ranks. He ran like a giant with great and immeasurable 
 steps, passing in a moment from heaven to earth. There 
 He overtook that fugitive nature ; He seized it, He appre- 
 hended it, body and soul." Let us study the youthful 
 eloquence of Bossuet, even in his perils of taste, as one 
 studies the youthful poetry of the great Corneille. 
 
 I know that one must be very circumspect when he 
 describes the liberties of youth in Bossuet's style, for he is 
 one of those speakers who have never lacked daring ; I do 
 not believe, however, that I am deceived when detecting 
 the superabundance of that age in certain passages. After 
 having, in the first part of the discourse, unfolded, and, 
 as it were, exhausted all the tenderness and compassion of 
 Jesus Christ made in the image of man, after having 
 exclaimed : " He has pitied us, that good brother, as His 
 companions in fortune, having had to pass through tin 
 same miseries as we," Bossuet, in the second part of hi* 
 discourse, portrays Him returning and, finally, becoming 
 angry on account of the hardness of heart which He finds 
 in man: "But as there is no stream whose course is so 
 tranquil, that one may not cause it, by resistance, to 
 acquire the rapidity of a torrent ; so the Saviour, irritated 
 by all those obstacles which the blind Jews opposed to His 
 goodness, seems to lay aside in a moment all that pacific 
 disposition." Then, by a sudden contrast, Bossuet strives 
 and, as he says, employs all the rest of his discourse, to 
 portray to his hearers the yet smoking ruins of Jerusalem. 
 He delights to set forth the prophecy and the menace 
 as it issued at first from the mouth of Moses ; as it is 
 embodied in Deuteronomy. He enumerates the circum- 
 stances of its utterance, he comments on it, follows it step 
 by step, all the while accompanying it with his eagle cries ; 
 and when he has led the Romans and the Emperor Titus 
 before Jerusalem, when he is very sure that it is invested, 
 that it is surrounded with walls by the besiegers, that it 
 is more like a prison than a city, and that not a single
 
 BOSSUET. 27 
 
 pprson who ia shut up in it like a famished wolf, can 
 escape to seek for sustenance, " Behold, behold, Chris- 
 tians," he cries in triumph, "the prophecy of my Gospel 
 fulfilled in every particular. Behold thyself besieged by 
 thy enemies, as my Master foretold thee forty years before : 
 ' Jerusalem, behold thou art shut in on all sides, they 
 have compassed thee round, they have surrounded thee with 
 ramparts and forts ! ' These are the words of my text ; and 
 is there a single word which does not seem to have been 
 put there to describe that circumvallation, not with lines, 
 but with walls I After that period, what words could paint 
 to you their raging hunger, their fury, and their despair ? " 
 Here, again, it seems to me, that young Bossuet indulges 
 in a little excess ; and just as in the first part he had gone 
 so far, with regard to the God-made man, as to speak of the 
 qualities of the blood and of the temperature of the body, he 
 proceeds in this second part to dwell on the horrors of the 
 famine and the foul details of the contagion. He will use 
 terms still more frightful when he wishes to declare the 
 final sentence, the dispersion of the Jewish nation through 
 the world, and to expose to us its members drawn and 
 quartered. It is true he immediately adds: "This com- 
 parison excites your horror ; " yet he pushes it to the end, 
 without any fear of the consequences. I see in this a proof 
 that he is young still ; he has some cruelty, not in the 
 heart, but in his talent.* 
 
 The reader will have remarked how easily he appropriates 
 that of which he speaks and upon which he relies : my 
 Gospel, my text, my twenty-eighth chapter of Deuter- 
 onomy, my Master, my pontiff, etc. He loves these sover- 
 eign forms ; he lays his hand upon things, and while he is 
 speaking he cannot help performing the office of God his 
 Master. It is not self-love or arrogance in Bossuet ; it is 
 only that his own personality is absorbed and confounded 
 in the public personality of the Levite and the priest. He 
 is at these moments but the man of the Most High. 
 
 * So with the Count de Maistre in that famous passage upon the 
 execut.oner. This passage of Bossuet resembles and recalls it.
 
 2S SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 A passage in this discourse gives us its date : upon the 
 occasion of the civil disorders which break out in besieged 
 Jerusalem, and which cause these insane people, on return- 
 ing from the fight against the common enemy, to come to 
 blows with each other, Bossuet has a reflection upon his 
 country: " But perhaps you do not observe that God has 
 let fall the same scourges upon our own heads. France, 
 alas ! our common country, so long agitated by a foreign 
 war, completes its distresses with intestine divisions. 
 Again, among the Jews, both parties combined to repulse 
 the common enemy, and were far from wishing to strengthen 
 themselves by its assistance, or to have any understanding 
 with it ; the least suspicion of such a thing would have 
 been punished by death without mercy. But we, on the 
 contrary ... ah ! friends, let us not finish, let us spare 
 our shame a littlo." But we, on the contrary . . . : this is 
 an allusion to the party which favoured the Spaniards, to 
 the Prince of Conde, who had become their ally and general. 
 When Bossuet, at a later day, in his Funeral Oration over 
 the prince, shall speak with so much repugnance of civil 
 discords, and of those things concerning which he wished ha 
 could be for ever silent, he will repeat a real and lively senti- 
 ment which had already drawn from him a cry both of pain 
 and alarm. 
 
 The language of this sermon, as of all the discourses of 
 these years, is a little more antique than that of Bossuet 
 when he had become the orator of Lewis XIV. ; one notes 
 in it some phrases of an earlier age : " But still let us 
 pretend to be Christians, if it be, nevertheless, that we 
 spare nothing, etc. It is declared that the example of the 
 ruin of Jerusalem, and of that divine vengeance, so public, 
 so indubitable, must serve as a memorial for ages upon ages." 
 Elsewhere it is rather in the employment of certain roughly 
 concise words, and in the almost Latin turn of expression, 
 that one perceives the contemporary of Pascal: "For, 
 finally, do not persuade yourselves that God may let you 
 rebel against Him for ages : His compassion is infinite, 
 but its effects have their limits prescribed by His wisdom :
 
 BOSSUET. 29 
 
 that wisdom which has counted the stars, which has 
 bounded this universe by a definite roundness, which has 
 prescribed bounds to the waves of the sea, has marked the 
 height to which it has resolved to let iniquities mount." 
 One would believe he was reading a passage in Pascal's 
 Thoughts. 
 
 I have still much to say upon that first period of Bossuet, 
 at Metz as well as at Paris. How was it with his person in 
 his youth, when he pronounced these discourses, already so 
 powerful, with a precocious authority which was radiant 
 with a visible inspiration, and which was embellished, 
 so to speak, with a certain degree of artlessness? M. 
 de Bausset has asked and has answered this question, 
 so far as he could, in very general terms : " Nature," savs 
 he, " endowed him with the noblest of figures ; the fire of 
 his mind shone forth in his looks ; the traits of his genius 
 penetrated all his discourses. It is enough to look at the 
 portrait of Bossuet, painted in his old age by the celebrated 
 Rigaud, to form an idea of what he must have been in his 
 youth." He cites a little farther on the testimony of the 
 Abbe Ledieu, who reports that " Bossuet's look was pleasant 
 and piercing; that his voice appeared always to proceed 
 from a passionate soul ; that his gestures in oratorical 
 action were modest, quiet, and natural." These delinea- 
 tions, a little tame and after the manner of Dagues- 
 seau, have not been satisfactory, we imagine, to M. de 
 Lamartine, who, with that second sight which is granted 
 to poets, knew how to see Bossuet distinctly as he was 
 when young, Bossuet at the age of Eliacim, even before 
 he had entered the pulpit, and when he was simply 
 ascending the steps of the altar. The author of Jocelyn 
 says : 
 
 " He (Bossuet) was not nine years old when his hair was cut in a 
 circlet at the top of his head. At thirteen he was nominated canon of 
 Metz. . . . That tonsure and that venture were as becoming to his 
 physiognomy as to his general appearance. One recognised the priest 
 in the youth. His frame, whicli was greatly to increase, was tall for 
 his age ; it had the delicacy and suppleness of the mail who is not
 
 30 SAINTE-BEUl'E. 
 
 destined to bear any other burden than thought ; who glides com- 
 posedly, with quiet steps, amid the columns of basilicas, and whom 
 habitual genuflection and prostration soften under the majesty of God. 
 His hair was of a brown tint and silken ; one or two locks rose in nn 
 involuntary tuft at the top of the forehead, like the diadem of Moses, 
 or like the horns of the prophetic ram ; these hairs thus standing, 
 whose motion one notices again even in his portraits taken at an 
 advanced age, gave du vent and inspiration to his hair. His eyes were 
 black and penetrating, but mild. His look was a continual and serene 
 gleam ; the light did not dart forth in Hashes, it ran from them with a 
 radiance which allured the eye without dazzling it. His lofty and flat 
 forehead revealed through a fine skin the interlaced veins of the temples. 
 His nose, almost straight, slender, delicately sculptured, between the 
 Greek softness and the Roman energy, was neither turned up with 
 impudence, nor depressed by the heaviness of the senses. His mouth 
 opened wide between delicate lips ; his lips quivered often without 
 utterance, as if with the wind of an internal speech which modesty 
 repressed before older men. A half smile, full of grace and of muto 
 after-thought, was their most frequent expression. One saw in them 
 a naturally sincere disposition, never rudeness or disdain. To sum up 
 generally, in that physiognomy the charm of the character so com- 
 pletely hid from view the force of the understanding, and suavity so 
 harmoniously tempered the virility of the entire expression, that on 
 detected the genius only by the exquisite delicacy of the muscles and 
 nerves of the thought, and the effect on the beholder was attraction 
 rather than admiration." 
 
 Here is a primitive Bossuet very much softened and 
 mellowed, and, it seems to me, a Bossuet who is made, 
 very much at one's fancy, to resemble Jocelyn and Fenelon, 
 in order that it may be said afterward: "The soul of 
 that great man was evidently of one temper, and the genius 
 of another. Nature had made him tender ; theological 
 dogmas had made him hard." I do not believe in this 
 contradiction in Bossuet, the most undivided and the least 
 contested nature that we know. But what I am not less 
 sure of is, that the illustrious biographer treats literary 
 history here absolutely as history is treated in a historic 
 romance ; wherever facts are wanting, or the dramatic 
 interest demands it, the character is carelessly invented. 
 "Without refusing the praise which certain ingenious and 
 delicate touches of this portrait merit, I will permit myself 
 to ask more seriously : Is it proper, is it becoming, thua
 
 BOSSUET. 31 
 
 to paint Bossuet as a youth, to flatter thus with the brush, 
 as one would a Greek dancing woman, or a beautiful 
 child of the English aristocracy, him who never ceased to 
 grow under the shadow of the temple, that serious young 
 man who gave promise simply of the great man, all genius 
 and all eloquence ? What ! do you not feel it T there is 
 here a moral contradiction. In a sermon delivered in his 
 youth, upon the occasion of one's taking the veil, Bossuet, 
 speaking of the modesty of the virgins, and contrasting it 
 with the freedoms of many Christian girls in the world, 
 said : " Who could recite nil the artifices they employ to 
 attract the looks of men ? and what are those looks, and 
 can I speak of them in this pulpit ? No : it is enough to 
 tell you that the looks which please them are not indifferent 
 locks ; they are those passionate, eager looks, which drink 
 in deep draughts from their faces all the poison they have 
 prepared for men's hearts ; these are the looks they love." 
 An orator, I know, is not a virgin ; the first condition of 
 the orator, even the sacred orator, is to be bold and daring; 
 but what boldness was Bossuet's ! I can say that, with his 
 manly and virile modesty, he would have blushed, even in 
 youth, at being viewed in that way in order to be painted. 
 Far, far from his taste these fondlings and these physio- 
 logical feats of a brush which amuses itself with carmine 
 and with veins ! Go rather and see in the Louvre his bust 
 by Coysevox : a noble head, a fine bearing, pride without 
 arrogance, a lofty and full forehead, the seat of thought 
 and majesty ; the mouth singularly agreeable in expression, 
 delicate, speaking even when it is in repose ; the profile 
 straight and pre-eminently notable : in the whole a look of 
 fire, of intelligence, and of goodness, the figure which is the 
 worthiest of the man, just as he was formed to address his 
 fellows, and to look at the heavens. Take away the 
 wrinkles from that face, give it the bloom of life, throw 
 over it the veil of youth, imagine a young and adolescent 
 Bossuet but be sparing of your descriptions of him, for 
 fear you may fall short of the severity of the subject and of 
 the respect which is due to it.
 
 33 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 II. 
 
 I DESIGN In this paper only to continue my view of 
 Bossuet in his early career, not before he was renowned 
 (for that was early), but before he became glorious. The 
 reverence we have for him does not need to become super- 
 stitious, and there is no reason why we should not acknow- 
 ledge the perils and the striking inequalities of a youthful 
 manner of speech which will soon attain of itself to the 
 plenitude of its eloquence. It is a long distance from the 
 Paneijyric of Saint Gorgon, which lie preached at Metz 
 during the years of his stay there, to the Panegyric of 
 Saint Paul, which signalized the first years of his preaching 
 at Paris, and is already in the style of the greatest of 
 our sacred orators. In the Panegyric of Saint Gorgon, the 
 subject was evidently at fault ; little more was known of 
 that martyr than his suffering, and the orator found him- 
 self compelled to fall back upon the frightful details of the 
 physical torments which had to be undergone by the person 
 whom he was to extol : "The tyrant made the holy martyr 
 sleep upon an iron gridiron, already red with the fierce heat, 
 which instantly contracted his bared nerves. . . . What a 
 horrible spectacle ! " And he describes the affair, not dis- 
 pensing with any circumstance. We have two discourses 
 of Bossuet upon the same subject, or, at least, one entire 
 discourse and the outline or sketch of another which he 
 delivered also : it was a tribute paid to a parish of the town 
 which was under the patronage of the saint. Bossuet ia 
 not one of those ingenious men of talent who have the art 
 of treating commonplace subjects excellently, and of intro- 
 ducing into them foreign materials ; but let the subject 
 which is presented to him be vast, lofty, majestic, and he 
 is at ease, and, the higher the theme, the more is he equal 
 to its demands. When he quitted Metz to establish him- 
 self in Paris, Bossuet showed immediately the effect of the 
 change in his eloquence ; and in reading his subsequent
 
 BOSSUET. 33 
 
 productions, we feel as if we were passing from one climate, 
 to another. "In following the discourses of Bossuet in, 
 their chronological order," the Abbe Vaillant very well says,, 
 "We see the old words fall successively as the leaves of 
 the woods fall." The superannuated or trivial expressions,, 
 the offensive images, the slips of taste, which are still less 
 the fault of Bossuet's youth than of all that epoch of 
 transition which preceded the great reign, disappear, and 
 leave in use only that new, familiar, unexpected speech, 
 which will never recoil, as he said of Saint Paul, from the 
 glorious meannesses of Christianity, but will learn also; 
 magnificently to consecrate its combats, its spiritual govern- 
 ment, and its triumphs. Called often, from the year 1662, 
 to preach before the Court, having to speak in churches or 
 before large bodies in Paris, Bossuet acquired there at once 
 the language in use, while still preserving and developing 
 his own ; he had completely despoiled the provinces ; there, 
 during six years cf exercise and discipline, he had been 
 trained ; the Court polished him only so far as it was 
 necessary. He was a finished orator at the age of thirty- 
 four. During eight or nine years (1660-1669), he was the 
 great fashionable preacher, as well as the most renowned. 
 
 Two opinions resulted from the publication of the 
 Sermons of Bossuet for the first time, in 1772 ; I have 
 already indicated that of the Abbe Maury, who placed 
 these Sermons above everything else of that kind which 
 the French pulpit had produced ; the other opinion, which 
 was that of La Harpe, and which I have known to be shared 
 in by other sensible men, was less enthusiastic, and showed 
 more sensitiveness to the inequalities and discordances of 
 tone. It would be possible to justify both of these opinions, 
 with the understanding that the first should triumph in the 
 end, and that the genius of Bossuet, there as elsewhere, 
 should keep the first rank. It is true that, read continuously, 
 without any notice of the age of the writer, and of the 
 place and circumstances of their composition, some of these 
 discourses of Bossuet may offend or surprise some minds, 
 that love to dwell upon the more uniform and more exact 
 c
 
 34 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 continuity of Bourdaloue and Massillon. For example, 
 one opens the volumes, and he finds at the very beginning, 
 one after the other, four sermons or plans of sermons upon 
 All Saints' Day. The first, of which we have only a sketch, 
 and which is little more than a mass of texts and notes, 
 was preached at Metz ; the second, which we have com- 
 plete, was also preached there. This second discourse is 
 fatiguing, slightly subtle, and has too much theological 
 display. Wishing to give an idea of the felicity and glory 
 of the saints in the life to come, wishing to iinfold the 
 designs of God in the discipline of His elect, and to show 
 how He takes them, manages them, prepares them, and 
 only succeeds at the very last in perfecting them ; the 
 orator, who seeks to give a rational explanation of this 
 procedure, institutes a lofty dissertation rather than preaches 
 a sermon : he must have had little influence that time on 
 the minds of his auditory, and they could not have followed 
 him far. Not that there are not great thoughts, beautiful 
 and grand comparisons, and also the ever true and ever 
 touching complaints about human life, so agitated and so 
 wretched in itself, that it was necessary, he says, that God 
 should use some address and some artifice in regard to it, to 
 conceal its miseries from us. " And yet, blindness of the 
 human mind ! it is this life which seduces, this life, which 
 is only trouble and agitation, which amounts to nothing, 
 which draws just so much nearer to its end as the moments 
 of its duration are multiplied, and which will fail us 
 suddenly like a false friend, when it shall seem to promise 
 us the most repose. Of what are we thinking ? " But, in 
 spite of these and many other noteworthy traits, this second 
 sermon for All Saints is, I repeat it, fatiguing and a little 
 obscure ; and if one would see again the great orator in 
 Bossuet, he must pass to the third : or rather, in a well- 
 advised reading of that part of Bossuet's works, one should 
 omit, suppress both the first sermon and the fourth, which 
 are only incomplete sketches, not stop at the second, 
 which is difficult, and then one will freshly enjoy all the 
 moral and serene beauty of that third sermon, preached in
 
 BOSSUET. 35 
 
 1669 in the royal chapel, and in which Bossuet, refuting 
 Montaigne, finishing and consummating Plato, demonstrates 
 and almost renders evident to the least prepared minds, the 
 conditions of the only true, durable, and eternal happiness. 
 And here observe that he does not do as in the discourse 
 at Metz, where he thought much more of dividing, of in- 
 vestigating his subject, than of lighting it up ; he reasons 
 no longer for himself alone, he thinks of his auditors, he 
 does not lose sight of them for an instant : " breadth, 
 depth, boundless length and inaccessible height (of the 
 celestial happiness) ! will it be possible for me to compre- 
 hend you in a single discourse ? Let us go together, my 
 brethren, let us enter that abyss of glory and of majesty. 
 Let us cast ourselves with confidence upon that ocean. ..." 
 When he would make us comprehend that true happiness 
 for an intelligent being lies in the perception and possession 
 of truth, he sees clearly that he will be asked : "What is 
 truth ? " and he is going to try to answer it : "Gross and 
 carnal mortals, we understand everything corporeally ; we 
 wish always for material images and forms. Shall I not be 
 able to-day to open those internal and spiritual eyes, which 
 are concealed in the depths of your soul, to turn them aside 
 a moment from the vague and changing images which the 
 senses present, and accustom them to bear the sight of pure 
 truth ? Let us try, let us endeavour, let us see. ..." 
 The second point is altogether moral in character, and very 
 beautiful. In order to give a vivid idea of the genuine 
 pleasures which the blessed enjoy, the orator says to himself 
 as well as to his hearers: "Let us philosophize a little, 
 before all things else, upon the nature of the world's joys." 
 He then tries to make us realize, by what is lacking to our 
 joys, what must enter into those of a better state : " For it 
 is an error to believe that we must welcome joy equally 
 from whatever quarter it originates in, whatever hand offers 
 it to us. Of all the passions, the fullest of illusion is joy." 
 Let us ask ourselves always : " Whence comes it, and what 
 is the occasion of it? Wliere does it lead us, and in whnt 
 state docs it leave us ? If it passes away so quickly, it is
 
 36 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 not the true. The happiness of a being (a great principle, 
 according to Bossuet) must never be distinguished from the 
 perfection of that being ; true happiness, worthy of the 
 name, is the state in which the being is living most in 
 accordance with its nature, in which it is most truly itself, 
 in the plenitude and in the satisfaction of its inner desires. 
 Montaigne (he names him in the pulpit) in vain holds faith 
 in check, degrades human nature, and compares it to that 
 of the brutes, by giving it often the lower place : " But tell 
 me, subtle philosopher, you who laugh so archly at the man 
 who imagines that he is something, will you count it for 
 nothing to know God I To know a primal nature, to adore 
 His eternity, to admire His omnipotence, to praise His 
 wisdom, to commit one's self to His providence, is that 
 nothing which distinguishes us from the brutes?" He 
 presses him ; he pushes him ; the witty sceptic has never 
 seen the flash of a sword so near his eyes : "Well, then ! 
 let the elements demand back from us all that they have 
 lent us, provided that God may also demand back of us that 
 soul which He made in His own likeness. Perish all the 
 thoughts which we have given to mortal things ; but let 
 that which was born of God be immortal like Himself. 
 Therefore, sensual man, you who renounce the future life 
 because you fear its just punishments, do not longer hope 
 for nothingness ; no, no, hope for it no longer ; wish for it, 
 or not wish for it, your eternity is assured to you." 
 
 As for the happiness itself, of which he would give us a 
 just idea, the purely spiritual and internal happiness of the 
 soul in the other life, he sums it up in an expression which 
 concludes a happy development of the subject, and he 
 defines it: "Reason always attentive and always con- 
 tented." Take reason in its liveliest and most luminous 
 sense, the pure flame disengaged from the senses. 
 
 By these examples, which I might multiply, we see 
 clearly the march and the rapid progress of the genius of 
 Bossuet. Like all inventors, he has had at first some perils 
 to overcome, has had to grope about, and he has done it 
 impetuously. I recollect that formerly M. Ampire, in his
 
 BOSSUET. 37 
 
 lectures at the College of France, wishing to characterize 
 those three great epochs of Pulpit Eloquence among us, the 
 time of its creation and puissant establishment by Bossuet, 
 the time of its full growth under Bourdaloue, and finally 
 the epoch of its extreme expansion and autumnal fertility 
 under Massillon, connected with it the ancient names, now 
 become symbols, which consecrate the three great periods 
 of the tragic stage in Greece. Of these names there are two 
 at least which may be recalled here without incongruity ; 
 there is something of the greatness and of the majesty of 
 ^Eschylus, as well as of Corueille, in Bossuet, just as there 
 may be visible something of Euripides, as well as of Racine, 
 in Massillon. 
 
 Bossuet's is a talent anterior in origin and formation to 
 that of Lewis XIV., but on the score of its completion and 
 perfection it owed much to that young king. Attempts 
 have been made more than once to rob Lewis XIV. of his 
 peculiar useful influence and propitious ascendancy ovef 
 what one has called his age : for some time, however, that 
 unjust and illiberal contest seemed to have been given 
 up, when a great writer of our days, M. Cousin, suddenly 
 renewed it, and desired once more to despoil Lewis XIV. of 
 his highest glory, in order to carry it back altogether to the 
 preceding epoch. M. Cousin has a very convenient way of 
 exaggerating and aggrandizing the objects of his admira- 
 tion : he degrades or depresses their surroundings. It is 
 thus that, to exalt Corneille, in whom he sees ^Eschylus, 
 Sophocles, all the Greek tragic poets united, he sacrifices 
 and diminishes Racine ; it is thus that, in order to celebrate 
 better the epoch of Lewis XIII. and the Regency which 
 followed, he depresses the reign of Lewis XIV. ; that, in 
 order to glorify the Poussins and the Sueurs of whom he 
 speaks, perhaps, with more enthusiasm and applause than 
 direct knowledge and real felt gust, he blasphemes and 
 denies the merit of the admirable Flemish painting ; he 
 says of Raphael that he does not touch the feelings, that he 
 only plays around the heart, Circum prcecordia ludit. In 
 a word, M. Cousin is voluntarily a man of foregone conclu-
 
 38 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 sions, of preconceived ideas, or, rather still, he is the man 
 of his temperament and of his own nature. He clings 
 resolutely to what he prefers as his starting-point ; his per- 
 sonal tastes carry his judgment completely captive. He 
 is wedded, on all occasions, to his own peculiar opinions, 
 and never adopts just ones till he has been opposed on all 
 sides with contradictions and checks, and obliged to limit 
 and moderate his assertions. Regarding the present ques- 
 tion, he has gone so far as to maintain that this Lewis XIV., 
 who troubles him, was not entirely himself, and somehow 
 did not begin to rule and to reign till after the influence of 
 M. de Lyonne and of Colbert, two pupils of Richelieu and 
 of Mazarin, had been exhausted ; so }'ou have the great 
 reign thrown back ten or fifteen years, and the minority of 
 the monarch strangely prolonged by an unexpected exercise 
 of authority.* M. Poujoulat, taking these assertions very 
 seriously, and without ever permitting himself to smile at 
 them, has combated them successfully. Bossuet, it seems 
 to me, presents us with one of the greatest and most striking 
 examples of the kind of blessings which the age of Lewis 
 XIV. owed to the young star of its king from the very first 
 day. Honoured by the queen, Anne of Austria, becoming 
 latterly her favourite preacher, Bossnet had at the outset 
 some of those abounding and ingenious subtleties which 
 characterized the taste of the time. Thus, preaching before 
 the queen-mother in 1658 or 1659, the Panegyric on Saint 
 Theresa, influenced, perhaps, by the Spanish saint's refine- 
 
 * It is in the preface to the volume entitled Madame de Longueville 
 that M. Cousin has said: "The influence of Lewis XIV. made itself 
 felt very late. He did not take the reins of government till 1661, and 
 at first he followed his time, he did not rule; he did not appear to be 
 really himself till he was no longer led by Lyonne and Colbert, the last 
 disciples of Richelieu and of Mazarin. It was then that, governing 
 almost alone, and superior to his surroundings, he everywhere im- 
 pressed his taste," etc. etc. The idea of making M. de Lyonne reign 
 and govern in place of Lewis XIV. is one of the strangest of all. 
 What ! because M. de Mignet, in publishing the Negotiations relative 
 to the Spanish Succession, has shown by a series of dispatches that M. 
 de Lyonne was a very clever Secretary of State and Foreign Minister, 
 you, for this reason, make him out to be a man who delays the real
 
 BOSSUET. 39 
 
 ments of style, and developing at pleasure a passage of 
 Tertullian which, declares that Jesus, before dying, wished 
 to satiate Himself with the luxury of patience, Bossuet will 
 not fear to add : ' ' Would you not say, Christians, that, 
 according to the sentiment of that Father, the whole life 
 of the Saviour was a festival of which all the meats were 
 torments ? a strange festival in the opinion of the age, but 
 one which Jesus deemed worthy of His taste ! His death 
 sufficed for our safety ; but His death did not suffice for that 
 marvellous appetite which He had for suffering for us." 
 Here is much of the bel esprit which still clings to the style 
 of speech fashionable under the Regency. But when he 
 was called to speak before the young king, he speedily 
 learned to correct such fancies and to repress them. Lewis 
 XIV., when he heard Bossuet for the first time, greatly 
 relished his preaching, and did a charming thing for him, 
 quite worthy of a young prince whose mother was still 
 living : he had a letter written to Bossuet's father at Metz, 
 congratulating him upon having such a son. He who does 
 not appreciate this delicate act is no better fitted to 
 appreciate the kind of influence which that young prince 
 could have on the vast imagination and reasonable mind of 
 Bossuet. The language of Lewis XIV. was always accurate, 
 just as the same quality, according to another, characterized 
 his talent for rapid observation. There was in him or about 
 him something which warned men not to exaggerate, not 
 to force things. Bossuet, when speaking in his presence, 
 felt that, with respect to a certain refined taste, he was 
 
 accession of Lewis XIV., and who, in your mind, provisionally de- 
 thrones him ! Never has one more grossly abused the privilege of 
 extracting information from State-papers than in making them aid such 
 a conclusion. But the sight of all posthumous and unedited papers 
 causes M. Cousin a kind of dazzlement. Lewis XIV., in his Memoirs, 
 speaking of M. de Lyonne at the time of his death, contents himself 
 with saying : " In 1671 a minister died who held the office of Secretary 
 of State, having the department of Foreign Affairs. He was a man of 
 capacity, but not without faults ; nevertheless he performed that duty- 
 well, which was a very important one. I spent some time in thinking 
 whom I should appoint to that place." It is thus that the king 
 expresses himself.
 
 40 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 confronted by a standard. I desire to say nothing that is 
 not incontestable : Lewis XIV., when very young, did 
 Bossuet a service by giving him proportion and all his 
 precision. For his inspiration and his originality the great 
 orator continued to be indebted only to himself and the 
 spirit which replenished him. 
 
 There is a fact which may be verified : in this series of 
 Bossuet's Sermons, which have been arranged, not in the 
 chronological order in which he composed them, but in the 
 order of the Christian year, beginning with All Saints' Day 
 and ending with Pentecost, if you would put your finger 
 unmistakeably upon one of the finest and most faultless, 
 take any one you please of those of which you read, 
 Preached before the King. 
 
 I cannot help expressing another thought. Oh ! when 
 M. Cousin speaks so freely of Lewis XIV., of Lewis XIII., 
 and of Richelieu, giving the palm so confidently to that 
 which he prefers and which he thinks resembles him, I am 
 astonished that he has never once asked himself this ques- 
 tion : "What would my own talent have gained or lost, 
 that talent which is daily compared with that of the writers 
 of the great age, what would have been gained or lost by 
 that admirable talent " (I forget that it is he that is speak- 
 ing), "if I had had to write or to discourse, were it only 
 for some years, in the very presence of Lewis XIV., that is 
 to say, that calm, sober, and august royal good sense ? 
 And would not what I should have thus gained or lost, in 
 inspiration or eloquence, have been precisely that which 
 was excessive in it, and also that which it lacked in gravity, 
 in proportion, in propriety, in perfect accuracy, and, conse- 
 quently, in true authority ? " For there was in Lewis XIV., 
 and in the atmosphere about him, something which enforced 
 the cultivation of these qualities and virtues by all who 
 came within the sphere of the great reign, and in this sense 
 he may be said to have conferred them upon them. 
 
 There is no doubt that, if Bossuet had continued in the 
 sermonizing career which he followed from 1661 to 1669, ho 
 would not have kept the sceptre, and that Bourdaloue
 
 BOSSUET. 41 
 
 would have come, in the general estimation, only after and 
 a little below him. And yet, perhaps, that solid, forcible, 
 and continuous evenness of style, with less audacity and 
 splendour, was better adapted to the average mass of 
 hearers. I merely mention this idea which I believe to be 
 true, and which does not altogether agree with that which 
 a sovereignly inexact biographer has expressed: "These 
 two rivals in eloquence," says M. de Lamartine, speaking 
 ofBossuet and Bourdaloue, "were passionately compared. 
 To the shame of the time, the number of Bourdaloue's 
 admirers surpassed in a short time that of the enthusiastic 
 admirers of Bossuet. The reason of this preference of a 
 cold argumentation to a sublime eloquence lies in the 
 nature of human things. The men of middling stature 
 have more resemblance to their age than the Titanic 
 men have to their contemporaries. The orators who 
 deal in argument are more easily comprehended by 
 the multitude than the orators who are fired with 
 enthusiasm ; one must have wings to follow the lyric 
 orator. ..." This theory, invented expressly to give the 
 greatest glory to the lyric orators and the Titanic men, is 
 here at fault. M. de Bausset has remarked, on the con- 
 trary, as a kind of singularity, that it never entered any 
 man's head at that time to consider Bossuet and Bourdaloue 
 as subjects for a comparison, and to weigh in the balance 
 their respective merits and genius, as was so often done in 
 the case of Corneille and Racine ; or, at least, if they were 
 compared, it was very seldom. To the honour, and not to 
 the shame of the time, the public taste and sentiment took 
 notice of the difference. Bossuet, in his higher sphere as 
 bishop, remained the oracle, the Doctor, a modern Father 
 of the Church, the great orator, who appeared on funereal 
 and majestic occasions ; who sometimes reappeared in the 
 pulpit at the monarch's request, or to solemnize the 
 Assemblies of the Clergy, leaving on each occasion an over- 
 powering and ineffaceable recollection of his eloquence. 
 Meanwhile Bourdaloue continued to be for the age the 
 usual preacher par excellence, the one who gave a continual
 
 42 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 Course of Lectures on moral and practical Christianity, and 
 who distributed the daily bread in its most wholesome form 
 to all the faithful. Bossuet has said somewhere, in one of 
 his sermons : " Were it not better suited to the dignity of 
 this pulpit to regard the maxims of the Gospel as indubit- 
 able, than to prove them by reasoning, how easily might I 
 make you see," etc. There, where Bossuet would have 
 suffered by stooping and subjecting himself to too long a 
 course of proof and to a continuous argumentation, Bour- 
 daloue, who had not the same impatient genius, was an 
 apostolic workman who was more efficient in the long run, 
 and better adapted to his work by his constancy. The age 
 in which both appeared had the wisdom to make this dis- 
 tinction, and to appreciate each of them without opposing 
 one to the other ; and to-day those who glory in this 
 opposition, and who so easily crush Bourdaloue with 
 Bossuet, the man of talent with the man of genius, because 
 they think they are conscious themselves of belonging to 
 the family of geniuses, too easily forget that this Christian 
 eloquence was designed to edify and to nourish still more 
 than to please cr to subdue. 
 
 Here it is just to say that in these Sermons or discourses 
 preached by Bossuet from 1661-1669 and later, in almost 
 all of them, there are admirable passages, which move us 
 readers of to-day, to whatever class we may belong, very 
 differently from the sermons of Bourdaloue. In the Pane- 
 gyric on Saint Paul, at the very beginning, what a probing 
 of the subject to the core, in its inmost, deepest, most 
 supernatural part ! Paul is the stronger the weaker he feels 
 himself to be ; it is his weakness which makes his strength. 
 It is the artless Apostle, endowed with a hidden wisdom, 
 with an incomprehensible wisdom, that shocks and scandal- 
 izes, and he will give him no disguise or artifice : 
 
 "He will go to that polished Greece, the mother of philosophers, 
 and orators, and, in spite of the resistance of the people, he will 
 establish there more churches than Plato gained disciples by that 
 eloquence which was thought divine. He will preach Jesus in 
 Athens, and the most learned of its senators will pass from the
 
 BOSSUET, 43 
 
 Areopagus into the school of that barbarian. He will push his 
 conquests still farther ; he will humble at the feet of the Saviour 
 the majesty of the Roman fasces in the person of a proconsul, and 
 he will make the judges before whom he is cited tremble on their 
 tribunals. Rome even shall hear his voice, and one day that mistress 
 city shall feel herself much more honoured by a letter written with 
 the stylus of Paul, than by so many famous harangues which she has 
 heard from her Cicero. 
 
 " What is the reason of this, Christians ? It is that Paul has means 
 of persuasion which Greece does not teach, and which Rome has not 
 learned ! A supernatural power, which is pleased to exalt that which 
 the haughty despise, has permeated and mingled with the august 
 simplicity of his words. Hence it happens that we admire in his 
 admirable Epistles a certain more than human virtue which persuades 
 in opposition to rules, or rather which does not so much persuade as 
 it captivates men's understandings ; which does not tickle the ears, 
 bat which directs its blows right at the heart. Just as we see a great 
 river, after running into a plain, retain still the violent and impetuous 
 force which it acquired rn the mountains where it had its origin, so 
 the celestial virtue which is contained in ttc writings of Saint Paul, 
 preserves even in that simplicity of style all the vigour which it 
 brings from the Heaven whence it descends." 
 
 There is nothing to be said after such beauties. 
 
 Let us take now quite a different kind of sermon, 
 preached afterward at the Court, that upon Ambition 
 (1666), that upon Honour (1666), and that upon the 
 Love of Pleasure, (1662) ; beauties of the same kind appear 
 everywhere. Upon ambition and honour, he says in the 
 face of Lewis XIV. everything which could prevent the 
 idolatry of which he is soon to be the object, if it were 
 possible to prevent it. He seeks by the example of a Nero 
 or a Nebuchadnezzar, for "something which may awaken 
 in the human heart that terrible thought of seeing nothing 
 above it. It is there that covetousness, " he says, "goes 
 daily subtleizing, and turning back, so to speak, upon itself. 
 Thence come unknown vices. . . ." And of that man, 
 little in himself, and ashamed of his littleness, who labours 
 to increase, to multiply himself, who imagines that he 
 embodies all that he amasses and acqiiires, he says: "So 
 many times a count, so many times a lord, possessor of so 
 much riches, master of so many persons, member of so 
 many councils, and so of the rest: however, let him
 
 44 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 multipty himself as many times as he pleases, it neeJs but 
 a single death to humble him. Amid this infinite increase 
 which our vanity imagines, we never think of measuring 
 oureelves by our coffins, which, nevertheless, are the only 
 exact measure." It is the peculiarity of Bossuet thus to 
 have at the first glance all the great ideas which are the 
 fixed limits and the necessary bounds of things, and which 
 take no note of the shifting intervals where the eternal 
 infancy of man sports and forgets itself. . 
 
 That it may not be said that I seek in Bossuet only for 
 lessons for the great and the powerful, I will add that in 
 this same sermon upon Honour, iu which he enumerates and 
 considers the different kinds of vanities, he does not forget 
 the men of letters, the poets, men who in their way contend 
 for renown and empire : "These, who pride themselves on 
 their intellectual gifts, the learned, the men of letters, the 
 wits, think they are more rational than those I have named. 
 In truth, Christians, they are worthy of being distinguished 
 from the rest, and they form one of the world's finest 
 ornaments. But who can endure them when, as soon as 
 they are conscious of a little talent, they weary all ears 
 with their facts and their sayings, and because they know 
 how to arrange words, to measure a verse, or to round a 
 period, think they have a right to be heard for ever, and 
 to decide everything authoritatively ? rectitude of life, 
 purity of morals, moderation of the passions, rich and 
 true ornaments of the rational nature, when shall we learn 
 to prize you? . . ." Eternal Poetry, the source, support, 
 and superior rule of true talents, behold yourself recognised 
 incidentally in a sermon of Bossuet at the very moment 
 when Despreaux was trying to recognise you in his way, 
 in his Satires. But from how much higher a region does 
 the spring run, and in how much more stable a region 
 does it originate, in Bossuet than in the Horaces and the 
 Despreaux ! 
 
 As a literary peculiarity, it is to be noted that in these 
 Sermons of Bossuet there are some very fine passages which 
 one finds repeated even two or three times in different
 
 BOSSUET. 45 
 
 discourses. From these passages I shall cite a complete 
 moral dissertation upon the inconstancy of human affairs, 
 and the freaks of fortune, which sports on every occasion 
 with all the wisest and most prudent precautions: "Use. 
 the utmost possible precaution, never will you keep pace, 
 with its caprices ; when you think you are fortified on one 
 side, disgrace will come upon another ; make all the other 
 parts secure, and the edifice will fail at the foundations ; 
 if the foundation is solid, a thunderbolt will come from the 
 sky, and overturn the whole structure from top to bottom.", 
 This eloquent commonplace reappears in the third sermon, 
 on All Saints' Day, which I have noticed in the sermon on 
 the Love of Pleasure, and, with some variation, in that on 
 Ambition: "0 man, do not deceive thyself, the future 
 teems with events too strange, and loss and ruin affect the 
 fortunes of men in too many ways, to allow of their being 
 completely prevented. You dam up the water on one side, 
 it works through on the other, it bubbles up even from 
 undergound. . . ." After all, Bossuet is an orator : how- 
 ever little he cultivates his art, he possesses it, and, like 
 a Demosthenes, knows all about its practice ; this fine 
 passage, which looks so abrupt and sudden, he well knows 
 to be fine ; he keeps it in reserve, to be rep3ated on occa- 
 sion. We observe also, even in his sermons delivered at tho 
 great epoch, some expressions, not obsolete, but peculiarly 
 energetic, which are not in current use : " Our delightful 
 age which cannot endure the hardship of the Cross ; " for 
 our age which is fond of delights. ' ' That is to wish in some 
 sense, to desert the Court, in order to combat ambition." 
 Deserter, that is to say, devaster, rendre deserte. "There 
 is this difference between the reason and the senses, that 
 the senses make their impression first ; their operation is 
 prompt, their attack blunt and surprising." Surprenante 
 is used here in a proper and physical sense, and not in the 
 figurative sense of astonishing or exciting wonder. But 
 pardon me for dwelling on these academic details in the 
 presence of Bossuet. 
 
 In the first years of his residence at Paris, he pronounced
 
 4 5 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 the first of his peculiar Funeral Orations. We Lave those 
 which he delivered on the death of Father Bourgoing, the 
 head of the Oratory (1662), and on the death of Nicholas 
 Cornet, grand-master of Navarre, and the cherished master 
 of Bossuet in particular (1663). There are beauties in these 
 two discourses ; a fine passage upon the establishment of 
 the Oratory, is often quoted from the Funeral Oration on 
 Father Bourgoing. In the Funeral Oration upon M. 
 Nicholas Cornet, the questions of grace and free-will, 
 which then agitated the Church under the names of 
 Jansenism and Molinism, are admirably defined, and 
 Bossnet, by the free way in which he handles them, shows 
 how far he is disconnected from parties, and how far he 
 soars above them. The Galliran arbiter, in these perilous 
 matters, is found. However, that which strikes us in 
 these two Funeral Orations, especially in the last, is a 
 remarkable lack of harmony between the style and the 
 subject. We who do not belong to the house of Navarre, 
 cannot be so enthusiastic about that glory of Nicholas 
 Cornet, or sympathize with the apostrophe to his great 
 manes. Bossuet requires large and lofty themes ; mean- 
 while till they come to him, he magnifies and heightens 
 those which he handles ; but some disproportion appears. 
 He was thundering a little in the void at those moments, 
 or rather in too narrow a place ; his voice was too strong 
 for its organ. 
 
 He was to be more at ease, and to feel more at liberty, 
 in celebrating the queen, Anne of Austria, whose Funeral 
 Oration he pronounced some years after ; but, singular 
 thing 1 that discourse in which Bossuet must have poured 
 out the gratitude of his heart, and already displayed his 
 historical riches, has never been printed. 
 
 Finally, the death of the queen of England came to offer 
 him (1669) the grandest and most majestic of themes. He 
 needed the fall and the restoration of thrones, the revolu- 
 tion of empires, all the varied fortunes assembled in a single 
 life, and weighing upon the same head ; the eagle needed 
 the vast depth of the heavens, and, below, all the abysses
 
 BOSSUET. . 47 
 
 and storms of the ocean. But let us note also a service 
 which Lewis XIV. and his reign rendered to Bossuet : he 
 would have had these great themes equally amid the 
 disastrous epochs and through the Frondes and civil 
 discords, but they would have come to him scattered, in 
 some way, and without bounds : Lewis XIV. and his reign 
 gave him a frame in which these vast subjects were limited 
 and fixed without being contracted. In the august yet 
 well-defined epoch in which he spoke, Bossuet, without 
 losing any of his breadth or any of the audacities of his 
 talent of far-seeing observation, found everywhere about 
 him that support that security, and that encourage- 
 ment or warning, of which talent and even genius 
 have need. Bossuet, no doubt, put his trust, before all 
 things else, in Heaven ; but, as an orator, he redoubled his 
 authority, his calm strength, by feeling that under him, 
 and at the moment when he pressed it with his foot, the 
 earth of France did not tremble. 
 
 I am stopping only at the threshold of Bossuet : other 
 publications, I hope, will furnish me Avith new oppor- 
 tunities, and will provoke me to follow him in some of his 
 other works. I could have spoken with more detail of M. 
 Poujoulat's book ; the author Avould have desired it, and 
 certainly he merited as much for his useful and conscientious 
 labour. But he will pardon me for not entering with him 
 into discussions which would be secondary : I commend 
 the general spirit of his book, and I approve of its general 
 execution, too warmly to be willing to enter upon a formal 
 criticism of particular parts of it. 
 
 On this occasion, then, in the presence of so great a 
 subject, and at the foot of the statue, let it suffice me to 
 have made with a timid chisel what I call a first blow.
 
 ROUSSEAU. 
 
 AFTER Laving spoken of the pure, airy, unempbatic, 
 entirely fluid aud free language which the closing seven- 
 teenth century had left to some extent as a legacy to the 
 eighteenth, I would like to-day to speak of that language 
 of the eighteenth century, as exemplified in the writer who 
 did the most to improve it, who made it undergo, at least, 
 the greatest revolution since Pascal, a revolution from 
 which we of the nineteenth century begin to reckon. 
 Before Rousseau and since Pascal there had been many 
 trials of ways of writing, which were quite different from 
 those of the eighteenth century : Fontenelle had his 
 manner, if there had ever been a manner ; Montesquieu 
 had his, stronger, firmer, more striking, but a manner 
 still. Voltaire alone had none, and his vivid, clear, rapid 
 language ran, so to speak, almost from the spring. "You 
 find," says he, somewhere, "that I express myself very 
 clearly : I am like the little rivulets ; they are transparent 
 because they are not very deep." 
 
 He said that laughing ; one tells himself thus many 
 half truths. The age, however, demanded more ; it wished 
 to be moved, warmed, rejuvenated by the expression ot 
 ideas and sentiments which it had not well defined, but 
 which, it was still seeking for. The prose of Buffon, in the 
 first volumes of the Natural History, offered it a kind of 
 image of what it desired, an image more majestic than 
 lively, a little beyond its reach, and too much fettered to 
 scientific themes. Rousseau appeared : the day when he 
 became fully known to himself, he revealed at the same 
 time to his age the writer who was best fitted to express 
 
 48
 
 ROUSSEAU. 49 
 
 with novelty, with vigour, with logic mingled with flame, 
 the confused ideas which were fermenting and which 
 desired expression. 
 
 In laying hold of the language which it was necessary for 
 him to conquer and command, he gave it a bent which it 
 was henceforth to keep ; but he gave back to it more than 
 he took away, and, in many respects, he reinvigorated and 
 regenerated it. Since Rousseau, it is in the mould of 
 language established and created by him that our greatest 
 writers have cast their own innovations, and tried to excel. 
 The pure form of the seventeenth century, such as we love 
 to recall it, has been little more than a graceful antiquity 
 and a regret to people of taste. 
 
 Although the Confessions did not appear till after the 
 death of Rousseau, and when his influence was fully domin- 
 ant, it is in that work that it is most convenient for us to 
 study him to-day with all the merits, the fascinations, and 
 the faults of his talents. We shall try to do so, confining 
 ourselves as far as possible to a consideration of the writer, 
 but without interdicting ourselves from remarks upon the 
 ideas and character of the man. The present moment is 
 not very favourable to Rousseau, who is accused of having 
 been the author and promoter of many of the ills from 
 which we suffer. "There is no writer," it has been 
 judiciously said, "better fitted to make the poor man 
 proud." In spite of all, in considering him here, we shall 
 try not to harbour too much of that almost personal 
 feeling which leads some good spirits to have a grudge 
 against him, in the painful trials we are passing through. 
 Men who have such a range of influence and such a 
 future must not be judged by the feelings and reactions of 
 a day. 
 
 The idea of writing 'the Confessions seems so natural to 
 Rousseau, and so suitable to his disposition as well as to 
 his genius, that one would not believe that it had been 
 necessary to suggest it to him. It came to him, however, 
 in the first place, from his publisher, Rey, of Amsterdam, 
 and also from Duclcs. After the Nouvelle Hdolse, after
 
 SO, SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 > 
 
 the 6milt, Rousseau, fifty-two years old, began to write his 
 Confessions in 1764, after his departure from Montmorency, 
 during his stay at Motiers in Switzerland. In the last 
 number of the Swiss Review (October, 1850), there has just 
 been published a beginning of the Confessions, taken from 
 a manuscript deposited in the Library of Neuchatel, a 
 beginning which is Rousseau's first rough draft, and 
 which he afterwards suppressed. In this first beginning, 
 much less emphatic and less pompous than we read at the 
 opening of the Confessions, we hear no peal of the trumpt c 
 of the Judgment, nor does it finish with the famous apo- 
 strophe to the Eternal Being. Rousseau sets forth there 
 more at length, but philosophically, his plan of portraying 
 himself, of giving his confessions with rigorous truthful- 
 ness ; he shows clearly wherein the originality and singu- 
 larity of his design consist : 
 
 " No one can write a man's life but himself. The character of his 
 inner being, his real life, is known only to himself ; but in writing it, 
 he disguises it ; under the name of his life, he makes an apology ; he 
 shows himself as he wishes to be seen, but not at all as he is. The 
 sinccrest persons are truthful at most in what they say, but they lio 
 by their reticences, and that of which they say nothing so changes 
 that which they pretend to confess, that in uttering only a part of the 
 truth they say nothing. I put Montaigne at the head of these falsly- 
 siiicere persons who wish to deceive in telling the truth. He shows 
 himself with his faults, but he gives himself none but amiable ones ; 
 there is no man who has not odious ones. Montaigne paints his likeness, 
 but it is a profile. Who knows whether some scar on the cheek, or an 
 eye put out, on the side which he conceals from us, would not have 
 totally changed the physiognomy t " 
 
 He wishes, then, to do what no one has planned or dared 
 before him. As to style, it seems to him that he must 
 invent one as novel as his plan, and commensurate with 
 the diversity and disparity of the thipgs which he proposes 
 to describe : 
 
 " If I wish to produce a work written with care, like the others, I 
 shall not paint, I shall rouge myself. It is with my portrait that I 
 arn here concerned, and not with a book. I am going to work, so to 
 s|x>ak, in the dark room ; there is no other art necessary than to follow 
 exactly the traits -which I see marked. I form my resolution then
 
 KOUSSEAU. 51 
 
 about the style as about the things. I shall not try at all to render it' 
 uniform ; I shall write always that which comes to me, I shall change 
 it, without scruple, according to my humour ; I shall speak of every-- 
 thing as I feel it, as I see it, without care, without constraint, without 
 being embarrassed by the medley. In yielding myself at once to the 
 memory of the impression received and to the present sentiment, I 
 shall doubly paint the state of my soul, namely, at the moment when 
 the event happened to me and the moment when I describe it ; my 
 style, unequal and natural, sometimes rapid and sometimes diffuse, 
 sometimes wise and sometimes foolish, sometimes grave and sometimes 
 gay, will itself make a part of my history. Finally, whatever may 
 be the way in which this book may be written, it will be always, 
 by its object, a book precious for philosophers; it is, I repeat, au 
 illustrative piece for the study of the human heart, and it is the only 
 one that exists." 
 
 Rousseau's error was not in believing that in thus con- 
 fessing himself aloud before everybody, and with a senti-, 
 ment so different from Christian humility, he did a singular 
 thing; his error was in believing that he did a useful 
 thing. He did not see that he did like the doctor who 
 should set himself to describe, in an intelligible, seductive 
 manner, for the use of worldly people and the ignorant, 
 some infirmity, some well-characterized mental malady : 
 that doctor would be partially guilty of, and responsible 
 for, all the maniacs and fools whom, through imitation and 
 contagion, his book should make. The first pages of the 
 Confessions are too strongly accented and very painful. I 
 find in them, at the very beginning, "a void occasioned 
 by a fault of memory ; " Rousseau speaks there of the 
 authors of his days ; he brings at birth the germ of an 
 inconvenience which the years have increased, he says, 
 and "which now sometimes gives him some respites only 
 to," etc. etc. All this is .disagreeable, and savours little 
 of that flower of expression which we enjoyed the other 
 day under the name of urbanity. And yet, close by these 
 roughnesses of expression, and these crudities of the soil, 
 we meet, strange to say, with a novel, familiar, and impress- 
 ive simplicity 1 
 
 " I felt before thinking ; It is the common lot of humanity. I 
 experienced it more than others. I know not what I did till I was
 
 52 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 five or six years old. I know not how I learned to read ; I recollect 
 only ray first readings, and their effect upon me. My mother had left 
 some romances ; my father and I set to reading them after supper. 
 The object, at first, was only to instruct me in reading, by means of 
 amusing books, but soon the interest became so lively, that we read 
 by turns without relaxation, and spent the night in that occupation. 
 We could never leave off till at the end of the volume. Sometimes 
 my father, hearing the swallows in the morning, said, quite ashamed : 
 1 Let us go to bed, I am more of a child than you.' " 
 
 Note well that swallow ; it is the first, and it announces 
 the new spring-time of the language ; one does not see it 
 begin to appear till in Rousseau. It is from him that the 
 sentiment of nature is reckoned among us, in the eighteenth 
 century. It is from him also that is dated, in our litera- 
 ture, the sentiment of domestic life ; of that homely, poor, 
 quiet, hidden life, in which are accumulated so many 
 treasures of virtue and affection. Amid certain details, in 
 bad taste, in which he speaks of robbery and of eatables, 
 how one pardons him on account of that old song of 
 childhood, of which he knows only the air and some 
 words stitched together, but which he always wished to 
 recover, and which he never recalls, old as he is, without 
 a soothing charm ! 
 
 " It is a caprice which I wholly fail to comprehend, but It is utterly 
 Impossible for me to sing it to the eud, without being checked by my 
 tears. I have a hundred times planned to write to Paris, to have the 
 rest of the words sought for, if any one there knows them still : but I 
 am almost sure that the pleasure which I take in recalling that air 
 would vanish in part, if I had proof that other persons than my poor 
 Aunt Susy have sung it." 
 
 This is the novelty in the author of the Confessions, this 
 is what ravishes us by opening to us an unexpected source 
 of deep and domestic sensibility. We read together the 
 other day Madame de Caylus and her Recollection* ; but of 
 what memories of childhood does she speak to us ? whom 
 did she love ? for what did she weep in quitting the home 
 in which she was born, in which she was reared ? Has she 
 the least thought in the world of telling us of it ? These 
 aristocratics and refined races, gifted with so exquisite a
 
 ROUSSEAU. 53 
 
 tact and so lively a sensibility to raillery, either do not 
 love these simple things, or dare not let it be seen that 
 they do. Their wit we know well enough, and we enjoy 
 it ; but where is their heart ? One must be plebeian, and 
 provincial, and a new man like Rousseau, to show himself 
 so subject to affections of the heart and so sensitive to 
 natural influences. 
 
 Again, when we remark with some regret that Rousseau 
 forced, racked, and, so to speak, ploughed the language, we 
 add immediately that he at the same time sowed and 
 fertilized it. 
 
 A man of a proud, aristocratic family, but a pupil of 
 Rousseau, and who had hardly more than he the sentiment 
 and fear of the ridiculous, M. de Chateaubriand, has 
 repeated in Ren6 and in his Memoirs that more or less 
 direct manner of avowals and confessions, and he has drawn 
 from it some magical and surprising effects. Let us note, 
 however, the differences. Rousseau has not the original 
 elevation ; he is not entirely far from it ! what one calls 
 a well-born child ; he has an inclination to vice, and to low 
 vices ; he has secret and shameful lusts which do not 
 indicate the gentleman ; he has that extreme shyness which 
 so suddenly turns into the effrontery of the rogue and the 
 vagabond, as he calls himself; in a word, he has not that 
 safeguard of honour which M. de Chateaubriand had from 
 childhood, standing like a watchful sentinel by the side of 
 his faults. But Rousseau, witli all these disadvantages, 
 which we do not fear, after him, to mention by their name, 
 is a better man than Chateaubriand, inasmuch as he is 
 more human, more a man, more tender. He has not, for 
 example, that incredible hardness of heart (a hardness 
 really quite feudal), and that thoughtlessness in speaking 
 of his father and his mother. When he speaks of the 
 wrongs done him by his father, who, an honest man, but a 
 man of pleasure, thoughtless, and remarried, abandoned 
 him and left him to his fate, with what delicacy does he 
 mention that painful matter ! With what deep feeling is 
 all that depicted ! It is not of chivalric delicacy that I
 
 54 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 speik ; it is of the real, the heartfelt, that which is moral 
 and human. 
 
 It is incredible that this inner moral sentiment with 
 whicli he was endowed, and which kept him so much in 
 sympathy with other men, should not have apprised 
 Rousseau how far he derogated from it in many a passage 
 of his life and iu many a phrase which he affects. His 
 style, like his life, contracted some of the vices of his early 
 education and of the bad company which he kept at first. 
 After a childhood, virtuously passed in the circle of the 
 domestic hearth, he became an apprentice, and as such 
 underwent hardships which spoiled his tone and deprived 
 him of delicacy. The words, rogue, vagabond, ragamuffin, 
 knave, have nothing that gives him any embarrassment, 
 and it even seems as if they returned with a certain 
 complacency to his pen. His language preserves always 
 something of the bad tone of his early years. I distinguish 
 in his language two kinds of debasement : the objection to 
 one of them is merely that it is provincial, and bespeaks 
 a Frenchman born out of France. Rousseau will write 
 without scowling : " Comme que je fosse, comme que cefiU," 
 etc., instead of saying, " De quelque maniere quejefasse, de 
 quelque manitre que ce fitt, " etc. ; he articulates strongly 
 and roughly ; he has at times a little gottre in his voice. 
 But that is a fault which one pardons him, so far has he 
 succeeded in triumphing over it in some happy pages ; so 
 far, by force of labour and emotion, has he softened his 
 organ of speech, and learned how to give to that cultivated 
 and laborious style mellowness and the appearance of a 
 first gush. The other kind of debasement and corruption 
 which one may note in him is graver, inasmuch as it 
 touches the moral sense ; he does not seem to suspect that 
 there are certain things, the mention of which is forbidden, 
 that there are certain ignoble, disgusting, cynical expres- 
 sions which a virtuous man never uses, and which he 
 ignores. Rousseau, at some time, was a lackey ; we perceive 
 it, in more than one place, in his style. He hates neither 
 the word iior the thing. "If Fenelon were living, yon
 
 XOUSSEAU. 55 
 
 would be a Catholic," said Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to him 
 one day, on seeing him affected by some ceremony of the 
 Catholic worship. "Oh! if Fenelon were living," cried 
 Rousseau, all in tears, " I should seek to be his lackey, that 
 I might deserve to be his valet de chambre." We see the 
 lack of taste even in the emotion. Rousseau is not only 
 a workman in respect to language, an apprentice before 
 becoming a master, who lets us see in passages marks of the 
 solderings ; he is morally a man who, when young, had the 
 most motley experiences, and whom ugly and villainous 
 things do not make heartsick when he names them. I 
 shall say no more of this essential vice, this stain which it 
 is so painful to have to notice and to censure in so great a 
 writer and so great a painter, in such a man. 
 
 Slow to think, prompt to feel, with ardent and suppressed 
 desires, with suffering and constraint each day, Roussean 
 reaches the age of sixteen, and he paints himself to us in 
 these terms : 
 
 " I reached thus my sixteenth year, restless, dissatisfied with every- 
 thing and with myself, without a liking for my condition, without the 
 pleasures of my age, devoured by desires of whose object I was 
 ignorant, shedding tears without occasion, sighing without knowing 
 why ; finally, cherishing tenderly my chimeras from inability to see 
 anything about me which was of equal value. On Sundays my play- 
 mates came for me, after the church service, to go and play with them 
 if I could ; but, once engaged in their sports, I was more ardent, and 
 I went farther than the rest, being difficult to stir and to restrain." 
 
 Always in extremes ! We here recognise the first form 
 of the thoughts, and almost the phrases of Rene, those 
 words which are already a music, and which sing still in 
 our ears : 
 
 " My disposition was impetuous, my character unequal. By turns 
 noisy and joyous, silent and sad, I gathered my young companions 
 about me, then, suddenly abandoning them, I went and seated myself 
 apart to contemplate the fugitive cloud, or to hear the rain fall on the 
 foliage." 
 
 Again : 
 
 ' When young I cultivated the Muses ; there is nothing more poeWc 
 than a heart of sixteen years in the freshness of its passions. The
 
 56 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 morning of life is like the morning of the day, full of purity, of hopes, 
 and of harmonies." 
 
 Rene", indeed, is no other than this young man of sixteen 
 transposed, exiled amid different natural scenery, and in 
 the midst of a different social condition ; no longer an 
 engraver's apprentice, son of a citizen of Geneva, of a 
 citizen of the lower class, but a cavalier, a noble traveller 
 at large, smitten with the Muses ; all, at the first view, 
 wears a more seductive, a more poetic colour ; the unex- 
 pected character of the landscape and of the framework 
 heightens the character, and denotes a new manner ; but 
 the first evident type is where we have indicated it, and it 
 is Rousseau who, in looking into himself, has found it. 
 Rne is a more pleasing model for us, because in it all the vile 
 aspects of humanity are concealed from us ; it has a tint 
 of Greece, of chivalry, of Christianity, the reflections of 
 which cross each other on its surface. Words, in that 
 masterpiece of art, have acquired a new magic ; they are 
 words full of light and harmony. The horizon is enlarged 
 in all directions, and the rays of Olympus play upon it. 
 Rousseau has nothing comparable with this at the first 
 view, but he is truer at heart, more real, more living. 
 That workman's son who goes to play with his comrades 
 after the preaching, or to muse alone if he can, that little 
 youth with the well-shaped form, with the keen eye, with 
 the fine physiognomy, and who arraigns all things more 
 than one would like, he has more reality than the other, 
 and more life ; he is benevolent, tender, and compassionate. 
 In the two natures, that of Rene" and that of Rousseau, 
 there is a spot that is diseased ; they have too much ardour 
 mingled with a tendency to inaction and idleness a pre- 
 dominance of imagination and of sensibility which turn 
 back and prey upon themselves ; but, of the two, Rousseau 
 is the more truly sensitive, as be is the most original and 
 the most sincere in his chimerical flights, in his regrets, 
 and in his pictures of a possible but lost ideal felicity. 
 When, at the end of the first book of the Confessions, 
 quitting his country, he pictures to himself in a simple and
 
 ROUSSEAU. 57 
 
 touching manner the happiness which he could have 
 enjoyed there in obscurity ; when he tells us : "I should 
 have passed in the bosom of my religion, of my country, of 
 my family, and of my friends, a sweet and peaceful life, 
 such as my disposition required, in regular labour suited to 
 my taste, and in a society after my heart ; I should have 
 been a good Christian, a good citizen, a good father of a 
 family, a good friend, a good workman, a good man in 
 every respect; I should have loved my situation ; I should 
 have honoured it, perhaps, and, after having passed an 
 obscure and simple, but even and pleasant life, I should 
 have died peacefully in the bosom of my family ; soon 
 forgotten, no doubt, I should have been regretted, at least, 
 as long as I should have been remembered ; " when he 
 speaks to us thus, he does indeed convince us of the sin- 
 cerity of his wish and of his regret, so profound and lively 
 is the sentiment that breathes through all his words, of the 
 quiet, unvarying, and modest charm of a private life ! Let 
 none of us who, in this age, have been more or less afflicted 
 with the malady of reverie, do like those ennobled persons 
 who disown their ancestry, and let us learn that before 
 being the very unworthy children of the noble Rene", we are 
 more certainly the grandchildren of citizen Rousseau. 
 
 The first book of the Confessions is not the most remark- 
 able, but we find Rousseau in it already, quite complete, 
 with his pride, his vices in their germ, his odd and grotesque 
 humours, his meannesses and his obscenities (you see that 
 I note everything) ; with his pride also, and that firm and 
 independent spirit which exalts it ; with his happy and 
 healthy childhood, his suffering and martyred youth, and 
 the apostrophes to society and avenging reprisals (one 
 foresees them), with which it will inspire him at a later 
 day ; with his tender sentiment of domestic happiness and 
 family life which he had so little opportunity of enjoying, 
 and also with the first breaths of springtime, a signal of the 
 natural revival which will appear in the literature of the 
 nineteenth century. We run a risk to-day of being too little 
 impressed by these first picturesque pages of Rousseau ; we are
 
 58 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 so spoiled by colours that we forget how fresh and new these 
 first landscapes then were, and what an event it was in the 
 midst of that very witty, very refined, but arid society, 
 which was as devoid of imagination as of true sensibility, 
 and had in its own veins none of the sap which circulates, 
 and at each season conies back again. French readers, 
 accustomed to the factitious life of a salon atmosphere the 
 urbane readers, as he calls them were astonished and 
 quite enraptured to feel blowing from the region of the 
 Alps these fresh and healthy mountain breezes which came 
 to revive a literature that was alike elegant and dried up. 
 It was time for this revival, and hence it is that Rousseau 
 was not a corrupter of language, but, on the whole, a 
 regenerator. 
 
 Before him La Fontaine alone, among us, had had as 
 keen a relish for nature, and had known that charm of 
 reverie in the fields ; but the example had little effect ; the 
 people let the good man come and go with his fables, and 
 kept in their salons. Rousseau was the first person \vho 
 compelled all these fashionable people to go out of them, 
 and to quit the great alley of the park for the true walk in 
 the fields. 
 
 The beginning of the second book of the Confessions is 
 delightful and full of freshness ; Madame de "Warens appears 
 to us for the first time. In painting her, Rousseau's style 
 becomes gentle and gracefully-mellow, and at the same 
 time we discover a quality, an essential vein which is 
 innate and pervades his whole manner I mean sensuality. 
 "Rousseau had a voluptuous mind," says a good critic; 
 women play in his writings a great part ; absent or present, 
 they and their charms occupy his mind, inspire him and 
 affect him, and something relating to them is mingled 
 with all that he has written. "How," says he of Madame 
 de Warens, "in approaching for the first time a lovely, 
 polished, dazzling woman, a woman of a superior condition 
 to mine, whose like I had never met, . . . how did I find 
 myself at once as tree, as much at my ease, as if I had been 
 periectly sure of pleasing her ? "
 
 ROUSSEAU. 59 
 
 This facility, this ease, which he will not usually feel 
 when he finds himself in the presence of women, will 
 always be found in his style when he paints them. The 
 most adorable pages of the Confessions are those concerning 
 that first meeting with Madame de Warens ; those, also, 
 where he describes the welcome of Madame Basile, the 
 pretty shopkeeper of Turin: "She was brilliant and 
 elegantly attired, and in spite of her gracious air that 
 splendour had overpowered inc. But her welcome, which 
 was full of kindness, her compassionate tone, her soft and 
 endearing manners, soon put ine at my ease ; I saw that I 
 had succeeded, and that made me more successful." Have 
 you never observed that brilliancy and splendour of com- 
 plexion, like a ray of the Italian sun ? He then relates 
 that vivid and mute scene, which nobody has forgotten, 
 that scene of gestures, seasonably checked, all full of 
 blushes and young desires. Join to this the walk in the 
 environs of Annecy with Mademoiselles Galley and de 
 Graffenricd, every detail of which is enchanting. Such 
 pages were, in French literature, the discovery of a new 
 world, a world of sunshine and freshness, which men had 
 near them without having perceived it ; they presented 
 a mixture of sensibility and of nature, one in which no 
 sensuality appeared, except so far as it was permissible and 
 necessary to deliver us at last from the false metaphysics of 
 the heart and from conventional spiritualism. The sen- 
 suality of the brush, in that degree, cannot displease ; it is 
 temperate also, and is not masked, which renders it more 
 innocent than that of which many painters have since made 
 use. 
 
 As a painter, Rousseau everywhere manifests the senti- 
 ment of reality. He shows it every time that he speaks to 
 us of beauty, which, even when it is imaginary, like his 
 Julia, assumes a body and perfectly visible forms, and is by 
 no means an airy and intangible Iris. That he has this 
 sense of reality, appears from his wishing that every scene 
 which he recollects or invents, that every character he 
 introduces, should be enclosed and move in a well deter-
 
 60 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 mined place, of which the smallest details may be traced 
 and retained. 
 
 One of the things which he found fault with in the great 
 novelist Richardson was, that he did not connect the 
 recollection of his characters with a locality the pictures 
 of which one would have loved to identify. See also how 
 he has contrived to naturalize his Julia and his Saint-Freux 
 in the Pays-de-band, on the border of that lake about 
 which his heart never ceased to wander. His sound, firm 
 mind continually lends its graver to the imagination, that 
 nothing essential to the sketch may be omitted. Finally, 
 this sense of reality is noticeable again in the care with 
 which, amid all his circumstances and his adventures, 
 happy or unhappy, and even the most romantic, he never 
 forgets to speak of repasts and the details of a good, frugal 
 cheer, fitted to give joy alike to heart and mind. 
 
 This trait is also a material one ; it is related to that 
 citizen-like and popular character which I have noted in 
 Rousseau. He had been hungry in his lifetime ; he notes 
 in his Confessions, with a feeling of thankfulness to Provid- 
 ence, the last time that it was his lot to experience literal 
 want and hunger. Nor will he ever forget to introduce 
 these incidents of real life and of the common humanity, 
 these heart-matters, even into the ideal picture of his 
 happiness, which he will give at a later day. It is by 
 all these true qualities combined in his eloquence, that he 
 seizes and holds us. 
 
 Nature, sincerely enjoyed and loved for herself, is the 
 source of Rousseau's inspiration, whenever that inspiration 
 is healthy, and not of a sickly kind. When he sees 
 Madame de Warens again, on his return from Turin, he 
 stays some time at her house, and from the room that is 
 given him he sees gardens and discovers the country : "It 
 was the first time," he says, " since I was at Bossey (a place 
 where he was sent to be boarded in his childhood), that I 
 had something green before my windows." Till then, to 
 have or not to have something green under one's eyes, had 
 been a matter of great indifference to French literature ; it
 
 ROUSSEAU. 6 1 
 
 belonged to Rousseau to make it perceive it. It is from 
 this point of view that one might characterize him by a 
 word : he was the first who put something green into our 
 literature. Living thus, at the age of nineteen, near a 
 woman whom he loved, but to whom he dare not declare 
 his passion, Rousseau abandoned himself to a sadness which 
 yet had nothing gloomy in it, and which was tempered by 
 a nattering hope. Having gone to walk out of town, on 
 a great fete day, whilst the people were at vespers, 
 
 " The sound of the bells, which has always strangely affected me, 
 the song of the birds, the beauty of the day, the softness of the land- 
 scape, the scatterered and rural houses, in which I fixed in imagination 
 our common abode, all this affected me with such a vivid, tender, sad, 
 and touching impression, that I saw myself, as It were, In ecstasy 
 transported to that happy time and to that happy sojourn, in which 
 my heart, possessing all the felicity that could please it, enjoyed it 
 with inexpressible rapture, without even dreaming of the pleasure of 
 the senses." 
 
 This is what the child of Geneva felt at Annecy in the 
 year 1731, whilst at Paris people were reading the Temple 
 of Guidus. On that day he discovered the reverie, that 
 new charm which had been left as a singularity to La 
 Fontaine, and which he was going, himself, finally to 
 introduce into a literature that was till then polite or 
 positive. Reverie, such is his novelty, his discovery, his 
 own America. The dream of that day was realized by him 
 some years afterward, in his sojourn at the Charmettes, in 
 that walk by day from Saint Louis, which he has described 
 as nothing like it had ever before been depicted : 
 
 "Everything seemed to conspire to promote the happiness of that 
 day. It had rained just before ; there was no dust, and the streams 
 were running well ; a gentle breeze stirred the leaves, the air was pure, 
 the horizon cloudless, serenity reigned in the sky as in our hearts. 
 We took our dinner at a peasant's house, and shared it with his family, 
 who blessed us heartily. These poor Savoyards are such good people ! ' 
 
 "With this kindly feeling, and in this observant and 
 simply truthful way, he continues to unfold a picture in 
 which all is perfect, all is enchanting, and in which only 
 the name of Mamma applied to Madame de Warens 
 morally wounds and pains us.
 
 fe^ SATNTE-BEUVE. 
 
 That period at the Charmettes, in which this still )~oung 
 heart was permitted to open for the first time, is the 
 divinest of the Confessions, and it will never return, even 
 when Rousseau shall have retired to the Hermitage. The 
 description of those years at the Hermitage, and of the 
 passion which came to seek him there, is very fascinating 
 abo, and is more remarkable perhaps than all that precedes 
 it; he will justly exclaim, however: It is no longer the 
 Charmettes there ! The misanthropy and the suspicion of 
 which he is already the victim, will pursue him in that 
 period of solitude. He will be thinking continually there 
 of the Parisian world, of the society at D'Holbach's ; he 
 will enjoy his retreat in spite of them, but that thought 
 will poison his purest enjoyments. His disposition will 
 sour, and will contract during these years a henceforth 
 incurable disorder. He will have, no doubt, some delicious 
 moments then, and afterward, even to the end ; he will find 
 a^'ain, in Saint-Peter's Island, in the midille of Lake Bienne, 
 an interval of calmness and of forge tfiil ness which will 
 furnish him with inspiration for some of his finest pages, 
 tliat fifth walk of the Reveries, which, with the third 
 letter to M. de Malesherbes, cannot be separated from the 
 divinest passages of the Confessions. Nevertheless, nothing 
 will equal in lightness, freshness, and joyousness the 
 description of life at the Charmettes. Roosseau's true 
 happiness, of which no one, not even himself, could rob 
 him, was the ability thus to evoke and to retrace, with the 
 precision and vividness which characterized his recollection, 
 such pictures of youth, even in the years that were fullest 
 of troubles and distiactions. 
 
 The pedestrian journey, with its impressions at each 
 moment, was also one of the inventions of Rousseau, one of 
 the* novelties which he imported into literature : it has 
 since been greatly abused. It was not just after he had 
 enjoyed his trip, but much later, that he thought of relating 
 his experience*. It was only then, he assures us, when ho 
 travelled on foot, at a beautiful season, in a beautiful 
 country, without being hurried, having for the goal of his
 
 ROUSSEAU. 63 
 
 journey an agreeable object which he was not in loo great 
 haste to attain, it was then that he was entirely himself, 
 and that ideas of his which were cold and dead in the study, 
 came to life and took flight : 
 
 " Walking has something in it that animates and brightens my ideas : 
 I am scarcely able to think when I keep one position ; my body must 
 be in full swing before my mind can be so. The sight of the country, 
 the succession of agreeable objects, the open air, the good health I 
 gain by walking, the freedom of the inn, the removal from everything 
 that reminds me of my situation, all this sets my soul free, gives me a 
 greater audacity of thought, casts me, in some way, into the immensity 
 of beings where I may combine, choose, and appropriate them at will, 
 without hindrance and without fear. I dispose, as a master, of all 
 nature. . . ." 
 
 Do not ask him to write, at these moments, the sublime, 
 foolish, pleasant thoughts which pass through his mind : he 
 likes much better to taste and to relish than to speak of 
 them : " Besides, did I carry with me paper and pens ? If 
 I had thought of all that, nothing would have come to me. 
 I did not foresee that I should have ideas ; they come when 
 it pleases them, not when it pleases me." Thus, in all that 
 he has since related, we should have, if we may believe 
 him, only distant recollections and feeble remains of him- 
 self, as he was at those moments. 
 
 . And yet what could be at once more true, more precise, 
 and more delicious? Let us recall that night which he 
 passes in the starlight, on the bank of the Rhone or the 
 Saone, in a hollow way near Lyons : 
 
 " I slept voluptuously on the sill of a kind of niche or false door 
 opened in a terrace wall. The canopy of my bed was formed of the 
 tops of the trees ; a nightingale was just above me, I fell asleep under 
 his song : toy sleep was sweet, my waking was more so. It was broad' 1 
 day ; my eyes, as they opened, saw the water, the verdure, a wonder- 
 ful landscape. I rose and roused myself ; I felt hungry ; I proceeded 
 gaily towards the city, resolved to lay out for a good breakfast two 
 six-blauc pieces * which were yet left to me." 
 
 All the native Rousseau is there, with his reverie, his 
 ideality, his reality, and that six-blane piece itself, which 
 
 * A blanc is an old French copper coin. Six blancs made one and a 
 half pence in English money
 
 64 SAINTF.-BEUVE. 
 
 comes after the nightingale, is not too much to bring us 
 back to the earth, and make us feel all the humble enjoy- 
 ment which poverty conceals within itself when it is joined 
 with poetry and with youth. I desired to extend the 
 quotation as far as this six-blanc piece, to show that when 
 we are with Rousseau we are not merely keeping company 
 with Rend and with Jocelyn. 
 
 The picturesque in Rousseau is temperate, firm, and clear, 
 even in the softest passages ; the colouring is always laid 
 upon a well-drawn outline ; that Genevese citizen shows in 
 this that he is of pure French extraction. If he lacks at 
 times a warmer light and the splendours of Italy and 
 Greece ; if, as about that beautiful Geneva lake, the north 
 wind comes sometimes to chill the atmosphere, and if at 
 times a cloud suddenly casts a greyish tint upon the sides 
 of the mountains, there are days and hours of clear and 
 perfect serenity. Improvements have since been made upon 
 this style, and persons have believed that they have paled 
 and surpassed it ; they have certainly succeeded in respect 
 to certain effects of colours and sounds. Nevertheless, the 
 style remains still the surest and the finest which one can 
 offer as an example in the field of modern innovation. 
 With him the centre of the language has not been too much 
 displaced. His successors have gone farther ; they have 
 not merely transferred the seat of the Empire to Byzantium, 
 they have often carried it to Antioch, and even to mid-Asia. 
 With them the imagination in its pomp absorbs and domin- 
 ates all. 
 
 The portraits in the Confessions are lively, piquant, and 
 spiritual Bach, the friend, Venture, the musician, Simon, 
 thejugemaye, are finely seized and observed ; they are not 
 so easily dashed oft' as in Gil Bias, they are rather en- 
 graved ; Rousseau has here recalled his first trade. 
 
 I have been unable to do more than hurriedly to indicate 
 the leading particulars in which the author of the Confession* 
 remains a master to salute this time the creator of the 
 reverie, him who has inoculated us with the sentiment of 
 nature and with the sense of reality, the father of the
 
 ROUSSEAU. 65 
 
 literature of the heart, and of internal painting. What 
 a pity that misanthropic pride should be mingled with 
 these excellences, and that cynical remarks should cast a 
 stain upon so many charming and genuine beauties ! 
 But these follies and vices of man cannot overcome his 
 original merits, nor hide from us the great qualities in 
 which he shows himself still superior to his descendants.
 
 JOUBERT. 
 
 A PEKSON was astonished one day tliat Geoffrey could 
 return again and again to the same theatrical piece, and 
 make so many articles upon it. One of his witty brethren, 
 M. de Feletz, replied : " Geoffroy has three ways of making 
 an article : to assert, to re-assert, and to contradict him- 
 self." I have already spoken more than once of M. Joubert, 
 and to-day I would like to speak of him again, without 
 repeating and without contradicting myself. The new 
 edition* which is now publishing will furnish me with 
 the occasion and perhaps with the means of doing so. 
 
 The first time that I spoke of M. Joubert, I had to 
 answer this question, which one had a right to ask me : 
 "Who is M. Joubert?" To-day the question will no 
 longer be asked. Although he may not be destined ever 
 to become popular as a writer, the first publication of his 
 two volumes of "Thoughts and Letters," in 1842, sufficed 
 to give him a place, at the very outset, in the esteem of 
 connoisseurs and judges, and to-day it is only necessary to 
 extend a little the circle of his readers. 
 
 His life was simple, and I recall it here only for those 
 who love to become acquainted with the personality 
 of an author. M. Joubert, who was born in 1754, and 
 died in 1824, was, in his lifetime, as little of an author 
 as possible. He was one of those happy spirits who pass 
 their lives in thinking, in talking with their friends, 
 in dreaming in solitude, in meditating upon some work 
 which they will never accomplish, and which will come to 
 * Of his "Pens6es, Essai", Maximes et Correspondance."
 
 JOUBERT. 67 
 
 us only in fragments. These fragments, by their quality, 
 and in spite of some faults of a too subtle thought, are in 
 this instance sufficiently meritorious to entitle the author 
 to live in the memory of the future. M. Joubert was, in 
 his day, the most delicate and the most original type of 
 that class of honest people which the old society alone pro- 
 duced, spectators, listeners who had neither ambition nor 
 envy, who were curious, at leisure, attentive, and dis- 
 interested, who took an interest in everything, the true 
 amateurs of beautiful things. " To converse and to know, 
 it was in this, above all things, that consisted, according 
 to Plato, the happiness of private life." This cla^s of 
 connoisseurs and of amateurs, so fitted to enlighten and to 
 restrain talent, has almost disappeared in France since 
 every one there has followed a profession. " We should 
 always," said M. Joubert, "have a corner of the head open 
 and free, that we may have a place for the opinions of our 
 friends, where we may lodge them provisionally.- It is 
 really insupportable to converse with men who have, in 
 their brains, only compartments which are wholly occupied, 
 and into which nothing external can enter. Let us have 
 hospitable hearts and minds." Go, then, to-day, and 
 demand intellectual hospitality, welcome for your ideas, 
 your growing views, from hurried, busy minds, filled wholly 
 with themselves, true torrents roaring with their own 
 thoughts ! M. Joubert, in his youth, coming in 1778 at 
 the age of twenty-four from his province of Perigord to 
 Paris, found there what one finds no longer to day ; he 
 lived there as one lived then : he chatted. What he did in 
 those days of youth may bo summed up in that single word. 
 He chatted then with famous people of letters ; he knew 
 Marmontel, La Harpe, D'Alembert ; he knew especially 
 Diderot, by nature the most gracious and the most 
 hospitable of spirits. The influence of the latter upon him 
 was great, greater than one would suppose, seeing the 
 difference in their conclusions. Diderot had certainly in 
 M. Joubert a singular pupil, one who was pure-miuded, 
 finally a Platonist and a Christian, smitten with the beau
 
 68 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 iiUal and saintlincss ; studying and adoring piety, chastity, 
 modesty ; and never finding, in which to express himself upon 
 these noble subjects, any style sufficiently ethereal, nor any 
 expression sufficiently luminous. However, it is only by 
 that contact with Diderot that one can fully explain the 
 inoculation of M. Joubert with certain ideas, then so new, 
 so bold, and which he rendered truer by elevating and 
 rectifying them. M. Joubert had his Diderot period, when 
 he tried everything ; later, he made a choice. Always, 
 even at an early day, he had tact ; taste did not come to 
 him till afterward. "Good judgment in literature," said 
 he, " is a very slow faculty, which does not reach the last 
 point of its growth till very late." Reaching that point of 
 maturity, M. Joubert was sufficiently just to Diderot to say 
 that there are many more follies of style than follies of 
 thought in his works. It was especially for his interest and 
 initiation in art and literature that he was indebted to 
 Diderot. But, in falling into a soul so delicate and so 
 light, those ideas of literary reform and of the regeneration 
 of art, which in Diderot had preserved a kind of homely 
 and prosaic, a smoky and declamatory character, were 
 brightened and purified, and assumed an ideal character 
 which approximated them insensibly to the Greek beauty ; 
 for M. Joubert was a Greek, he was an Athenian touched 
 with the Socratic grace. "It seems to me," said he, 
 "much more difficult to be a modern than to be an 
 ancient." He was especially an ancient in the calmness and 
 moderation of his sentiments ; he disliked everything that 
 was sensational, all undue emphasis. He demanded a lively 
 and gentle agreeableness, a certain internal, perpetual joy, 
 giving to the movement and to the form ease and supple- 
 ness, to the expression clearness, light, and transparency. 
 It is principally in these that he made beauty consist : 
 
 " The Athenians were delicate in mind and ear. They never would 
 have endured a word fitted to displease, even though one had only 
 quoted it One would say that they were always in good humour 
 when writing. They disapproved in style of the austerity which 
 reveals hard, harsh, sad, or severe manners."
 
 JOUBERT. 69 
 
 He said again : 
 
 "Those proud Romans had a hard ear, which It was necessary to 
 caress a long time to dispose them to listen to beautiful things. 
 Hence that oratorical style which one finds even in their wisest 
 historians. The Greeks, on the contrary, were endowed with perfect 
 organs, easy to put in play, and which it was only necessary to touch 
 in order to move them. Again, the simplest dress of an elegant 
 thought sufficed to please them, and in descriptions they were 
 satisfied with pure truth. They observed especially the maxim, 
 Nothing in excess. Much choice and purity in the thoughts ; words 
 assorted and beautiful by their own harmony; finally, the sobriety 
 required to prevent anything from weakening an impression, these 
 formed the character of their literature." 
 
 Upon Pigalle and modern statuary as opposed to the 
 ancient, one might cite from him thoughts of the same 
 kind, whole pages which mark at once and very clearly 
 in what respect he agrees with Diderot, and wherein he 
 separates from him. Thus, then, about the epoch of 1789, 
 there was in France a man already at maturity, thirty 
 years old, eight years older than Andre Che"nier, and 
 fourteen years older than Chateaubriand, who was fully 
 prepared to comprehend them, to unite them, to furnish 
 them with incitements and new views, to enable them to 
 extend and complete their horizon. This was the part, 
 indeed, of M. Joubert touching M. de Chateaubriand, whom 
 he knew in 1800, on the return of the latter from London. 
 M. de Chateaubriand, at that fine period of his life (that 
 fine period, for me, is the literary period, and extends 
 from "Atala," by "Rene*," by "The Martyrs," even to 
 the " Last of the Abencerrages "), M. de Chateaubriand had 
 then, as a poet, a happiness which very few persons enjoy : 
 he found two friends, two distinct critics, Fontanes and 
 Joubert, made expressly for him, to inform him or to guide 
 him. One has commonly but one guardian angel, he then 
 had two : one entirely guardian, Fontanes, restraining him 
 in private, defending him when necessary before everybody, 
 covering him with a buckler in the melte ; the other, 
 rather fitted to incite and to inspire, M. Joubert, who 
 encouraged him in an undertone, or murmured to him
 
 70 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 sweet counsel in a contradiction full of grace. The best, 
 tbe finest criticism to be made upon the first and great 
 literary work of M. de Chateaubriand, might still be found 
 in the " Letters and Thoughts " of M. Joubcrt. This is not 
 the place to examine and to disentangle that criticism ; I 
 shall, nevertheless, touch somewhat upon it presently. 
 
 The life of Joubert is all in his thoughts ; but one would 
 not say of that life the little that is to be said of it, if one 
 did not speak of Madame de Beaumont. That daughter of 
 the old minister, M. de Montmorin, who escaped during 
 the Reign of Terror from the fate of the rest of her family, 
 and who found favour on account of her weakness and 
 paleness, was one of those touching beings who only glide 
 through life, and who leave there a trace of light. M. 
 Joubert, who was already married, and who spent a part of 
 the year at Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, had met her in Burgundy 
 at the door of a cottage, where she had taken refuge. He 
 was immediately attracted to her ; he loved her. He would 
 have loved her with a sentiment livelier than friendship, if 
 there had been for this exquisite soul a livelier sentiment. 
 Madame Beaumont, still young, had infinite grace. Her 
 mind was quick, solid, exalted ; her form delicate and 
 aerial. She had formerly known and appreciated Andre 
 Che'nier. Rulhiere had had a seal engraved for her, which 
 represented an oak with this device : "A breath agitates 
 me; nothing shakes me." The device was just; but the 
 image of the oak may seem somewhat proud. Be this as it 
 may, that frail and graceful shell, that sensitive reed, which 
 seemed to abandon itself to the least breath, enclosed a 
 strong, ardent soul, capable of a passionate devotion. 
 Struck in her tenderest place, victim of an ill-assorted 
 union, she had little love for life ; mortally attacked, 
 she felt that it was fleeing from her, and she hastened 
 to give it up. While waiting for death, her noble mind 
 was prodigal of itself, happy in scattering sweet approvals 
 about her. It has been said of Madame de Beaumont that 
 she loved merit as others love beauty. When M. de 
 Chateaubriand, coming to Paris, was presented to her, she
 
 JOUBERT. 71 
 
 immediately recognised that merit under its most seductive 
 form of poetry, and she adored it. Hers was, after his 
 sister Lucille's, the first great devotion which that figure 
 of Rene" inspired, that figure which was to inspire more 
 than one other afterward, though none of greater value. 
 "With what feeling she inspired M. Joubert, it would be 
 difficult to define : it was an active, tender, perpetual 
 solicitude, without excitement, without uneasiness, full of 
 warmth, full of radiance. That too lofty spirit, which 
 knew not how to move slowly, loved to fly and perch itself 
 near her. He had, as he said, a chilly mind ; he loved to 
 have it pleasant and warm about him ; he found in her 
 society the serenity and the warmth of affection, which he 
 desired, and he drew strength from the indulgence. As 
 she despised life, he preached to her constantly upon the 
 care and love of it ; he would have had her learn again to 
 hope. He wrote to her : 
 
 " I am paid for desiring your health, since I have seen you ; I know 
 its importance, since I have it not. That, you say, will be the sooner 
 done with. Yes, sooner, but not soon. One is a long time dying, 
 and if, roughly speaking, it is sometimes agreeable to be dead, it i* 
 frightful to be dying for ages. Finally, we must love life while wo 
 have it : it is a duty." 
 
 He repeats to her this truth of morality and of friendship 
 in all its forms ; he wished, if possible, to lessen and to 
 moderate the activity which was consuming her and wast- 
 ing her frail organs. He wished to insinuate Madame de 
 La Fayette's sentiment of resignation : It is enough to be. 
 
 "Be quiet in love, in esteem, in veneration, I pray you with joined 
 hands. It is, I assure you, at this moment the only way to commit 
 but few mistakes, to adopt but few errors, to suffer but few ills." 
 " To live," he said to her again, " is to think and to be conscious of 
 one's soul ; all the rest, eating, drinking, etc., although I value them, 
 are but preparations for living, the means of preserving life. If one 
 could do without them, I eould easily resign myself thereto, and I 
 could very well dispense with my body, if one would leave me all my 
 soul." 
 
 He had reasons for speaking thus, he of whom one has 
 said that he had the appearance of a soul which has eu- >
 
 7* SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 countered a body by chance, and which gets along with it 
 as it can. He commended to that lovely friend repose, 
 immobility, that she should follow the only regimen which 
 he found good for himself, to remain a long time in bed 
 and to count the joists. He added : 
 
 " Your activity disdains such a happiness ; but see if your reason 
 does not approve of it. Life is a duty ; we must make a pleasure of it, 
 so far as we can, as of all other duties. If the care of cherishing it is 
 the only one with which it pleases Heaven to charge us, we must 
 acquit ourselves gaily and with the best possible grace, and poke that 
 sacred fire, while wanning ourselves by it all we can, till the word 
 comes to us : That will do." 
 
 These tender recommendations were useless. Madame de 
 Beaumont had so little attachment to life, that it seemed 
 as if it depended only upon herself whether she should live. 
 Pure illusion ! she was but too really attacked, and she 
 herself had but little to do to hasten her end. She decided 
 to go to the waters of Mont-Dore in the summer of 1803, 
 and thence to set out for Rome, where she rejoined M. do 
 Chateaubriand ; shortly after her arrival there she died. 
 One should read the letter of M. Joubert, written during 
 that trip to Rome. He had not believed in that departure ; 
 he had secretly hoped that she would shrink from so much 
 fatigue and such occasions of exhaustion. The last letter 
 which he addressed to her (October 12, 1803), is filled with 
 an anxious tenderness ; one perceives in it a kind of revela- 
 tion, long withheld, which he finally made to himself ; he 
 had never before confessed to himself, so plainly, how much 
 he loved her, how necessary she was to him. He wrote : 
 
 " All my mind has returned to me ; it gives me many pleasures ; 
 but a despairing reflection corrupts them ; I have you no longer, and 
 surely I shall not have you for a long time within reach, to hear what 
 I think. The pleasure I formerly had in speaking is entirely lost to 
 me. I have made a vow of silence : I remain here fi-r the winter. My 
 inner life is going to be spent wholly with Heaven and myself. My 
 soul will preserve its wonted habits, but I have lost its delights." 
 
 In conclusion, he cries : 
 
 '" Adieu, adieu, cause of so many pains, who hast been for m so 
 often the source of so many blessings. Adieu ! preserve yourself, take
 
 JOUBERT. 73 
 
 care of yourself, and return some day among us, if only to give me 
 for a single moment the inexpressible pleasure of seeing you again." 
 
 In the two preceding years (1800-1803) there had been 
 formed ahout Madame de Beaumont a little reunion, often 
 spoken of, which was very short in duration, but which 
 had life and activity, and which deserves to hold a place by 
 itself in literary history. It was the hour when society 
 was everywhere regenerated, and many salons then offered 
 to those who had recently been exiled and shipwrecked the 
 enjoyments, so desired, of conversation and intellectual 
 intercourse. There were the philosophic and literary circles 
 of Madame Suard and Madame d'Houdetot, and that of the 
 Abbe Morellet (held by his niece, Madame Cheron) ; there, 
 properly speaking, literary people and philosophers held 
 sway, who directly prolonged the last century. There 
 were the fashionable salons, of a more varied and diverse 
 composition ; the salon of Madamo de la Briche ; that of 
 Madame de Vergennes, where her daughter, Madame 
 de Remusat, distinguished herself ; that of Madame de 
 Pastoret, that of Madame de Stae'l when she was at Paris ; 
 and yet others, of which each had its hue and its dominant 
 tone. But, in a corner of Rue Neuve-du-Luxembourg, a 
 salon much less visible, much less exposed, gathered 
 together some friends in intimate union about a lady of 
 superior quality. In that place were to be found youth, 
 the new sentiment, and the future. The habituts of the 
 place were M. de Chateaubriand, even his sister Lucille for 
 a whole winter, M. Joubert, Fontanes, M. Mole, M. Pas- 
 quier, Chenedolle, M. Grenean de Mussy, one M. Jullien, 
 well instructed in English literature, Madame de Venti- 
 mille. These were the body of the assemblage : the others 
 whom one might name came only as it happened. The 
 sun -flash which followed the eighteenth brumaire had 
 made itself felt more in this corner of the world than 
 elsewhere ; one loved, one was open to every kind of genius, 
 every new talent ; one enjoyed each as an enchantment ; 
 imagination had flowered again, and on the door of 
 the place one might have inscribed the saying of M.
 
 74 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 Joubert : "Admiration has reappeared, and rejoiced a 
 saddened earth." 
 
 These happy meetings, these complete reunions last 
 but a day. After the loss of Madame de Beaumont, 
 M. Joubert continued to live and to think, but with 
 less delight ; he conversed often of her with Madame de 
 Ventimille, her closest surviving friend ; but such a 
 reunion as that of 1802 was never formed again, and, 
 at the end of the Empire, politics and business had 
 loosened, if not dissolved, the ties of the principal friends. 
 M. Joubert, isolated, living with his books, with his 
 dreams, noting his thoughts on unconnected bits of paper, 
 would have died without leaving anything finished or 
 enduring, if one of the relatives of the family, M. Paul 
 Raynal, had not had the pious care to collect these frag- 
 ments, to set them in a certain order, and to make of them 
 a kind of series of precious stones. These are the volumes 
 of which a second edition is published to-day. 
 
 Since I have spoken of precious stones, I will say, right 
 at the beginning, that there are too many of them. An 
 English poet (Cowley) has said : " One concludes by doubt- 
 ing whether the milky-way is composed of stars, there are 
 so many of them ! " There are too many stars in the 
 heaven of M. Joubert. One would like more intervening 
 spaces and more repose. " I am like Montaigne," said 
 he, "unfit for continuous discourse. Upon all subjects, it 
 seems to me, I either lack intermediate ideas, or they 
 weary me too much." These intermediate ideas, if he had 
 given himself the trouble to express them, would not have 
 wearied us, it seems, but would rather have given us repose 
 in reading him. One is conscious in his writings ot an 
 effort, often happy, yet an effort. "If there is a man," 
 he says, ' ' tormented with the accursed ambition of putting 
 a whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase, and 
 that phrase into a word, it is I. " His method is always to 
 express a thought in an image ; the thought and the image 
 make, for him, but one thing, and he believes that he has 
 grasped the one only when he has found the other. "It is
 
 JOUBERT. 75 
 
 not my phrase that I polish, but my idea. I stop till the 
 drop of light which I need is formed and falls from my 
 pen." This series of thoughts, then, are only drops of 
 light ; the mind's eye is at last dazzled by them. " I 
 would like," says he, defining himself with marvellous 
 correctness, "I would like to infuse exquisite sense into 
 common sense, or to render exquisite sense common." 
 Good sense alone wearies him ; the ingenious without good 
 sense rightly appears to him contemptible ; he wishes to 
 unite the two, and it is no small undertaking. " Oh ! how 
 difficult it is," he cries, "to be at once ingenious ami 
 sensible ! " La Bruyere, before him, had felt the same 
 difficulty, and had avowed it to himself at the beginning : 
 " All is said, and one comes too late, now that there have 
 been men for seven thousand years, and men, too, that, 
 have thought." M. Joubert recognises this likewise : 
 "All the things which are easy to say well have been 
 perfectly said ; the rest is our business or our task : painful 
 task!" I indicate at the outset the disadvantage and 
 the fault ; books of maxims and of condensed moral 
 observations, such as that of La Bruyere, and especially 
 such as M. Joubert's, cannot be read consecutively without 
 fatigue. It is the mind distilled and fixed in all its sugar ; 
 one cannot take much of it at once. 
 
 The first chapters of the first volume are not those which 
 please me most ; they treat of God, of creation, of eternity, 
 and of many other things. To the peculiar difficulty of 
 the subjects is added that which springs from the subtlety 
 of the author. Here it is no longer with Plato that we 
 have to do, but with Augustine in large doses, and without 
 any connection in the ideas. Unquestionably it will be 
 well, one day, to make of all these metaphysical chapters a 
 single one, much abridged, into which shall be admitted 
 only the beautiful, simple, acceptable thoughts, rejecting 
 all those which are equivocal or enigmatical. On these 
 terms one may make of M. Joubert's volumes, not a library 
 book as to-day, but (that which would be so easy to make 
 by selection) one of those beautiful little books which he
 
 76 SA 1NTE-BE UVE. 
 
 loved, and which would justify in every respect his device : 
 Excel, and iliou shall live ! 
 
 It is when he returns to speak of manners and of arts, 
 of antiquity and of the century, of poetry and of criticism, 
 of style and of taste, it is in treating all these subjects 
 that he pleases and charms us, that he appears to us to 
 have made a notable and novel addition to the treasure of 
 his most excellent predecessors. Taste, for him, is the 
 literary conscience of the soul. Not more than Mon- 
 taigne does he love the book-like or bookish style, that 
 which savours of ink, and which one never employs except 
 when writing : " There should be, in our written language, 
 voice, soul, space, a majestic air, words which subsist all 
 alone, and carry their place with them." This life he 
 demands of the author, and without which style exists 
 only on paper, he wishes also in the reader : " The writers 
 who have influence are only men who express perfectly 
 what others think, and who reveal in minds ideas or 
 sentiments that were striving to come forth. It is in 
 the depths of minds that literatures exist." Again, ho 
 who relished the ancients so well, the antiquity of Rome, 
 of Greece, and of Lewis XIV., does not demand impossi- 
 bilities of us ; he will tell us to appreciate that antiquitj% 
 but not to return to it. In respect to expression, he prefers 
 again the sincere to the beautiful, and truth to appearance : 
 
 " Truth in style is an indispensable quality, and one which suffices to 
 recommend a writer. If, upon all sorts of subjects, we should write 
 to-day as men wrote in the time of Lewis XIV., we should have no 
 truth in style, for we have no longer the same dispositions, the same 
 opinions, the same manners. A woman who would write like Madame 
 de Sevigne" would be ridiculous, because she is not Madame de Sevigne. 
 The more the way in which one writes partakes of the character of the 
 man, of the manners of the time, the more must the style differ from 
 that of the writers who have been models only by having manifested 
 pre-eminently, in their works, either the manners of their epoch or 
 their own character. Good taste itself, in that case, permits one to 
 discard the best taste ; for taste, even good taste, changes with 
 manners." 
 
 If this is already the case, so far as we are concerned,
 
 JOUBERT. 77 
 
 with the style of the nge of Lewis XIV., how will it be 
 with that of remote antiquity, and can one hope to return 
 to it? M. Joubert contents himself with desiring that 
 we should prize and tenderly regret that which will never 
 return : 
 
 " In the luxury of our writings and of our life, let us at least love 
 and regret that simplicity which we have no longer, and which, 
 perhaps, we can no longer have. While drinking from our gold, let 
 us regret the ancient cups. Finally, that we may not be corrupted in 
 everything, let us cherish that which is better than ourselves, and 
 let us, in perishing, save from the shipwreck our tastes and our 
 judgments." 
 
 What M. Joubert demands, above all, of the moderns is, 
 not to insist upon their faults, not to follow their inclina- 
 tions, not to throw themselves in that direction with all 
 their strength. The visionary and fickle nature, the 
 sensual, the bombastic, the colossal, especially displease 
 him. We have had a high opinion for some years of what 
 we call force, power. Often when I have chanced to hazard 
 some critical remark upon a talent of the day, the reply 
 has been made to me: "What matters it! that talent has 
 power. " But what kind of power ? Joubert is going to 
 reply for me : "Force is not energy; some authors have 
 more muscles than talent. Force ! I do not hate it nor do 
 I fear it ; but, thanks to heaven, I am entirely disabused in 
 regard to it. It is a quality which is praiseworthy only 
 when it is concealed or clothed. In the vulgar sense Lucan 
 had more of it than Plato, Brebeuf more than Racine." 
 He will tell us again : "Where there is no delicacy, there 
 is no literature. A writing in which are found only force 
 and a certain fire without splendour, announces only 
 character. One may produce many such, if he has 
 nerves, bile, blood, and boldness." M. Joubert adores 
 enthusiasm, but he distinguishes it from explosiveness, and 
 even from fervour, which is but a secondary quality in 
 inspiration, and which excites whilst the other moves : 
 "Boileau, Horace, Aristophanes, had fervour; La Fontaine, 
 Menander, and Virgil, the gentlest and the most ex- 
 quisite enthusiasm that ever was." Enthusiasm, in that
 
 78 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 sense, might be defined a kind of exalte 1 peace. Fine 
 works, according to him, do not intoxicate, but they 
 enchant. He exacts agreeableness and a certain amenity 
 even in the treatment of austere subjects ; he requires a 
 certain charm everywhere, even in profundity: "It is 
 necessary to carry a certain charm even into the' deepest 
 investigations, and to introduce into those gloomy caverns, 
 into which one has penetrated but for a short time, the 
 pure and antique light of the ages that were less instructed 
 but more luminous than ours." Those words luminous and 
 light reappear frequently in his writings, and betray that 
 winged nature that loved the heavens and high places. 
 The brilliant, which he distinguishes from the luminous, 
 does not seduce him : " It is very well that thoughts should 
 shine, but it is not necessary that they should sparkle." 
 What he most of all desires in them is splendour, which 
 he defines a quiet, inner brilliancy, uniformly diffused, and 
 which penetrates the whole body of a work. 
 
 There is much to be drawn from the chapters of M. 
 Joubert upon criticism and upon style, from his judgments 
 upon different writers ; in these he appears original, bold, 
 and almost always correct. He astonishes at the first 
 impression ; he generally satisfies when one reflects upon 
 his sayings. He has the art of freshening stale precepts, 
 of renewing them for the use of an epoch which holds to 
 tradition only by halves. On this side he is essentially a 
 modern critic. In spite of all his old creeds and his regrets 
 for the past, we distinguish immediately in him the stamp 
 of the time in which he lives. He does not hate a certain 
 appearance of elaborate finish, he sees in it rather a mis- 
 fortune than a fault. He goes so far as to believe that 
 "it is permissible to avoid simplicity, when to do so is 
 absolutely necessary for agreeableness, and when simplicity 
 alone would not be beautiful." If he desires naturalness, 
 it is not the vulgar naturalness, but an exquisite natural- 
 ness. Does he always attain it ? He feels that he is not 
 exempt from some subtlety, and he excuses himself for it : 
 "Often one cannot avoid passing through the subtle to riso
 
 JOUBERT. 79 
 
 and reach the sublime, as to mount to the heavens one 
 must pass through the clouds." He rises often to the 
 highest ideas, but it is never by following the high-roads ; 
 he has paths that are unseen. Finally, to sum all up, there 
 is singularity and an individual humour in his judgments. 
 He is an indulgent humorist, who sometimes recalls Sterne, 
 or rather Charles Lamb. He has a manner that leads him 
 to say nothing, absolutely nothing, like another man. 
 This is noticeable in the letters he writes, and does not fail 
 to be wearisome at last. It appears by all marks that 
 Joubert is not a classic but a modern, and it is by this title 
 that he appears to me fitted, better perhaps than any other 
 person, to give emphasis to good counsel, and to pierce us 
 with his shafts. 
 
 I have sometimes asked myself what would be a sensible, 
 just, natural French rhetoric, and it happened to me, once 
 in my life, to have to treat the subject in a course of lectures 
 to some young people. What did I have to do to avoid 
 falling into routine, and also risking too much by novelty ? 
 I began quite simply with Pascal, with the " thoughts" on 
 literature in which the great writer has set down some of 
 the observations which he made upon his own art ; I read 
 them aloud, at the sime time commenting on them. Then I 
 took La Bruyere at the chapter on the " Works of the Mind." 
 I next went to Fenelon for his "Dialogues on Eloquence," 
 and for his "Letter to the French Academy. " I read cursorily, 
 choosing the points, and commenting on them always by 
 means of examples, and without confining myself to the 
 living. Vauvenargues, on account of his "Thoughts" and 
 his "Literary Characters," came next. I then borrowed of 
 Voltaire his articles on Taste and Style in the "Philosophical 
 Dictionary," his "Temple of Taste," and some passages of his 
 letters in which he judges Boileau, Racine, and Corneille. 
 In order to extend the horizon a little at this moment, I 
 joined some considerations upon the genius of Goethe and 
 upon the English taste of Coleridge. Marmontel, in his 
 "Elements of Literature," furnished me next with the article 
 on Style, an excellent piece. I was careful not to forget
 
 Bo SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 Buffon upon the same subject, who crowned the whole. 
 Then, the classic circle completed, I gave M. Joubert to my 
 young people for a kind of dessert, for recreation, and for a 
 little final debauch, a debauch worthy of Pythagoras ! And 
 so my French rhetoric found itself complete. 
 
 On the whole, if we must characterize M. Joubert, he 
 had all the delicacy which one can desire in a mind, but he 
 had not all the power. He was one of those meditative 
 and fastidious minds that "are incessantly distracted from 
 their work by immense perspectives and distant prospects of 
 celestial beauty, of which they would like to show every- 
 where some image or some ray." He had in too high a 
 degree the sentiment of the perfect and of the complete : 
 "To perfect one's thought," cried he, "that takes time, 
 that is rare, that imparts an extreme pleasure ; for perfected 
 thoughts enter minds easily ; they need not even be beau- 
 tiful to please ; it suffices that they be finished. The 
 condition of the soul which has had them communicates 
 itself to other souls, and conveys to them its own repose." 
 He had sometimes that sweet enjoyment of finishing his 
 thoughts, but never that of joining them together and 
 forming a monument. 
 
 A philosopher of that time, himself an exceedingly in- 
 tellectual man, was accustomed to distinguish three kinds 
 of minds thus : 
 
 " The first, at once powerful and delicate, which excel as they under- 
 stand it, execute what they conceive, and attain both the great and 
 the true beautiful ; a rare elect among mortals ! 
 
 "The second, whose chief quality is delicacy, and who feel their 
 idea to be superior to their execution, their intelligence greater still 
 than their talent, even when this last is very real. They are easily 
 disgusted, disdain the easily obtained suffrages, love better to judge, 
 to taste, and to abstain, than to remain below their idea and them- 
 selves. When they write, it is iu fragments, it is for themselves alone, 
 it is at long intervals, and in rare moments ; they have for their 
 apportionment only an internal fecundity, which has few confidants. 
 
 " Finally, the last kind of minds comprises those who, more power- 
 ful and less delicate or less exacting, go on producing and diffusing 
 themselves, without being too much disgusted with themselves and 
 with their works ; and it is very happy that it is so with them, for,
 
 JOUBERT. 8 1 
 
 otherwise, the world would run the risk of being deprived of many 
 thoughts which amuse and which charm it, which console it for the 
 want of those greater ones that will not come." 
 
 Is it necessary to say that M. Joubert, like M. Royer- 
 Collard, belongs to the second class of these minds, to those 
 who look upward and produce chiefly within ? 
 
 Naturally the conversation of these men is superior to 
 what they leave in writing, and which exhibits but the 
 smallest part of themselves. I have been permitted to 
 gather some flashes of the conversation of M. Joubert from 
 the papers of Chenedolle, who took notes of them on leaving 
 him. Would one know how Joubert talked about M. de 
 Chateaubriand and about Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, while 
 comparing the excellences of the two ? The last week has 
 been entirely consecrated to M. de Chateaubriand, and 
 there has been a great festival of eloquence on his account.* 
 Nevertheless, if I do not deceive myself, and if I see 
 clearly in respect to certain symptoms, the moment is 
 approaching when his high renown will have to undergo 
 one of those general insurrections which long -continued 
 monarchies, universal monarchies, at the final reckoning, 
 never escape. What it will be necessary to do then, to 
 maintain the just rights of his renown, will be, in wise 
 criticism as in wise war, to abandon without difficulty all 
 the parts of that vas-t domain which are not truly beautiful, 
 nor susceptible of being seriously defended, and to entrench 
 one's self in the portions which are entirely superior and 
 durable. The portions which I call truly beautiful and in- 
 expugnable, will be "Rene"," some scenes of "Atala,"thestory 
 of Eudore, the picture of the Roman Campagna, some fine 
 pictures in the "Itineraire;" to these will be joined some polit- 
 ical and especially some polemical pages. Well, here is what 
 M. Joubert said, one day in February, 1807, while walking 
 with Chenedolle before the column of the Louvre, as "Rene"," 
 " Paul et Virginie," and " Atala" came to his recollection : 
 
 * On the sixth of December (1849) there was a great session at the 
 French Academy for the reception of M. Noailles, who came to replace 
 and to celebrate M. dc Chateaubriand ; M. Patin had replied to him. 
 F
 
 82 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 " The work of M. de Saint-Pierre resembles a statue of white marble, 
 that of M de Chateaubriand a bronze statue cast by Lysippus. The 
 style of the former is more polished, that of the latter more coloured. 
 Chateaubriand takes for his theme heaven, earth, and hell: Saint- 
 Pierre chooses a well-lighted earth. The style of the one has the 
 fresher and younger look ; that of the other has the more ancient 
 look : it has the appearance of belonging to all times. Saint-Pierre 
 seems to choose the purest and richest terms in the language : 
 Chateaubriand borrows from all sources, even vicious literatures, 
 but he works a real transmutation, and his style resembles that 
 famous metal which, at the burning of Corinth, was formed bv 
 the mingling of all the other metals. The one has a varied unity, 
 the other a rich variety. 
 
 "There is a reproach to be made against both. M. de Saint-Pierre 
 has given to matter a beauty which does not belong to it ; Chateau- 
 briand has given to the passions an innocence which they do not have, 
 or which they have but once. In " Atala " the passions are covered with 
 long white veils. 
 
 "Saint-Pierre has but one line of beauty which turns and returns 
 indefinitely upon itself, and is lost in the most graceful windings : 
 Chateaubriand employs all the lines, even the defective ones, the 
 breaks of which he makes contribute to the truth of the details and to 
 the pomp of the whole. 
 
 "Chateaubriand produces with fire ; he melts all his thoughts in the 
 fire of heaven. 
 
 ' Bernardin writes by moonlight, Chateaubriand by the light of the 
 sun.' 
 
 I will add nothing after such thoughts so worthy of 
 memory, except that, when a new edition of M. Joubert is 
 prepared, they should be added to it.
 
 GUIZOT. 
 
 M. GITIZOT has twice addressed the public, as a writer, 
 since February, 1848 : the first time in January, 1849, by 
 his pamphlet, " On Democracy in France ; " the second time, 
 in these latter days, by the "Discourse"* which we have 
 now to notice, and which has a double end in view. This 
 "Discourse," indeed, is designed to serve as an introduction 
 to a new edition of the " History of the English Revolution," 
 which appears at this time ; but it has also an evident 
 reference to the present political situation, and almost a 
 direct discussion of it. In discussing strictly this question ; 
 "Why did the English Revolution succeed?" the eminent 
 historian evidently provokes every thinking reader to ask 
 himself this other question : " Why has the French Revolu- 
 tion miscarried thus far ? Why, at least, did it not succeed 
 in the same sense as the English, and why is its final adjust- 
 ment yet to be made ? " 
 
 If M. Guizot's discourse were purely political, I might let 
 it pass without believing it to belong to my province, thus 
 remaining faithful to my office and to my taste, which are 
 agreed to adhere to literature ; but this "Discourse" is polit- 
 ical only in its meaning and object ; it is purely historical 
 in form and appearance, and as such I cannot neglect it 
 without seeming to be iinequal to an important occasion, 
 and almost to an opportunity. It is impossible for the 
 newspaper critic, who commonly has to hunt for or to create 
 subjects of interest, to evade so important ones when they 
 directly confront him. I f I should pass by this ' ' Discourse " 
 * " Discours sur 1'Histoire de la Revolution d' Aneleterre. " 
 
 S3
 
 84 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 iu silence, to speak of a book of poetry, or of an old or new 
 novel, the public would have a right to think that literary 
 criticism acknowledges its incompetency, that it knows its 
 business only to a certain trifling extent ; that there are 
 subjects from which it is interdicted as too difficult or too 
 thorny ; and I have never thus regarded that criticism, 
 which is light, no doubt, and, so far as possible, agreeable, 
 but firm and serious when it should be, and as far as it 
 should be. 
 
 However (and I will frankly confess it at the outset, in 
 order that I may be so much the more at my ease afterward), 
 [ have felt a momentary embarrassment on finding myself 
 prepared to express a direct opinion upon a work whose 
 import is so real, and consequently upon an eminent man 
 of whom there is so much to be said, and whom one cannot 
 consider by halves. The writings of M. Guizot form a 
 complete chain ; you cannot touch a link, without moving, 
 without shaking all the rest. And then we have to do, in 
 this case, with a living writer ! M. Guizot is not one of 
 those men who are divided, and of whom one can say : I 
 will speak of the historian, of the man of letters, without 
 touching the politician. No, to his honour we must admit, 
 and it is one of the very causes of his personal importance, 
 he is one ; literature and history itself have been with him 
 only a means of action, of teaching, of influence. He 
 adopted early certain ideas and systems, and in all ways, 
 by the pen, by speech, in the professor's chair, on the 
 platform, in power and out of power, he has left nothing 
 undone to naturalize those ideas and to make them prevail 
 in our country. And at this moment what is he doing 
 still ? Fallen yesterday, he lifts up his banner again to- 
 day ; only he raises it now in the historic form. Once more 
 he ranges his ideas and his reasons in order of battle, as if 
 lie had never been attacked. To make an end of these 
 precautions, which were yet indispensable, I shall not 
 pretend to forget that Guizot has counted for much in 
 our destinies, that, in determining them, he has been a 
 heavy weight. The accident of February, that immense
 
 GUIZOT. 85 
 
 catastrophe in which we all shared and by which we were 
 shipwrecked, will be present to my memory. I should tell 
 a falsehood if I should say that this last lesson of history 
 is not joined, in my opinion, to all the others which we 
 owe to M. Guizot, to complete them, to correct them, and 
 to confirm me in certain judgments, which I shall try to 
 express here as fitly as possible. 
 
 M. Guizot is one of the men of our day who, early and on 
 every occasion, have laboured the most and written the 
 most, and upon all sorts of subjects ; one of those whose 
 information is the most various and vast, who are best 
 acquainted with the ancient and the modern languages 
 and with belles-lettres ; and yet he is not a litterateur 
 properly so called, in the exact sense which that word 
 conveys to me. Napoleon wrote to his brother Joseph, 
 then king of Naples, who was very fond of literary people 
 and of savants: "You live too much with men of letters 
 and savants. They are coquettes with whom one must hava 
 a commerce of gallantry, but one must never dream of mak- 
 ing a wife or a minister of any of them." This is true ot 
 many literary persons, of some even of those whom, in our 
 day, we have seen made ministers. But it is not true either 
 of M. Guizot or M. Thiers. Both are politicians who began 
 by being writers ; they made their start in literature, they 
 return to it when necessary, they honour it by their works ; 
 but they do not belong, strictly speaking, to the family of 
 litterateurs, that race which has its special qualities and 
 faults. M. Guizot, perhaps, is farther from belonging to 
 it than anybody else. There is no mind to which one can 
 less properly apply that word coquette, which Napoleon used ; 
 it is a mind which, in everything, cares the least for form, 
 for fashion. Literature has never been his end, but his 
 means. He does nothing trivial, nothing useless. He 
 goes in all matters to the fact, to the end, to the main point. 
 If he writes, he does not trouble himself about a chimerical 
 perfection ; he seeks to say well what he means, and as he 
 means it ; he does not hunt for a better form of expression, 
 thus losing time and wasting his energies. He is not smitten
 
 86 SAISTTE-BEUVE. 
 
 with an ideal which he would realize. An excutive mind, 
 he gathers his forces and his ideas with vigour and with 
 ardour, and sets himself resolutely to work, caring little 
 for the form, and attaining it often by the nerve and 
 decisiveness of his thought. When a work is done, he 
 rarely returns to it ; he does not resume it in order to revise 
 it at leisure, to retouch it and polish it up, to improve the 
 inexact or weak parts, and to amend the imperfections of 
 the first draft ; he passes on to another. He thinks of 
 the present and of the morrow. 
 
 Such he was at the beginning, before he was in office, 
 such in the intervals of his political life. When the 
 Restoration took place, he felt that, under a peaceful 
 government, which admitted the right of discussion and 
 of speech, he was one of those whom their natural vocation 
 and their merit call to take part in the affairs and in the 
 deliberations of the country. All the while that he wrote 
 a great deal, as much from taste as from an honourable 
 necessity, he felt that he belonged to the class who become 
 ministers and who govern. From the very first day he set 
 his eye upon a lofty position, and he prepared himself for 
 it with energy. 
 
 While waiting, however, for the hour to come when he 
 should be an orator and a minister, ho taught at the 
 Sorbonne ; he was the greatest professor of history that we 
 have had. He founded a school ; that school reigns ; it 
 reigns in part over the very persons who think they are 
 combating it. In his " Essays on the History of France," 
 in his "History of Civilizati a in Europe and in France," 
 Guizot has developed his principles and his points of view. 
 More precise than the Germans, generalizing more than 
 the English, he became European by his writings before 
 becoming such by the part he played as a public man. 
 From the first day that he set foot in history, M. Guizot 
 brought to it his instinct and his habits of mind ; he 
 professed to regulate it, to organize it. His first design, in 
 crossing that vast ocean of past things, was to discover and 
 trace a determinate direction, without being too straitened,
 
 GUIZOT. 87 
 
 nd without diminishing the diversity of the whole. To 
 act impartially, to admit all the constituent elements of 
 history, royal, aristocratic, communal, or ecclesiastic, to 
 exclude no one of them henceforth, on condition of classify- 
 ing them all and making them march under one law, that 
 was his ambition. It was vast, and if we may judge by the 
 effect produced, M. Guizot has succeeded. He has been 
 praised as he deserved. He has not been controverted as 
 he ought. Daunou alone made some timid but judicious 
 observations. No firm spirit, in the name of the school of 
 Hume and Voltaire, in the name of that of experience and 
 good sense, in the name of human humility, has come 
 forth to declare the objections which would not have 
 detracted from his solid merits as a thinker and classifier, 
 which would have left untouched many of the positive 
 portions of his work, but which would have given birth 
 to some doubts concerning the foundation of his exorbitant 
 pretensions. 
 
 I am one of those who doubt, indeed, whether it is 
 granted to man to comprehend with this amplitude, with 
 this certainty, the causes and the sources of his own history 
 in the past ; he has so much to do to comprehend it even 
 imperfectly at the present time, and to avoid being de- 
 ceived about it at every hour ! Saint Augustine has made 
 this very ingenious comparison : Suppose that a syllable in 
 the poem of the Iliad were endowed, for a moment, with 
 a soul and with life, could that syllable, placed as it is, 
 comprehend the meaning and general plan of the poem ? 
 At most, it could only comprehend the meaning of the 
 verse in which it was placed, and the meaning of the 
 three or four preceding verses. That syllable, animated for 
 a moment, is man ; and you have just told him that he has 
 only to will it in order to grasp the totality of the things 
 which have occurred on this earth, the majority of which 
 have vanished without leaving monuments or traces of 
 themselves, and the rest of which have left only monuments 
 that are so incomplete and so truncated ! 
 
 This objection does not address itself to M. Guizot only,
 
 88 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 but to the whole doctrinaire school of which he has been 
 the organ and the most active and influential worker. It 
 addresses itself to many other schools, also, which believe 
 themselves distinct from that, and which have split upon 
 the same rock. The danger is very real to any person, 
 especially, who would pass from history to politics. His- 
 tory thus seen from a distance, mark the fact ! under- 
 goes a singular metamorphosis, and produces an illusion, 
 the worst of all because one believes it a reality. Under 
 this more or less philosophical arrangement which one 
 gives to history, the deviations, the follies, the personal 
 ambitions, the thousand strange accidents which compose 
 it, and of which those who have observed their own times 
 know that it is composed, all this disappears, is neglected, 
 and is judged but little worthy of being taken into tlie 
 account. The whole acquires, after the fact, a rational 
 appearance which is deceptive. The fact becomes a view of 
 the mind. One judges henceforth only from above ; he puts 
 himself, insensibly, in place of Providence. He finds in all 
 the individual accidents inevitable chains, necessities, as 
 they are called. But if he afterward proceeds from study 
 to practice, he is tempted to forget, in dealing with present 
 things, that one has incessantly to deal with human 
 passions and follies, with human inconsistency. He desires 
 at the present time, and even at the very hour, certain net 
 results, as he fancies that they existed in the past. He 
 deals authoritatively with experience. In this age of 
 sophists in which we live, it is in the name of the philosophy 
 of history that each school (for each school has its own) 
 comes imperiously to demand the innovation, which, in its 
 eyes, is no more than a rigorous and legitimate conclusion. 
 It is well to see how, in the name of that pretended historic 
 experience which is nothing more than logic, each one 
 presumptuously arrogates the present and claims the future 
 as his own. 
 
 M. Guizot knows better than we these inconveniences, 
 and he would combat them, if there were occasion, in his 
 own masterly way. But he has not been exempt from
 
 GUIZOT. 89 
 
 these errors himself, and, by his ascendancy, he has 
 authorized these general ways of viewing events. His 
 philosophy of history is by far too logical to be true, and 
 none the less so for being more specious than others, and 
 for resting upon facts. I see in it only an artificial method, 
 convenient for keeping an account of the past. All the 
 forces which have not produced their effect, and which, 
 nevertheless, might have produced it, are suppressed. AH 
 those which can be recovered and gathered together are 
 arranged in the best order, and under complex names. 
 All the lost causes, which have not had their representative, 
 or which have been finally vanquished, are declared to have 
 been born feeble, and from the outset doomed to defeat. 
 And often what a trifle has prevented them from being 
 triumphant ! The very old facts are the ones which lend 
 themselves most readily to this kind of systematic history. 
 They are no longer living ; they reach us scattered, piece- 
 meal ; they permit themselves to be commanded and trained 
 at will when a capable hand attempts to arrange and 
 reconstruct them. But modern history offers more resist- 
 ance. M. Guizot knows it well. In his " History of Civili- 
 zation in Europe," it is only when he comes to the sixteenth 
 century that he entertains any doubts about the advantages 
 of hasty generalizations ; it is only then, also, that these 
 objections start up of themselves on all sides, and we 
 re-enter the stormy and variable atmosphere of modern and 
 present times. The generalization which seems profound in 
 respect to far distant ages, would seem shallow and rash in 
 respect to nearer ones. Let us well understand each other : 
 I admire that far-reaching and ingenious force of mind 
 which recreates, which restores all of the past that can be 
 restored, which gives it a meaning, if not the true, at least 
 a plausible and probable meaning, which controls the 
 disorder in history, and which furnishes useful bases and 
 directions for its study. But what I would point out as a 
 danger is the habit of wishing to draw conclusions from a 
 past thus recreated and reconstructed, from a past arti- 
 ficially simplified, concerning the moving, various, and
 
 90 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 changing present. For myself, when I have read some of 
 these lofty lessons, so clear and so trenchant, upon the 
 "History of Civilization," I speedily reopen a volume of the 
 " Memoirs " of Retz, that I may come back to the real world 
 of intrigue and of human masquerades. 
 
 We touch here upon one of the essential reasons why 
 the historian, even the great historian, is not necessarily a 
 great politician or a statesman. These are talents which 
 approximate, which resemble each other, and which one is 
 tempted to confound, but which in some important respects 
 differ. The historian is employed to describe the malady 
 when the sick man is dead. The statesman is employed to 
 treat the sick man while he is still living. The historian 
 deals with "facts accomplished" and simple results (at 
 least, relatively simple) : the politician confronts a certain 
 number of results, of which more than one may chance at 
 any moment to vanish. 
 
 Some recent facts have demonstrated this last truth. I 
 appeal here to everybody's good sense, and say : In politics, 
 there are several different ways in which a thing that is 
 begun may turn out. When the thing is done, we see only 
 the event. That which passed under our eyes in February 
 is a notable example. The thing might have turned out in 
 many different ways. Fifty years hence one will maintain 
 perhaps (according to the method of the doctrinaires) that 
 it was a necessity. In a word, there are many possible 
 defiles in the march of human affairs. In vain does the 
 absolute philosopher tell you : "In history I love the main 
 roads; I believe only in the main roads." Good sense 
 replies: "These main roads are most frequently made by 
 the historian. The main road is made by enlarging the 
 defile which one has passed, and at the expense of the other 
 defiles which one might have passed." 
 
 A positive mind, that knows how to combine the prac- 
 tical result and the abstract view, M. Guizot did not care 
 to embarrass himself very long with these historic formulas 
 in which a German professor would have dwelt for ever. 
 He stated them, but he did not shut himself up in them.
 
 GUIZOT. 91 
 
 In 1826 he knew how to choose, as material for history, a 
 subject which was most happy in its analogies to our own 
 political situation, and which, besides, was in all respects 
 most fitting to his abilities : he undertook the "History of 
 the English Revolution." Two volumes only of that History 
 have appeared thus far, and the recital goes only to the 
 death of Charles I. M. Guizot, after a long interruption, 
 resumes his task to-day, and he signalizes his return to it 
 by the remarkable "Discourse" which one may read. Amid 
 the interruptions and the chasms there is this in common 
 between the beginning in 1826 and the resumption in 1850, 
 that he published the ' ' History " then as a lesson given to that 
 time, and it is also by the title of a lesson given to our own 
 time, that he returns to his task to-day. In 1826 the lesson 
 was addressed to royalty which wanted to be absolute, and 
 to the ultras. In 1850 it is addressed to the democracy. 
 But why, then, a lesson always? Does not history, thus 
 presented, run a risk of going out of the way and of being 
 made a little to order ? 
 
 Be this as it may, the two published volumes of this 
 " History of the English Revolution " have a real interest, and 
 offer a grave and manly recital, a series of facts that form a 
 firm and dense tissue, with great and lofty parts. The 
 scenes of the death of Strafford and the trial of Charles I. are 
 treated simply, and with great dramatic effect. That which 
 was more difficult, and which M. Guizot excels in setting 
 forth, is the debates, the discussions, the disagreements of 
 parties, the parliamentary side of the history, the state of 
 the ideas in the different groups at a given moment ; he 
 understands in a masterly way this marshalling of ideas. 
 Sprung from a Calvinist family, he has kept up a certain 
 austere tone of theirs, a talent for comprehending and repro- 
 ducing those tenacious natures, those energetic and gloomy 
 inspirations. The habits of race and early education stamp 
 themselves on the talents and reappear in the speech, even 
 when they have disappeared from the habits of our life ; we 
 keep their fibre and their tone. The men, the characters, 
 are expressed, as we meet them, by vigorous strokes ; but
 
 92 SA INTE-BE UVE. 
 
 the whole lacks a certain splendour, or rather a certain 
 continuous animation. The personages do not live with a 
 life of their own ; the historian takes them, seizes them, and 
 gives their profile in brass. His plan implies a very bold 
 and confident execution. He knows what he wants to say, 
 and where he wants to go. The ridiculous and ironical side 
 of things, the sceptical side, of which other historians make 
 too much, has with him no place. He shows plainly a kind 
 of moral gravity in men amid their manoeuvrings and 
 intrigues ; but he does not set the contradiction in a suffi- 
 ciently strong light. He gives us, on the way, many stale 
 maxims, but none of those moral reflections which instruct 
 and delight, which recreate humanity and restore it to itself, 
 like those which escape incessantly from Voltaire. His 
 style, which is emphatically his own, is sad and never 
 laughs. I have given myself the pleasure of reading at the 
 same time the corresponding pages of Hume : one would 
 not believe that the same history was treated, so different is 
 the tone ! What I remark especially is, that it is possible 
 for me, in reading Huine, to check him, to contradict him 
 sometimes : he furnishes me with the means of doing so by 
 the very details he gives, by the balance he strikes. In 
 reading Guizot this is almost impossible, so closely woven is 
 the tissue, so interlinked is the whole narrative. He holds 
 you fast and leads you to the end, firmly combining the fact, 
 the reflection, and the end in view. 
 
 How far, even after these two volumes, and regarding his 
 writings as a whole, is M. Guizot a historical painter ? How 
 far and to what extent is he properly a narrator ? These 
 would be very interesting questions to discuss as literary 
 ones, without favour and without prejudice ; and, whatever 
 fault one might find with M. Guizot, it would necessarily 
 be accompanied with an acknowledgment of a peculiar 
 originality, which belongs only to him. Even when he 
 narrates, as in his "Life of Washington," it is of a certain 
 abstract beauty that he gives us an impression, not of an 
 external beauty that is designed to please the eyes. His 
 language is strong and ingenious ; it is not naturally pictur-
 
 GUIZOT. 93 
 
 esqne. He uses always the graver, never the brush. His 
 style, in the fine passages, is like reflections from brass, and, 
 as it were, of steel, but reflections under a grey sky, and 
 never in the sunlight. It has been said of the worthy Join- 
 ville, the ingenuous chronicler, that his style "savours still of 
 his childhood," and that "worldly things are created for him 
 only on the day when he sees them." At the other extrem- 
 ity of the historic chain, with Guizot, it is quite the contrary. 
 His thought, his very recital, assumes spontaneously a kind 
 of abstract, half- philosophical appearance. He communi- 
 cates to everything that he touches, a tint, so to speak, of 
 an anterior reflection. He is astonished at nothing ; he 
 explains whatever he presents to you, he gives the reason for 
 it. A person who knew him well said of him: "That 
 which he has known only since morning, he appears to have 
 known from all eternity." In fact, an idea in entering that 
 lofty mind loses its freshness ; it instantly fades, and be- 
 comes in a manner antique. It acquires premeditation, 
 firmness, weight, temper, and sometimes a gloomy splendour. 
 
 All this being said, it is just to admit that in the second 
 volume of the ' ' History of the English Revolution, " there are 
 passages of a continuous narrative which are irreproachable. 
 It is when M. Guizot abandons himself to his favourite 
 manner, as in the late " Discourse," that everything in his 
 writing naturally turns into reflections. The very descrip- 
 tion of a fact is already a result. 
 
 But we cannot properly estimate M. Guizot as a writer, 
 unless we also speak of the orator. The one is closely con- 
 nected with, and has reacted on, the other. Generally, it 
 is the writer (as Cicero has observed) that contributes to 
 form the orator. In Guizot, it is rather the orator that has 
 contributed to perfect the writer, and some one has gone so 
 far as to say that it is upon the marble of the tribune that 
 he has finished polishing his style. M. Guizot, in his first 
 attempts, did not always write well ; at least, he wrote very 
 unequally. As soon, however, as his feelings were roused, 
 in his polemical articles, in his pamphlets, he had much 
 point and sharpness. For a long time I have heard it said
 
 94 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 that M. Gxiizot did not write well. It is necessary to think 
 twice before denying that he has a certain quality ; for, 
 with that tenacious and ardent will of his, he may not- 
 be long in winning the very quality which one denies to 
 him, and in saying, "Here it is!" As a professor, M. 
 Guizot spoke well, but with nothing extraordinary in his 
 manner ; there was clearness, a perfect lucidity of expression, 
 but along with repetitions of abstract terms ; very little 
 elegance, little warmth. One has always the warmth of 
 his ambition. The ambition of M. Guizot was not to feel 
 at ease, and at home, as it were, till he should enter upon the 
 parliamentary stage, into the heart of political struggles ; 
 it was then that lie became wholly himself and began to 
 grow. He needed some apprenticeship still ; but from 
 1837 he displayed all his talent. He had not merely what 
 I call the warmth of his ambition ; he had at moments 
 its flame in his speech. That flame, however, burst forth 
 chiefly in his look, gesture, and action. His speech, taken 
 separately, has force and nerve rather than fire. I check 
 myself in these praises. One cannot, if he is patriotic, 
 confine himself here to the literary point of view ; for is 
 it possible to forget it ? that speech has translated itself 
 into acts, it has had too real consequences. That marvellous 
 faculty of authority and serenity (to take a word which he 
 affects), that sovereign art of im parting to things an apparent 
 simplicity, a deceitful clearness, which is purely fanciful, 
 was one of the principal causes of the illusion which de- 
 stroyed the last administration. Eloquence, to that extent, 
 is a great power ; but is it not also one of those deceitful 
 powers of which Pascal has spoken ? In the last years of 
 the preceding administration, there were two very distinct 
 atmospheres, that within the Chamber and that without. 
 When the eloquence of M. Guizot had reigned within, when 
 it had refilled and renovated that artificial atmosphere, it 
 was believed that the storms had been conjured away. But 
 the atmosphere without was so much the more charged, and 
 out of equilibrium with the air within. Hence the final 
 explosion.
 
 GU1ZOT. 95 
 
 The style of M. Guizot has come forth from these trials of 
 the tribune firmer and better tempered than before ; his 
 thought has come forth unmodified. The present ' 'Discourse, " 
 which he has just published, attests this statement. This 
 "Discourse " is written with a master's hand, but it has also 
 a master's tone. He views the English Revolution in its 
 whole course, from the beginning of the troubles under 
 Charles I. till after the reign of William III., and even till 
 the complete consolidation of the Settlement of 1688. 
 Looking at the direct intention which is visible in the 
 picture, and which appears formally in the conclusions, it 
 is clear that in the eyes of the eminent historian, all the 
 lessons which that English Revolution, already so fertile in 
 real or false analogies, may furnish us, are not exhausted. 
 This prepossession with the English government and with 
 the English remedy applied to our malady, does not seem 
 to me less grave an error, and one that has been already 
 sufficiently fatal, because it is a more specious one and 
 touches us more nearly. For example, much has been said, 
 under the preceding constitutional government of the land 
 of law : "The land of law is the one for us ; ours is the 
 land of law." To what has this led? In England such a 
 saying is significant ; for there, before everything else, one 
 has respect for law. In France, it is to other instincts that 
 one must appeal, it is other feelings that one must lay hold 
 of, to maintain even the land of law. The Gallic people 
 are rapid, tumultuous, inflammable. Is it necessary to 
 recall to the historian who has known and described the 
 two countries, these essential differences of genius and of 
 character? Yet it is through the character rather than 
 through the ideas that men are governed. A foreigner, 
 a man of genius, was accustomed to divide human nature 
 into two parts, human nature in general and the French 
 nature, meaning that the latter so sums up and combines 
 in it the inconstancies, the contradictions, and the caprices 
 of the other, that it forms a variety, and a kind of distinct 
 species. M. de la Rochefoucauld, who had seen the Fronde 
 and all its changes, said one day to Cardinal Mazarin :
 
 96 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 " Everything happens in France ! " It was the same 
 moralist, a contemporary of Cromwell, who was the author 
 of that other saying, which is so true, and which too many 
 systematic historians forget : " Fortune and humour govern 
 the world." Understand by humour the temperament and 
 character of men, the stubbornness of princes, the complais- 
 ance and presumption of ministers, the irritation and the 
 spito of party chiefs, the turbulent disposition of the 
 peoples, and say, you who have had experience of public 
 affairs, and who speak no longer in front of the stage, if 
 that is not to a great extent true. It is then only with the 
 utmost discreetness, it seems to me, that one should propose 
 general remedies made up only of speculations. M. Guizot, 
 after having considered in his masterly way the English 
 and the American Revolutions, recognises in them three 
 great men, Cromwell, William III., and Washington, who 
 remain in history as the chiefs and representatives of those 
 sovereign crises that determined the fate of two powerful 
 nations. He characterizes them, one after the other, by 
 broad outlines. All three succeeded, the last two the most 
 completely, Cromwell less so : he succeeded only in main- 
 taining his own position, and founded nothing. M. Guizot 
 attributes this difference to the fact that William III. and 
 Washington, "even amidst a revolution, never accepted 
 nor acted upon the revolutionary policy." He believes that 
 Cromwell's misfortune was in having at first, by the neces- 
 sity of his position, to adopt and practise a policy whose 
 alloy rendered his power always precarious. M. Guizot 
 concludes from this, that under all forms of government, 
 whether a monarchy or a republic is concerned, an aristo- 
 cratic society or a democratic, the same light shines forth 
 from the facts ; ultimate success is obtained, he says, only 
 in the name of the same principles and by the same means. 
 The revolutionary spirit is as fatal to the great persons whom 
 it raises up ns to those whom it casts down. 
 
 M. Guizot will permit me here to say that this conclusion, 
 while it is generally true, is perfectly vague and sterile. To 
 say generally to those who govern a State, that they must
 
 GUIZOT. 97 
 
 not be in any degree revolutionary, is not to give any 
 indication whatever of the ways and means, the contrivances 
 necessary to preserve it ; for it is in the detail of each 
 situation that the difficulty lies, and that there is a field for 
 skill. If you go and say to a commander of an army, 
 " Adopt only the defensive method, never the offensive," 
 will he be much better prepared to gain a battle ? As if 
 there were no moments, also, when, to defend Rome, it is 
 necessary to go and attack Carthage ! 
 
 In what relates to men in particular, the conclusion of 
 M. Guizot appears to me much too absolute. Cromwell, 
 you say, only half succeeded, because he was revolutionary. 
 I will add that Robespierre afterward fell through the same 
 cause, and for other reasons besides. But Augustus suc- 
 ceeded in both characters. He was by turns Octavius and 
 Augustus ; he proscribed and he founded an empire. And 
 as that Siime Augustus tells us so eloquently by the mouth 
 of the great Corntille : 
 
 Mais 1'exemple souvent n'est qu'un miroir trompeur; 
 Et 1'ordre du Destin, out gene nos pensees, 
 N'est pas toujours e"crit dans les choses passe'es. 
 Quelquefois 1'un brise ou 1'autre est sauve", 
 Et par oil 1'un perit un autre est conserve". 
 
 This is the only practical philosophy of history : nothing 
 absolute, an experience always called in question again, and 
 the unexpected concealing itself in resemblances. 
 
 Bossuet has the habit, in his views, of introducing 
 Providence, or rather he does not introduce it : it reigns, 
 with him, in a continual and sovereign way. I admire that 
 religious inspiration in the great bishop ; but, practically, 
 it has led him to divine right and sacred politics. In the 
 modern historians, who have risen to general and purely 
 rational views, Providence intervenes only at intervals, and, 
 so to speak, at the great moments. The more discreet and 
 rare that intervention is, as described by them, the more 
 real reverence it attests ; for, in many cases, when one is 
 prodigal of it, it may seem much rather an implement of 
 discourse, an oratorical and social effect, than a heartfelt 
 G
 
 98 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 and truly sincere exaltation. This is not tlie case with M. 
 Guizot. He has from the beginning cherished the religious 
 sentiment, a turn of mind and, as it were, habitual gesture 
 directed toward Providence. For a man, however, who 
 reverences and worships it to such a degree, he makes, I 
 think, too frequent and too familiar use of that mysterious 
 intervention. Ho says : 
 
 " The fall of Clarendon has been ascribed to the faults of his cha- 
 racter, and to certain faults of or checks to his policy, at home or abroad. 
 This is to ignore the greatness of the causes which decide the fates of 
 eminent men. Providence, which imposes upon them a task so hard, 
 does not treat them so rigorously as to refuse to pardon their weak- 
 nesses, and inconsiderately to overthrow them, on account of certain 
 wrongs tkey have done, or certain defeats of their policy. Richelieu, 
 Mazarin, Walpole, had their defeats, committed faults, and experienced 
 checks as grave as those of Clarendon. But they understood their 
 time ; the aims and efforts of their policy were in harmony with its 
 needs, with the general condition and movement of minds. Clarendon 
 was deceived about his epoch; he did not recognise the meaning 
 of the great events in which he took part. . . ." 
 
 So, yon appear to believe that Providence proceeds with 
 more ceremony when it d^als with those eminent men whom 
 one calls Mazarin or Walpole, than when it deals with 
 simply honest private people ! You leave to these last the 
 petty causes and the paltry accidents which decide their 
 destiny. As for the others, tlie real statesmen, the ambi- 
 tious men of high rank, yon believe that they never suc- 
 cumb except from motives worthy of them, worthy of the 
 painful sacrifice to which they subject themselves in govern- 
 ing us. In a word, you believe that Providence thinks 
 twice before it causes them to fall. For myself, I believe 
 that at the moment that it looks at the matter, a single 
 glance and a single rule answers with it for all. But of 
 that rule we are profoundly ignorant. 
 
 I might select again some other assertions equally abso- 
 lute, equally gratuitous, and which make me doubt the 
 intrinsic reasonableness of this imposing philosophy. But 
 if one examines the " Discourse " with respect to the subject 
 itself of which it treats, that is to say, the English Revolu-
 
 GUIZOT. 99 
 
 tion, there is much to praise. When I question the 
 possibility of man's attaining to the thousand distant and 
 various causes, I am far from objecting to that order of 
 considerations and conjectures by which, within deter- 
 minate limits, one tries to connect effects with their causes. 
 It is the noble science of Machiavelli and Montesquieu, 
 when they both treat of the Romans. The English Revo- 
 lution, considered in its proper elements and in its limits, 
 that Revolution which presents itself to us, as it were, shut 
 up in an enclosed field, lends itself better than any other, 
 perhaps, to such a study, and M. Guizot is better fitted 
 than any other person to treat it properly, without mingling 
 with it those disputed conclusions which each one draws 
 for himself. We might point out in his " Discourse " some 
 portraits vigorously and saliently drawn, notably those of 
 Monk and Cromwell. Finally, need it be said? the 
 talent which shows us all this is masterly. But even when 
 we consider only the conclusions concerning the English 
 Revolution, the chain of causes and effects, as there set 
 forth, will appear too extended. The author, at each de- 
 cisive crisis, is not content with explaining it ; he declares 
 that it could not have taken place otherwise. It is habitual 
 for him to say : "It was too soon ... it was too late . . . 
 God was beginning simply to execute His laws and to give 
 His lessons " (page 31). What do you know about it ? 
 
 Let us remain men in history. Montaigne, who loved 
 it better than any other reading, has given us the reasons 
 for his predilection, and they are ours. He loved, he tells 
 us, only the simple and ingenuous historians who recounted 
 facts without choice or selection, in good faith ; or, among 
 the other more learned and nobler historians, he loved only 
 the best, those who know how to choose and to say that 
 which is worthy of being said. But the intermediate ones 
 (as he calls them) "spoil all for us ; they wish to chew the 
 mouth fuls for us ; they lay down rules for judging, and 
 consequently for bending history to their fancy ; for since 
 the judgment leans to one side, they cannot help turning 
 and twisting the narration accoiding to that bias." That
 
 loo SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 is the rock, and a talent, even of the first order, does not 
 save one from it. 'At least, an experience absolutely perfect 
 is necessary to guard one against it, as it seems to me. 
 The superior men, who have been acquainted with public 
 affairs, and who have relinquished them, have a great r61e 
 still to fill, but on condition that that role be quite different 
 from the first, and that it even be no longer a role. 
 Initiated as they have been into the secret of things, into 
 the vanity of good counsels, into the illusion of the best 
 minds, into human corruption, let them sometimes tell us 
 something of these things ; let them riot disdain to make us 
 touch with our finger the little springs which have often 
 played at the greatest moments. Let them not always 
 force humanity. The lesson which springs out of his- 
 tory must not be direct and stiff; it must not be fired 
 off at us puint-blank, so to speak, but should sweetly 
 exhale and insinuate itself. It should be savoury, as we 
 said lately regarding Commynes ; it is a lesson entirely 
 moral. Do not fear to show these mean things in your 
 great pictures ; the dignity will find its way into them 
 afterward. The nothingness of man, the littleness of his 
 most exalted reason, the inanity of that which once 
 appeared wise, all the labour, study, talent, accomplish- 
 ment, and meditation that are needed to frame even an 
 error, all this leads back also to a severer thought, to the 
 thought of a supreme force ; but then, instead of speaking 
 in the name of that force which baffles us, we bow down, 
 and history yields all its fruit.
 
 MADAME ROLAND.* 
 
 I. 
 
 THE French Revolution has repeatedly changed its aspect 
 -towards the individuals who claim to be its offspring, and 
 whom it certainly produced. As time elapses, differences 
 in the manner of regarding it increase among the progeny, 
 which was at first unanimous in its mode of recognition. 
 The more ardent, those who claim to be the more advanced, 
 have a growing tendency to systematize the Revolution in 
 their own minds j their aim is to co-ordinate men and 
 things under high-sounding but hollow political and social 
 formulas, which seem to us to torture the varied events 
 with which they have to deal, and to impose upon them, 
 by main force, a fallacious interpretation quite independent 
 of the miserable passions by which, for the most part, they 
 were controlled. Under cover of the general principles to 
 which they are devoted, these men are endeavouring to 
 manufacture an imposing mask for individual monstrosities 
 and figures of unparalleled ugliness. Others, not adopting 
 their formulas, who, when the way to democracy w.is 
 opened, in '89, conceived more moderate and apparently 
 more practicable hopes, but who see that after the lapse of 
 forty years, as at the very outset, every step is attended by 
 difficulties, checks, and disappointments, are at last tempted 
 to regard the programme of that day as little else than a 
 grand and generous illusion of our forefathers, a promised 
 but deeply-involved inheritance, which has been constantly 
 
 * This fragment served as an introduction to the publication by 
 Eugene Renduel, in 1835, of the inedited letters of Mine. Roland. 
 101
 
 102 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 deteriorating in value, until it is now three-fourths wasted. 
 There is a medium between this disheartening resignation 
 and the exaggerated ideas of the other party. No doubt 
 the majority of the authors and heroes of the Revolution, 
 could they return for a season to the midst of us, and see 
 for what their blood was shed, would smile somewhat com- 
 passionately, unless, indeed, the lapse of years had cooled 
 the ardour of their old requirements, and tranquillized the 
 flow of their blood. Yet an unquestionable gain has been 
 made in comfort, if not in glory : we have equality in our 
 manners, if not grandeur in our deeds ; rivil enjoyments, if 
 not political character ; a certain facility in the employ- 
 ment of different orders of industry and talent, if not the 
 consecration of such talent to the common interest of our 
 country. For ourselves, who adopt and enjoy these results, 
 realizing all the while their poverty in comparison with that 
 of which we dreamed, who believe in social perfection, 
 however slow and increasingly difficult of attainment, 
 thanks to the fallibility of all men, we continue at intervals 
 to turn our eyes towards those horizons whose widespread 
 blazonry illumined our own morning, towards those names 
 which we have so often invoked in the hope of being able 
 to reproduce the example and the virtues of those who bore 
 them. _Times have changed, indeed, and so have duties, 
 and it would be vain to attempt to make direct applications ; 
 still, from the fiery furnace of our first revolution, side by 
 side with vile and shapeless abortions, there came forth 
 noble statues, which are shining in their places still. Let 
 us maintain intercourse with these beings ; let us beg them 
 to impart to us their lofty thoughts ; let us admire their 
 heroism and disinterestedness, as we admire those grand 
 characters of Plutarch whom we love to study in themselves, 
 apart from the causes they espoused, or the fate of the cities 
 they rendered famous^ 
 
 *"" More than ever, "where so regarded, does the immortal 
 Gironde become -a limit where our thoughts are fain to 
 linger, which they refuse to overpass. Of course what 
 followed must be understood and explained, for thereby our
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 103 
 
 country, though stained and mutilated, was in some sort 
 protected too. All this should be understood ; but, with a 
 few rare exceptions, our admiration and regard are else- 
 where. When we see the deadly and increasing repugnance 
 excited in their posterity by those men of gigantic stature, 
 whom the glare of the thunderbolt too olten shows besmeared 
 with mud and livid with gore, when we consider the bold 
 logic of their characteristic doctrines, and how soon these 
 were made the occasion or pretext for terror and counter- , 
 oppressions, we cannot wonder that their crimes, their 
 violent, iniquitous, inhuman measures should have left, if 
 only upon the diseased imaginations of their descendants, 
 permanent, fatal, contagious marks, which reveal themselves 
 now in exaggerated imitation of their theory, now in narrow 
 and pusillanimous fears. But while with some the tumult 
 of memory redoubles, with me it subsides and clears ; and I 
 turn more and more towards those noble and merciful 
 figures, who, simultaneously, by a sublime instinct and with 
 a pitiful cry, stopped short beside the river of blood, and 
 who, by their errors, their sincere illusions, by that very 
 softness of youth which their savage enemies attributed to 
 corruption, but which was only the weakness of honest men, 
 finally, also, by the few eternal verities which they con- 
 fessed, interest every one who has a human heart, and 
 naturally attract the thought which can rise clear of 
 sophistry to the search for human happiness J Mine. Roland 
 is the foremost and the finest figure in that group. She is 
 its genius, strong, pure, graceful. She is its muse, glori- 
 ous and austere, with all the sanctity of matyrdom. But 
 the idealized form of expression which our subject naturally 
 suggests ought studiously to be restrained, for in approach- 
 ing this illustrious woman we have to deal with a simple, 
 grave, historic personage. 
 
 She has been so painted by her own hand that one would 
 hardly care to follow her. Add the few original traits, 
 furnished by Lemontey and other contemporaries who had 
 seen her, and we have but to turn for the essential features 
 of her personality to her delicious and indispensable Memoirs.
 
 104 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 Who would tell the story of Jean Jaoques, his childhood, 
 his early struggles, his tender years, who would sketch the 
 peculiarities of his youthful physiognomy after the Confes- 
 sions ? So with Mme. Roland. We may not retouch the 
 nice drawing of those delicate and spirited features, stately 
 and gracious, intelligent and sweet, nor dream even of 
 reproducing that pure and simple profile, so modest yet so 
 proud. Neither may we venture to retrace those days of 
 childhood, whose freshness of delight she fixed in colours so 
 vivid behind the gratings of the Abbaye or of Sainte-Pe"lagie, 
 from her father's studio in the Quay des Lunettes, and 
 that favourite corner of the little drawing-room which was 
 her chosen retreat ; from her catechizings in the church of 
 Saint-Barthelemy, her retirement to the convent in the Ruo 
 Neuve Saiute-Etienne for her first communion, and her 
 rambles in the Jardin des Plantes, to her happy and grate- 
 ful sojourn with her grandmamma Phlipon, in the Isle of 
 Saint-Louis ; her return to the paternal quay near the 
 Point Neuf, and her Sunday excursions to the woods of 
 Meudon. All this has been done and may be read. These 
 details, so truthful, so natural, so happy in their aptitude 
 and freedom of expression ; these innocent and tender mem- 
 ories, rejoicing in their own brightness amid the dark and 
 bloody framework ever narrowing about them, and destined 
 soon prematurely to suppress and crush them altogether, go 
 to make up a book whose charm is healthful and immortal, 
 whose perusal tempers the soul, none more so, which is 
 strengthening and admonitory, though somoving to the heart. 
 The correspondence with Hancal, and a few other unpub- 
 lished letters which we have had the opportunity to examine, 
 show us Mme. Roland during a portion of her life, passed 
 lightly over in her Memoirs, after her purely private and 
 domestic years, and before her husband's appointment to the 
 ministry. Among the letters to Bosc published in the last 
 edition of the Memoirs, only a very few are referable to this 
 epoch, that is, to the interval between 1789 and 1792, the 
 latest period of her residence at Lyons and her earliest months 
 in Paris ; while the correspondence with Baucal comprises
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 105 
 
 precisely this interesting period. The impressions produced 
 by the memorable events then daily taking place, faithfully 
 and minutely transmitted by that grand, responsive soul, 
 and confided to the ear of friendship, constitute a harvest 
 precious to gather. The frequent and conflicting shocks, 
 the premature hopes succeeded by despondency, the fervid 
 revivals, the exaggerated and passionate judgments pro- 
 nounced in wrath and afterwards softened, the frequent 
 mingling of sound sense, the unfailing sincerity, all these 
 things help to make these artless pages an honourable testa- 
 monial to her who penned them, and at the same time, as 
 we think, a useful lesson to those who seek in the records of 
 the past some wisdom to aid, some rule to guide them, in 
 forming their political opinions, some curb to their first 
 generous transports. Nowhere else are we so fully made to 
 realize that the importance of a definite end and deliberate 
 progress was utterly overlooked by these men of the Gironde, 
 who flung themselves desperately between M. Necker and 
 Robespierre, and turned and faced the latter too late to 
 esgape defeat and destruction at his hands. 
 (Mine. Rolaud and her husband had welcomed the Revolu- 
 tion of 1789 with enthusiasm. Since 1784 they had been 
 established in the district of Lyons, passing some of the 
 winter months in that town, and the greater part of the 
 year now at Villefranche, and now two leagues distant at 
 the close of La Platiere, a little rural demesne in sight of 
 the woods of Alix and hard by the village of Theze'e. M. 
 Roland, being inspector of manufactures, was devoted to 
 industrial and economic studies, which his wife shared #nd 
 enlivened by readings in philosophy and poetry. The 
 Revolution, and the expansive impulse which it communi- 
 cated to all patriotic hearts, naturally put them in corre- 
 spondence with sundry active individuals in Paris. They 
 became especially intimate with Brissot, whose writings 
 on the blacks and correspondence with the Marquis de 
 (Jhastcllux M. Roland greatly admired, and who was just 
 stnrtiug the Patriot, and with Bancal, who had recently 
 abandoned the profession of notary to devote himself to
 
 106 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 letters and politics, and whom Lanthenas, an intimate 
 friend and servant of the Rolands, had met during a visit to 
 the capital. The letters to Brissot, inedited for the most 
 part, are in the hands of M. de Montrol, whom we cannot 
 too strongly urge to make them public, and to whose kind- 
 ness we owe their perusal. The opening of the correspond- 
 ence with Brisjsot is very like that of the correspondence 
 with Bancal. " If my excellent friend," wrote Mme. Roland 
 to the former, in the early part of the year 1790, "had been 
 a few years younger, America would ere this have received 
 us in her arms ; but we regret that promised land the less 
 in that we now hope for a country of our own. The Revo- 
 lution, imperfect though it be, has changed the face of 
 France. It is developing character where before there was 
 none. It is opening a free course to Truth, whereby her 
 worshippers may profit." We can see that the swift con- 
 quests of 1789 were far from satisfying her, and her aversion 
 and contempt for the leading men of that first epoch are 
 not slow to appear. One week after the royal sitting of 
 February 4, 1790, the swearing of the civic oath, and 
 the address of Louis XVI., which aroused such general 
 enthusiasm, she wrote to Brissot, " Opinion is much divided 
 here. The address is ascribed to M. Necker ; but although 
 there are some ministerial turns of expression at the be- 
 ginning, and a little of that pathos which is rather common 
 with him, the prevailing tone does not seem to us like his, 
 and there are occasional touches of sentiment such as he, with 
 his subterfuges and affectations, would never have known 
 how to utter." This radical prejudice against M. Neckcr 
 which originated before 1788, as we see by a word in n 
 letter to M. Bosc, and which we find expressed in a rather 
 unseemly fashion in the correspondence with Baucal (page 
 12) is nought else, in its primitive crude form, but the 
 instinctive and well-nigh invincible hostility of the Girond- 
 ists to the doctrinary * mind, an hostility, moreover, 
 
 * The term doctrinaire was introduced under the Restoration, and 
 applied to those men whose private political opinions were subordin- 
 ated to a body of doctrine half liberal and half conservative. TB.
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 107 
 
 bitterly reciprocated by the latter. In Mme. Roland and 
 M. Necker we behold the earliest manifestation of this 
 antagonism ; but the parties, or at least the political fami- 
 lies to which they severally belonged, have been so far 
 perpetuated that their characteristics may now be general- 
 ized without reference to individuals. , The Girondist type, 
 reproduced in the youth of each successive generation, is 
 ardent, adventurous, prone to popular sympathies, over- 
 weeningly confident in rapid reforms, simple methods, and 
 the might of individual liberties ; ever distrustful of its foes, 
 but never of its allies ; promptly and openly resentful of all 
 that savours of secrecy or subterfuge ; unhesitating in its 
 denial of sentiment and heart to all who effectually bar its 
 progress. The latter, in their turn, comfortably restrict- 
 ive and negative in their prudence, never hesitating, if, 
 amid the . complexities of their system such need arise, 
 to limit and encroach on the right from motives of policy, 
 become extremely obnoxious to minds of the Girondist 
 stamp, whom alternately they affect to despise as poor polit- 
 icians, and in their eagerness to prove them dangerous, 
 confound with the Jacobin party in one common condemna- 
 tion. Mine. Roland, when she imputed Machiavelianism to 
 M. Necker, to the committees of the Constituent Assembly, 
 and to the national notabilities of 1790, was also guilty of 
 excess. Far removed from the principal focus and from 
 the details of those events, actual observation of which, 
 after the 5th of October, might have helped to exhaust her 
 surplus zeal and discourage her faith, she was keenly alive to 
 the vacillation and sluggishness of the Assemblv. and its 
 attempts at procrastination. She interpreted the struggles 
 of Paris too literally by those of Lyons, where the old and 
 new regime came into direct collision. Early disgusted 
 with Lyons, and despairing of any result from the blind and 
 passionate struggle of conflicting interests there going on, 
 she did but aggravate the irritation of the general quarrel, 
 the progress of which she had not closely followed, but 
 whose complicated nature, even had she been at hand 
 during its first phase of enthusiasm, she might all the same
 
 108 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 have failed to appreciate. Entirely misconceiving the 
 increasingly difficult duty which devolved upon the sincere 
 men of 1789, she beheld, thenceforth, in the patriotic opposi- 
 tion and the members of the Assembly only the friends and 
 enemies of the people in hostile array, and was convinced 
 that nothing could come of it but a fierce struggle. Thus 
 the starting-point of her political career was in reality a 
 grave mistake, an erroneous view of the situation. She was 
 in this mood of mind when she arrived in Paris in February 
 of 1791. She had chosen her side, and was already deeply 
 pledged, and all her Lyonnese resentments she brought, 
 like fresh troops, to the aid of Brissot and the rest. 
 
 The letters of Mme. Roland to Bancal and Brissot furnish 
 numbers of interesting facts relative to the history of Lyons 
 at that time. As we compare them with recent events 
 (and how can we fail to do so when we see the same interests 
 at stake, the same dissentions revived, the same devices 
 upon the banners ?), we see how the old sore remains and has 
 spread, and how little, in the space of forty years, our 
 vaunted social science has effected in the way of cure. Wo 
 are humbled to perceive how moderate have been our gains, 
 despite the perpetual invocation of that god, Progress, 
 whom men are everywhere inaugurating. 
 r ~Mme. Roland strikes us, at the beginning, as one of the 
 most eloquent and incorruptible, and altogether one of the 
 fittest models to study, of that race of politicians who had 
 longed for 1789, and whom 1789 did not fatigue, nor even 
 satisfy. From the first she is consciously and confessedly 
 in the vanguard. "Destiny, in causing our own birth to 
 coincide with that of freedom, has made us like that forlorn 
 hope which must needs fight and conquer for the army. It 
 is for us to perform our tasks well, and so prepare the 
 happiness of future generations." While she continues to 
 take this broad philosophic view of the situation, her 
 magnanimous attitude is in harmony with truth, and time 
 has onjy consecrated her words. The spirit of disinterested- 
 ness requisite in public affairs finds noble and vigorous 
 expression beneath her pen. " When one is not used," she
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 109 
 
 says, "to identify his own interest and honour with the 
 general good and glory, lie makes but insignificant progress, 
 being absorbed in self, and utterly losing sight of his true 
 end and aim." Yet even then her noble heart, so free from 
 vulgar ambitions, fully accepted the idea of storms -to come, 
 and even invoked them, possibly as occasions for the 
 display of her own fortitude. . Bancal, when describing to 
 her his ascent of the Puy-de-D6mc, had compared tho 
 thunders and tempests encountered at a certain elevation to 
 those which beset the painful upward path of the friends of 
 freedom. "That glorious mountain summit of yours," 
 replies Mine. Roland, " is the image of the one which all 
 great souls are struggling to gain amid political agitations 
 and the tumult of passion." She had a presentiment that 
 her own true level was a lofty one, and in her inmost heart 
 she did not repudiate the idea of being one day forced to 
 attain it. But when she confines herself to more practical 
 opinions and a consideration of the details of government, 
 the vagueness and insufficiency of her system become appar- 
 ent. " Shu professes," she somewhere acknowledges, " two 
 capitaTprinciples, that security is tbe grave of liberty, and. 
 that leniency towards men in authority is the true method 
 of forcing them into tyranny." Elsewhere she demands 
 that the Assembly should provide first of all for the un- 
 limited freedom of the press, which came fully to pass in 
 1790. In a letter addressed to Bilssot, in December of the 
 same year, she sums up her advice as follows: "Reports 
 and reason, nothing else can render the people happy." 
 Yet this weakness and lack of positive political science are 
 constantly relieved by political views remarkable for their 
 justice and sagacity, and which show that she was under no 
 delusion with regard to the real state of society^ .'Speaking 
 of a pamphlet by Lally Tolendal, she says of the men of his 
 stamp, "They flatter the passions of the malcontents, they 
 seduce the inconsiderate, they confuse weak minds. Take 
 away from society these individuals and the ignorant class, 
 whom, after a fashion, they control, and see how many men 
 so found and enlightened minds will remain to stem the
 
 no SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 torrent and preach the truth." But the ardour of the 
 attack and something like the joy of battle, bear her swiftly 
 on to a point where her anticipations become less flattering. 
 Peril gives animation to her style, and causes her pen to 
 sparkle. To Bosc she writes, ' ' People no longer dare to 
 speak, say you ? Well, then, let them thunder." A letter 
 to Lanthenas of the 6th of March 1790, begins with the 
 thrice-repeated cry, " War ! war ! war ! " The burden of 
 her song is always a reveille. ' ' Joy and Safety ! " more 
 often " Vigilance and Fraternity ! " the sentinel's cry 
 upon the ramparts, as one may say, when he calls to the 
 conflict at dawn. Even the expression " Morbleu " occurs, 
 and does not seem out of place. A letter to Brissot on the 
 7th of January 1791, closes with these hurried words : 
 "Yours, in haste. The wife of Cato must not amuse 
 Herself with paying compliments to Brutus." 
 
 Between the month of February, in which Mme. Roland 
 came to Paris, and September, when she returned to Lyons, 
 during that half-year, so pregnant, so effervescent, which 
 comprehended the flight of the king and the scenes at the 
 Champ de Mars, we behold her aggressive spirit becoming 
 more and more conspicuous, and excited to the last degree 
 by the whirlwind atmosphere in which she lived. The 
 correspondence witli Bancal is especially precious, in that 
 it supplies us with the history of her tumultuous impres- 
 sions during this sojourn. In the pages which she devotes 
 to them in her Memoirs, her emotions, though still lively, 
 are softened by distance and blended with judgments of a 
 later date. Here we have a daily record of her thoughts 
 and deeds. We see her despising the pleasures of the 
 theatre and all mere gratifications of taste, but hurrying to 
 the Assembly, to find it first weak, then corrupt ; to regard 
 it first with severity, afterwards with indignation and wrath. 
 She sees plainly that 1789 and the impartials have become 
 the most dangerous enemies of the Revolution. Sieyes, 
 Barnave, Thouret, and Rabatit, the most of those with 
 whom she is soon to die, by no means escapu being charac- 
 terized as lax and perfidious ; Petion, Buzot, and Robespierre
 
 MADAME ROLAND. in 
 
 alone satisfy her. But there is nothing of hers more telling 
 and characteristic than an article which she penned during 
 a sitting of the Assembly on the 20th or 28th of April. On 
 the occasion of organizing the national guards, the distinc- 
 tion of active and passive citizens had been revived. Hence 
 her rage and tears of blooJ. The article, which begins with 
 these words "Throw thy pen into the fire, generous 
 Brutus, and betake thyself to the cultivation of lettuce " 
 closes with this military metaphor: "Adieu! we must 
 beat to battle or retreat : there is no middle course." And 
 yet, with all her reckless and passionate transports, she 
 preserves a clearness of reason far worthier than these of her 
 great intelligence. Her estimate of Mirabeau is beautifully 
 lucid and calm ; and as regards events, she often appears to 
 possess a foresight truly marvellous, being in no respect 
 deceived about their tendency, while yet she will not waver 
 or relent. Thus to Bancal she writes, ' ' We are not yet 
 called to die for liberty. There is more to be done. We 
 must live to establish, to deserve, to defend it;" and else- 
 where, " I know that good citizens, such as I see every day, 
 regard the future with tranquil eyes ; but, for all I heal 
 them say, I am more than ever convinced that they are 
 deluded;" and again, "I think the wisest are those who 
 confess that it has become next to impossible to forecast 
 future events." In one place (page 233) she dwells with 
 the utmost good sense upon patience, a virtue too often 
 neglected, and yet very necessary to the well-meaning if 
 they would accomplish useful results ; and then, with 
 singular inconsistency, she herself fails in patience immedi- 
 ately afterwards. Regretting that the fugitive Louis XVI. 
 had been arrested at Varennes, she assigns as a reason that 
 but for this unlucky capture, civil war would have been 
 inevitable, and the nation would have been forced into that 
 grand school of public virtues. Exasperated by the events 
 of the Champ de Mars, she "has come," she says, "to 
 applaud the utmost excesses of the Assembly, nay, even to 
 long for greater ones, as the only means of arousing the 
 public conscience." Far dearer to me is this virgin soul,
 
 1 1 2 SAINTE-BE UVE. 
 
 long self- restrained and suddenly overmastered, when, 
 yielding to the contemplation of infinite prospectives of 
 hope for those descendants whom she will never see, she 
 confesses, with tears and rapture, her unbounded faith in 
 that religion of the future which commands the respect of 
 those even who do not clearly distinguish the foundations 
 on which it rests. Having been tearful witness to a triumph 
 of Brissot's over the Jacobins, she exclaims, ' ' At last I 
 have seen the fire of freedom kindled in my land. It 
 cannot be put out. Recent events have been as fuel to the 
 flames. The lights of reason and the instincts of the heart 
 unite to fan and fei-d it. I shall die when it may please 
 nature, but my last breath will be an aspiration of joy and 
 hope for coming generations." 
 
 The strictures of Mme. Roland on La Fayette are especially 
 striking in the contrast which they offer to the unanimous 
 reverence which he inspires in his patriotic old age. lu her 
 correspondence with Bancal, she repeatedly shows herself 
 extremely unjust. In an unpublished letter to Brissot, 
 dated July 31, 1792, and very important from an historical 
 point of view, she becomes, it must be confessed, absolutely 
 injurious and insulting ; and so far forgets herself as to 
 qualify the virtuous general by the very epithet which the 
 angry Voltaire did not hesitate to bestow upon Rousseau. 
 It is humiliating to think of the well-nigh irretrievable 
 wrongs which political passions entail, and for which noble 
 souls have afterwards to weep. A fortnight before her death, 
 Mme. Roland repented so to speak of her old acrimony 
 against La Fayette. In defending Brissot, who had been 
 accused by Arnar of complicity with the general, she uses 
 the following words : " He shared a very common error with 
 regard to La Fayette ; or rather, it would seem that La 
 Fayette, carried away in the first place by the principles 
 which his intellect adopted, had not the force of character 
 needful to defend them when the struggle became a hard 
 one ; or, possibly, terrified by the consequences of the over- 
 weening popular ascendency, he judged it prudent to estab- 
 lish some sort of check." These vaiious suppositions are
 
 MADAME ROLAND. ny 
 
 evidently ibe successive steps by which Mme. Roland came 
 down, as we may say, from her original height of injustice ; 
 but we see, by the precautions she takes, that when injustice 
 has once been done (and, in general, how hastily done !), 
 a lingering remnant of false shame reudtrs it most painful 
 to repair. 
 
 Returning to Paris towards the close of the year 1791, 
 Mme. Roland may fairly be said in March 1792 to have entered 
 the ministry with her husband. After the expiration of 
 tlr.it first term of office, Roland and his wife occupied some- 
 limes a country seat at Champigny-sur-Marue, and some- 
 times a lodging at No. 81 Rue de la Harpe. During the 
 months which preceded the 10th of August, the political 
 activity of our heroine was unremitting ; but her experience 
 had borne fruit. She ceased to urge on the movement, 
 such as it was, and even strove to retard it. After mingling 
 freely with the influential men and party leaders, she had 
 soon fathomed their characters with all a woman's subtilty, 
 and classified them with a masculine vigour of intellect. 
 Petty differences between her husband and Brissot or 
 Glavieres had shown her the difficulty of combined and 
 uniform progress on the part even of the best of men. As 
 the imminent crisis of the 10th of August drew near, she 
 no longer called, as after Varennes, for stem and decisive 
 measures : she desired the sections to unite, and demand, 
 not forfeiture,* which, "if pronounced, would render the 
 constitutional enactment well-nigh void," but provisory 
 suspension, "which," she wrote to Brissot on the last of 
 July, "might possibly, although with difficulty, be made 
 to grapple some article of the Constitution." A letter from 
 Louvet to Brissot, a week only before the 10th of August, 
 is in the same strain, and expresses the same fear of weak- 
 ness on the one side and excess on the other. Mme. Roland, 
 like Louvet, complained of the silence of the Assembly, and 
 of the dubious attitude of their friend, in these so threatening 
 circumstances. The judgment pronounced by Mme. Roland 
 on the politicians of the second revolutionary period, on 
 * Of the royal office on the part of Louis XVI. 
 H
 
 ii4 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 those whom she had personally known and proved, is as 
 distinct and decisive as her contempt of the men of 1789 may 
 have seemed vague and blind. The reason is that, alter 
 1790, she had a near view of the scene, and possessed all the 
 facts of the situation, and the elements of the conduct there 
 displayed. Her Memoirs contain brilliant and truthful 
 portraits of her friends, a little in the style of Plutarch ; 
 but it is far more curious to study their likenesses as here 
 taken, in action and under the fire of battle, confidentially 
 and not officially, in private and not for posterity. The 
 letter to Brissot of July 31, 1792, which has been already 
 cited, was designed to caution him on the score of his too 
 easy temper and lenient judgments, and furnishes very 
 minute information about that illustrious and fraternal 
 group who seem, at this distance, to stand irradiated by a 
 common halo. They defile before us, each with his proper 
 physiognomy, and every individual is briefly characterized. 
 First we have the worthy Sers, afterwards senator, the 
 amiable philosopher, used to moderate pleasures, but slow 
 and timid, and therefore incompetent in a revolution : then 
 Gensonne", so weak with regard to Dumouriez in the affah 
 of Bonne Carrere ; who does not know how to sacrifice a 
 man at the right moment ; with too many images in his 
 brain, and not enough resolution in his character : then the 
 estimable Guadet, who, on the other hand, is too hasty, too 
 ready with his wrath or contempt ; and who was, moreover, 
 deceived about the capacity of Duranthon, whom he urged 
 into action, and has for ever compromised his judgment by 
 this inexcusable blunder : finally, Vergniaud, whom she 
 does not greatly love ; whom we feel to have been too 
 epicurean, too languid and voluptuous, for this woman with 
 the soul of Cornelia ; she will not, she says, allow herself to 
 pass judgment upon him ; but evidently it is not as easy 
 for her as for us to regard the unexpected temporisings of 
 the impulsive and high-flown orator as merely the recklesa 
 caprices of genius. She thinks him far too vain in his toilet, 
 and distrusts, we know not wherefore, those downcast eye.s, 
 which yet would so lighten under the magic power of speech I
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 115 
 
 In her final portrait of Vergniaud, although she makes 
 amends for the injustice of her first fleeting impression, we 
 see plainly how slight was the sympathy between them. 
 Friend Clavieres seems to her in the retrospect more trust- 
 worthy, and, when not crotchety, absolutely loveuble. "What 
 would you have ? " said Mme. de Stae'l, when some one 
 reproached her with showing up her friends too freely ; "if 
 I were on my way to the scaffold, I could not help judging 
 the friends who accompanied me." So it was with Mme. 
 Eoland. Among all these excellent and worthy men she 
 sought in vain for a great character, able, in this crisis, to 
 reassure and rally by his counsels the party of right. Oh, in 
 those days how she must have mourned for the honest and 
 disinterested Mirabeau ! Even while she adjures Brissot to 
 assume the command, we can see that she trusts him little, 
 knowing him to be excessively hopeful, and of a pliant and 
 even guileless nature. Could she herself, had she been a 
 man, have become the good genius of patriotism, the saviour 
 of the land ? We love to think so ; and there is nothing in 
 her conduct at this time which belies the presence in her of 
 a clairvoyant daring, a vast and most apposite ability. 
 
 But, confining ourselves to her estimate of others, 
 since, by reason of her sex, she was hampered and in- 
 adequate in action, we are struck by the soundness of her 
 judgment, and the keenness of her insight, even when 
 clouded by passion. Her invectives against Garat, for 
 instance, are extremely severe, and allow no glimpse of the 
 subordinate qualities of that man of talent and even sensi- 
 bility, who was amiable and fluent, and as good and sincere 
 as one may be who is only a brilliant sophist, and un- 
 tcmpered by virtue. And yet, after a reperusal of Carat's 
 own apology in his Memoirs, I find that, despite all the 
 author's denials, and Ids elegant, ingenuous, analytical 
 explications, Mme. Roland's unfavourable judgment remains 
 unrefuted and substantially sound. As we read the subtle 
 specifications, the Ciceronian periods, of him who dared 
 stigmatize neither Clodius nor Catiline, we can readily 
 imagine Mme. Roland's indignation against this soft
 
 Ii6 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 language of palliation, in presence of what she calls crime ; 
 against the conciliatory pretensions of that supple intelli- 
 gence so entirely subservient to a vibratory imagination. 
 Mine. Roland foresaw that this explanation would be made ; 
 and she demolished it in advance when she wrote to Garat 
 from her prison, " Betake yourself to fine writing ; account 
 on philosophical principles for events, and their attendant 
 errors and passions: posterity will still say of you, "Ho 
 strengthened the hands of the party that brought popular 
 representation into contempt." As for Brissot, we adopt in 
 full Mme. Roland's estimate of him ; her testimony to his 
 thorough honesty and disinterestedness. We make this 
 statement because it has been, sad and sickening for us to 
 see the learned, conscientious, but system -ridden authors of 
 a history of the Revolution, otherwise worthy of credit, repro- 
 ducing as unanswerable certain odious imputations upon tho 
 probity of the Girondist leader. It is not easy, at the end 
 of fifty years, to defend Brissot against the calumnies of 
 Morande ; but his whole public career is a denial aud refuta- 
 tion of the charges adduced against his previous obscure 
 life. I was born in the region where Biissot first resided, 
 at Boulogne, where he worked with Swinton, and where ho 
 married ; I am related to persons who extended to him a 
 welcome at that time ; to that Cavilliers family where he 
 was so intimate during his calumniated years ; and I have 
 never heard expressed the slightest doubt of his unswerving 
 integrity and virtuous poverty. If we were to have a full 
 biography of Brissot, in the style of a recent essay, would it 
 serve, I wonder, as prelude to a theory of the sacrifice of a 
 corrupt and Protestant Giromle to a Catholic and incor- 
 ruptible Robespierre ? So be it ! All I can say is, that the 
 latter would smile his ugliest smile, could he read the 
 biography of his victim, thus prematurely arrayed in 
 blemished fillets. 
 
 In the correspondence with Bancal, frequent mention is 
 made of Blot and Lanthenas, both of whom were soon 
 alienated by differences of opinion from their illustrious 
 friends. Lanthenus, to whom Mine. Roland alludes in her
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 117 
 
 Memoirs as a slightly exacting swain, and whom she 
 characterizes in her letters as a saint, was so in fact, in the 
 full and least flattering sense of the term. A well-meaning, 
 impressible, excitable man, one of those on whom the revo- 
 lution seized at the very outset, and whom it tossed aloft 
 like cerfs volants,* extremely useful in the household up to 
 that time, the very ideal of a famulus, he afterwards 
 undertook to think and act for himself, and lost his head 
 in the melee. Perhaps I ought rather to say that he lost 
 his mind ; for Marat, his former fellow-student in medicine, 
 who had taken his measure without malice, inflicted a 
 crowning injury by causing his name to be erased from the 
 fatal list, as of "weak mind."^ We foresee this grievous 
 destiny of Lanthenas from the moment when we find him 
 addressing Brissot in articles with such silly titles as, 
 "When the people is ripe for liberty, the nation is always 
 worthy to be free ; " and especially when he proposes to 
 Bancal to " form a mighty league which shall work simul- 
 taneously in France and England, and rid us entirely of the 
 priests in the course of a few years." And still, by the 
 qualities of his heart, and his old love for Mme. Roland, 
 the good Lanthenas deserved a better fate. 
 
 The correspondence with Bancal stops at the second 
 ministry of Roland ; interrupted, as it were, by a double 
 cry of heroic alarm at the approach of the Prussians, and of 
 horror and execration at the September massacres. After 
 these days, Mme. Roland and her friends organized openly 
 and boldly for resistance. What change of theory was 
 then wrought in the mind of the Girondists ? They had no 
 time for reflection, no opportunity to reconsider and re- 
 arrange their ideas of government and the constitution. 
 Divided among themselves even about the most imperative 
 measures, trembling and paralyzed before those other in- 
 
 * Kites, a child's toy made of paper, somewhat in the form of a 
 shuttlecock, attached by a string to the baud of the player, and 
 floating when tossed into the air. TB. 
 
 t He said before the whole Convention, that, " as for Dr. Lanthenaa, 
 everybody knew that his mind was weak."
 
 1 18 SAINTE-BE UVE. 
 
 flexible theories which were being thrust in their faces like 
 keen and steady swords, their resistance was wholly a 
 matter of instinct, humanity, and heart. Into what would 
 their political views have ripened, if they themselves had 
 not perished ? To judge by their survivors, Louvet, 
 Lanjuinais, and those of the seventy-one who respected 
 their memory, they would have remained faithful to a 
 thorough, generous, republican form of freedom ; to the 
 freedom of the year 3, even though it had still proved 
 unequal to the conflict with intrigue and passion. They 
 would have fallen back upon the principles of 1789 for a 
 basis ; their antipathy against the men of that epoch would 
 have died away ; or, at least, a feeling of respect would i'or 
 ever have silenced the war of abusive words. The noble 
 Andre" Che"nier would not have vilified the pure intentions 
 of Brissot. Mme. Roland could not have failed to give her 
 hand to La Fayette. All the leading minds, from M. 
 Necker to Louvet, however hasty and headstrong they may 
 have seemed, were still upon the same side of the stream, 
 and acknowledged the same social laws. They found space 
 among themselves for disputes about the extent of authority, 
 and differences concerning the limits of freedom ; but a 
 radical incompatibility of principles, as well as of manners 
 and temperament, the abyss which, on the 2nd of Septem- 
 ber, opened under the very feet of the Gironde, separated 
 them from the bloodthirsty extremists and their savage 
 system. From the moment when fanaticism no longer 
 recoils from slaughter as a method, social life is at an end. 
 The bounds of human morality are overpassed ; the restric- 
 tions which civilization imposes upon nature are violated. 
 The fundamental guaranty of man's right to live and com- 
 municate with and differ from his kind is swept away. 
 
 I must crave pardon for insisting so strongly upon the 
 fact of this abyss, this Rubicon, narrow, indeed, but 
 fathomless, which divided the foremost of the Girondists 
 from their Jacobin foes. The demarcation is historically 
 essential. If there be (which God forbid !) any similarity 
 between the situation of to-day and that which we describe,
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 119 
 
 any chance for reorganizing parties analogous to those, it 
 becomes especially needful to make the statement, and to 
 guard against all confusion. However candid the original 
 Girondists may have been, in so long failing to perceive the 
 radical point of difference between themselves and their 
 future enemies, the Girondists of our day, enlightened by 
 experience, would be very unfair if they pretended not to 
 see it. 
 
 We gather from the correspondence with Bancal minute 
 information concerning the sentiments of Mine. Roland, and 
 such as strengthens our sense of the depth and simplicity of 
 her character. Mindful of individual attachments, she awards 
 them a large and fair space ; and, so far from sacrificing 
 them, in an ultra- Spartan fashion, on the altar of her 
 country, she cultivates them with pious care. She loves to 
 associate with the names of friends those public sympathies 
 which engross and carry her away ; "for thus," she says in 
 her musical style, whose finished turns of expression recall 
 the conversation of Mme. de Wolmar, "we add to tho 
 mighty interest inspired by a glorious history the affecting 
 interest peculiar to a private sentiment, and with the 
 patriotism which elevates, and, as it were, generalizes, the 
 affections, there mingles the charm of friendship, which 
 adorns and perfects them." 
 
 The letters of the 24th and 26th of January 1791, addressed 
 to Bancal, who was then in London, and in which she tries 
 to console him for his father's death, deserve a place beside 
 the most sublime and eloquent effusions of a brave yet 
 tender philosophy. Cicero and Seneca offered more common- 
 place comfort, and suggested considerations more remote 
 and less moving to the heart. Marcus Aurelius would 
 have been more stoical, and could not thus have entered 
 into sorrow ; but if the son-in-law of Agricola had had to 
 speak to a friend of the death of a father, I can fancy that 
 he would have approached him with words such as these, 
 manly and yet compassionate, temperate as befits a solemn 
 reality. 
 
 The superficial reader of this correspondence may possibly
 
 120 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 miss some of its most interesting features. The truth is, 
 that during these years there was a kind of romance in 
 progress, accompanied by more or less of complication, 
 between Mme. Roland and Baucal yes, a veritable heart 
 history, whose half-hidden traces we now and then discern 
 beneath the proprieties of language and the absorbing 
 interest of great events. Bancal, from the very commence- 
 ment of their intercourse, seems to have been deeply fascin- 
 ated. We gather from Mme. Roland's gentle raillery 
 that he maintained that their mutual attraction was not 
 due solely to the Revolution, that it would have occurred 
 all the same had there been no special call for patriotism, 
 and that they were predestined to a reciprocal attachment. 
 There are secret ties. There are sympathies. During a 
 sojourn at the close of La Platiere, some time in September 
 1790, Bancal became doubly captivated, and the two having 
 fallen on a certain day into confidential converse, he found 
 it impossible to hide from his friend the disquiet that she 
 caused him. Leaving soon after, he wrote a letter to M. 
 and Mme. Roland, jointly ; but the latter, to whom it war 
 forwarded by her absent husband (he was then at Lyons 01 
 Villefranche), seized upon certain expressions which she 
 interpreted in a very special manner, and ventured, in the 
 absence and without the knowledge of M. Roland, to write 
 from the country, on the 8th of October, a letter which, 
 with no further comment, we leave to the sensibility of the 
 reader. But the emotion which this letter betrays was the 
 index of sentiment merely, not of a passion. In another a 
 kind of aside dated October 28, Mme. Roland reverts to 
 the subject, and endeavours to calm the imagination of her 
 friend and restore him to reason. Elsewhere she quotes 
 the fable of the nightingale and the linnet, complaining, 
 pleasantly enough and with a kind of veiled coquetry, of 
 the inevitable forgetfulness of the traveller, who really 
 eeems to have neglected his friends. "We find, too, in her 
 letters of condolence, certain promises of fidelity to tender 
 memories they have in common; then, after his return to 
 _Loiidon, the expression of a fond anxiety at witnessing his
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 121 
 
 protracted sadness. But all is ended by the avowal of a 
 new passion on the part of Bancal, on which occasion Mine. 
 Roland, like a discreet and generous friend, lavishes upon 
 him her counsels and delicate offers of intervention. This 
 could not have been the genuine, serious, long-delayed 
 sentiment which at length seized the strong soul of Mme. 
 Roland, and to which she twice alludes iu her Memoirs. 
 First, when she speaks of the excellent reasons which 
 hastened her departure for the country somewhere about 
 the 31st of May ; and again when hailing the empire of 
 philosophy, which had succeeded to that of religious feeling 
 within her, she adds that these continuous defences ought, 
 it would seem, for ever to protect her from the onslaught of 
 passion, from which, nevertheless, though she strive with 
 the energy of an athlete, she can scarcely defend her mature 
 years ! Who, then, was the object of that late, unique, 
 heart-rending passion ? A prejudiced public has named 
 Barbaroux, because, in a noble sketch of him, she praises 
 that " head of Antinoiis ; " but there is no proof that it was 
 he. A sacred veil will continue to hide this latest storm, 
 which gathered and passed in silence over her mighty 
 spirit when death was near. 
 
 In a letter found among Brissot's papers, but not ad- 
 dressed to him, for at that date (November 22, 1789), there 
 was no such connection between them as is here indicated, 
 Mme. Roland has once mentioned Mme. de Stael. "Stories 
 are told here" (at Lyons), says Mme. Roland, "of Mme. 
 de Stael, who is said to be very constant at the Assembly, 
 and who, they pretend, has cavaliers there to whom she sends 
 billets from the gallery, urging them to support the patriotic 
 measures. They say, too, that the Spanish ambassador has 
 reproved her severely at her father's table. You cannot 
 conceive the importance attached by our aristocrats to 
 this nonsense, which perhaps originated in their own brains. 
 They would willingly represent the Assembly as governed 
 by a few blind fanatics urged on by a handful of women." 
 Mme. de Stael, on the other hand, has nowhere, that I 
 . reuicinlier, mentioned Mme. Roland. Was this the instinct
 
 122 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 of filial vengeance on behalf of her misconceived and vilified 
 father ? or was it the weakness of a woman who averts her 
 eye from a rival ? In that chapter of the Considerations 
 which treats of the Girondist group, Mme. Roland is con- 
 spicuous by her absence. Yet it is impossible to help 
 .comparing and contrasting, in imagination, these two 
 illustrious women. Mme. Roland, who was eleven years 
 the elder, owed to her bourgeois education the advantage 
 of original and entire freedom from the vanity, the artifici- 
 ality, and the tinsel of society. Her little recess in the 
 drawing-room near her father's studio was worth more, as 
 a juvenile asylum, than the arm-chair in M. Necker's salon, 
 suiTounded by a circle of wits, or even than the romantic 
 shades of Saint-Ouen. Mile. Phlipon, therefore, became the 
 more masculine and simple character of the two. She early 
 formed the habit of repressing sensibility and imagination, 
 of pausing at the dictates of reason, and regulating her 
 conduct thereby. We do not find her, at fifteen, com- 
 pletely enamoured of any but M. de Guibert ; and M. de 
 Boismorel, who seems to play a part in her life analogous to 
 his, is a perfectly quiet and commonplace figure in her 
 eyes. The philosophic and rationalistic tinge which she 
 assumes, and to some extent affects, makes her even a little 
 antipathetic and unjust towards the reigning wits and 
 literati of the day, so dear to the heart of Mile. Necker. 
 Her feeling is the very opposite of infatuation. She loses 
 none of their absurdities. She finds the bearing of d'Alem- 
 bert insignificant, the pronunciation of Abbe" Delille un- 
 pleasant ; Ducis and Thomas seem to her to extol one 
 another like the two asses in the fable, and she is quite 
 ready to see an ordinary man of letters in him of whom 
 Mme. de Stael has said, with such consummate tact, 
 "Garat was then minister of justice, and in happier times 
 he had been one of the best writers in France." Yet let no 
 one think to represent Mme. Roland as a mere stoical 
 philosopher, a strict citizen like her husband, in a word, 
 as anything but a woman. A woman she is. We recognise 
 her as such amid all her philosophy and her wisdom, by her
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 123 
 
 need of acting, if not openly, of touching the springs, 
 although she never boasted of so doing. With what 
 smiling satisfaction she describes herself as seated at her 
 little table in the cabinet which Marat called her boudoir, 
 and writing, under cover of the minister, her famous letter 
 to the pope. More than once, during M. Roland's second 
 ministry, was she summoned before the bar of the Conven- 
 tion ; and she came and answered all questions, modestly 
 but fully, in language singularly apt and clear. Beneath 
 this modest air men read her radiant enjoyment of this 
 active participation in political affairs. On her return to 
 Villefranche, after her six months at Paris, in 1791, when 
 about to re-enter private life, never having dreamed of 
 the ministry for her husband, how she suffers under the 
 stifling obscurity and nullity of the province ! How her 
 heart dies within her ! She, too, felt that she was formed 
 for an active, influential, manifold part, for that main 
 stage of action where, at every step, the intellect finds 
 food and the .love of glory is stimulated. She, too, far from 
 Paris, exiled from the large and lofty existence whose joys 
 she had tasted, would have begged, but gently, for het 
 Rue do la Harpe. And if any prophetic vision could then 
 have revealed her public career, so brief, so crowded ; her 
 messages to the pope and the king from the depths of her 
 austere boudoir ; her ever-applauded appearance before the 
 bar of the Assembly ; and, for the last scene of the drama, 
 herself, white-robed and with floating hair, mounting the 
 scaffold in triumph, if she could have had her choice, 
 surely she would never have wavered. Like Achilles of old, 
 she would have preferred the fate of the warrior, early 
 stricken and immortal, to any obscure fireside happiness. 
 And yet she appreciated domestic life, the mother's voca- 
 tion, managed the affairs of her household in all simplicity, 
 and could hearken to Nature in her secret solitudes. Out- 
 door details, the colouring of vines and nut-trees, the toil 
 of the vine-dresser, the harvest, the poultry-yard, the store- 
 of gathered fruit, the dried pears, she was passionately 
 fond of all these things, aud busied herself with them. In
 
 124 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 a letter to Bosc rich, beautiful, and, as it were, fertile in 
 its rusticity she exclaims, "I am assaying per force,"* 
 which would not have sounded well beneath the majestic 
 shades of Coppet.t George Sand, in her best days, might 
 so have written from Berri. To com j dote the picture of 
 Mme. Roland's domestic qualities, we need but recall tlie 
 opening of that other letter which she wrote to Bosc from 
 Villefrauche. "Seated by the fire at eleven A.M., after a 
 peaceful night and the performance of my various morning 
 duties, my friend at his desk, my little girl knitting, and I 
 talking with the one and superintending the work of the 
 other, happy in the tender affection of my dear little family, 
 and writing to a friend while the snow falls without," etc. 
 Along with these antique fashions, this wholesome and 
 kindly bourgeois life, we may venture to note its drawbacks. 
 In default of aristocratic punctilio, is not the plebeian and 
 philosophic boastfulness rather annoying? When Mmc. 
 Roland alludes, with a superior smile, to the disciples of 
 Jesus, her strong-minded accent shocks me. When, in 
 imitation of Jean Jacques, she commits to paper certain 
 details which it becomes every woman to reserve, she seems 
 to enjoy, with a kind of fine stoical humour and contempt 
 of sexual distinctions, allusions unworthy of one who was 
 chastity itself. ' Her virtuous levity allows her, in another 
 similar case, to find the romances of Louvet J merely pretty 
 and tasteful. I These whims of philosophism could not, 
 however, spoil her air of perfect womanliness, nor that 
 consummate grace which the friction of the Revolution 
 neVer tarnished. \No heed should be paid, on this head, to 
 the insinuations of Mine, de Crequy, who has given us a 
 
 * Satuno sordida rura easse, says Martial. " I am assifying perforce, 
 and immersed in the petty cares of this piggish country life." (Letter 
 of October 12, 1785.) She uses this word ossify because she was then 
 drinking asses' milk. 
 
 t Mme. de Stael used to say that she should like agriculture well 
 enough if agriculture smelleil less strongly of manure. 
 
 t Let Adventures du Chevalier de Faub'as and Emilie de Varlmont 
 scandalous talcs, in which the author professed to lay bare the corrup- 
 tions of his time, particularly in the higher ranks of society. TR.
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 125 
 
 picture of Mme. Roland in her youth, which is in other 
 respects charming. 
 
 The style and language of Mine. Roland are clearer, more 
 vigorous, and more concise than Mme. de StaeTs, in her 
 earlier manner, a difference traceable to the character and 
 mental habits of the two writers, and to Mme. Roland's 
 ten years of seniority. In her solitary leisure, she had 
 already written much, and on all sorts of subjects. She 
 came before the public ripe and ready. The pages which 
 she threw off in haste attest a thorough and practised pen, 
 a mind capable of comprehending and describing a multitude 
 of relations. Mme. de Stael, arraigned before the same 
 Assembly, would probably have spoken with less calmness 
 and self-possession. She would have been inclined to dis- 
 play, and easily overcome. The one, like a Roman matron 
 controlling her shyness and pride, would have hidden 
 under the folds of her robe her stylus and tablets. Delphine 
 might have trembled and felt her heart swell, but, like a 
 Norse woman, she would not have feared to loosen her 
 girdle arid bring forth her harp. And yet Mme. Roland is 
 very much under the spell of the same sentimental inspira- 
 tion as that other daughter of Jean Jacques. "Whatever 
 be the fruits of observation and the rules of philosophy," 
 she cries to Bancal, " I believe in a surer guide for healthful 
 souls, and that is feeling." Like Mme. de Stael, again, she 
 reads Thomson with tears ; and if, later in her republican 
 vein, she devotes herself to Tacitus, and desires no other 
 reading, was not the republican author of the work on 
 literature also fed on Sallust and the letters of Brutus ? 
 The narratives of both show the utmost vivacity of mind, 
 and they regard with a kind of transport of contempt the 
 base calumniators around them. They can employ, when- 
 ever occasion demands, that play of irony so natural to 
 superior women. In the course of years I think they 
 would have assimilated still more. The former would have 
 learned more of the world, and would have abated her 
 stoicism in presence of the actual. The powers of the 
 latter would have ripened, and her illusions would have
 
 126 SAINTE-BEUVE, 
 
 passed away.* A tribute which can rarely be paid to great 
 aud glorious beings, but which Mme. Rolind especially 
 deserve", is this, the deeper you search into her life and 
 letters, the more simple the who'e appears. Always the 
 same language, the same frank thoughts, not a secret, not 
 a complication, whether of passion or of contending 
 inclinations and desires. Even that last mysterious love 
 whose object is unknown, whose existence is but twice 
 confessed is majestic in its silence. For the rest, all is 
 true, obvious, perfectly limpid, not a stain, nor a veil to 
 be raised. Peer as closely as you will into her house of 
 glass, transparent as ever the old Roman desired, the 
 light of reason and innocence irradiates its well-ordered and 
 refined interior. How this woman bears scmtiny from the 
 standpoint of the actual ! Close upon death she could 
 exclaim, without any affectation, in her parting hymn, 
 "Farewell, my child, my husband, my maid, my friends 
 all ! Farewell, sun, whose beams bring peace to my soul, 
 while recalling it to the skies. Farewell, lonesome fields, 
 the sight of which has so often moved me, and you, rustic 
 inhabitants of Theze'e, who were wont to bless me when I 
 came, whose sweat I have wiped away, whose misery I have 
 soothed, whose sickness I have tended. Farewell, farewell, 
 peaceful alcoves, where my spirit was fed on truth, my 
 imagination captivated by study, and where I learned in 
 
 * The name of Mme. Roland has sometimes been compared with that 
 of Mistress Hutchinson, a woman of equal powers, and the author of 
 Memoirs which, though somewhat monotonous and not very amusing, 
 are solid and healthful reading. Mistress Hutchinson descants too 
 much, during a whole volume or more, on the entanglements of her 
 husband, the governor of Nottingham, with the local committees, and 
 is not sufficiently explicit about his conduct in Parliament during the 
 affair of the king and afterwards; but the beginning and the end are 
 pcrfert, and sensibly impregnated, or rather kneaded, with veracity. 
 It is touching to sec the love and respect of Mistress Hutchinson for 
 her noble husband, and how modestly *he attributes all her own 
 virtues to him. " While he was here he was her life ! Now she is 
 but Ihe faded image of her former self." But Mistress Hutchinson 
 and Mine. Roland d ffer as widely as the two Revolutions tliat pro- 
 duced them.
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 127 
 
 the silence of meditation to rule my senses and to despise 
 vanity." 
 
 ^There has been an attempt of late to make Mme. Roland 
 thVtype of the woman of jlie future, a brave republican wife, 
 inspiring her husband, equal or superior to him ; substitut- 
 ing, as it is said, for Christian meekness and virginal 
 timidity a noble and clairvoyant daring. But this is an 
 ambitious and delusive chimera. Women like Mme. 
 Roland will always make themselves a place, but they will 
 always be exceptional. A more wholesome and temperate 
 system of education than now prevails, marriages more 
 accordant with the real fitness of things, will doubtless, 
 at least we hope so, tend to make the relation of man and 
 wife one of the intellect as well as of the other faculties. 
 Nevertheless, we cannot afford to transmute the old virtues, 
 or even the old graces. There is the more need to preserve 
 them. We would remind those who adduce Mme. Roland 
 as an example, that she did not, ordinarily, neglect those 
 graceful amenities which constitute her empire in common 
 with the rest of her sex, while the keen, irrepressible, and, 
 at times, self-asserting genius which belonged to her alone, 
 cannot, unless by some strange hallucination, be deemed 
 authority for others. i 
 
 II.* 
 
 IT may seem that enough, "and more than enough, has 
 been said on the subject of Mme. Roland. We ourselves dis- 
 cussed her some time since, and now occasion offers, and we 
 renew the theme. In criticism as well as in life there is a 
 certain fidelity to one's old attachments, which is a pleasure 
 and a profit, as well as a duty. We expand too much now- 
 a-days in writing as well as in living. We are all critics, 
 and we try our hand at everything. Within and without 
 we are all like commonplace drawing-rooms j but it is well 
 not quite to forget the old favourite nooks. 
 
 * This second article was called forth by the publication of some 
 further inedited letters of Mme. Roland by Coquebert in 1840.
 
 128 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 True, tlie world does not think so ; and inveterate habits 
 displease the public. When it has had enough of an author 
 or a personage, however excellent, it wants no more. "We 
 know all that," it says; "pass on to something else." 
 And so I should not be surprised, if, despite the intrinsic 
 interest of the correspondence just published, certain readers 
 should find it monotonous and tiresome. Those, on the 
 other hand, who believe that a soul is a microcosm, and 
 that an eminent character can never be too minutely 
 studied, those in whose estimate of Mine. Roland there 
 mingles the worship of a fond affection, will find in it a 
 thousand fresh reasons for their sympathy, and will discover 
 a multitude of particulars as reliable as they are interesting. 
 
 Wheu about eleven years of age, Mile. Phlipou was placed 
 in the convent of the Dames de la Congregation, Rue Neuvo 
 Saint Etionne, to recei/e her first communion. There she 
 became acquainted with two young girls from Amiens, 
 sisters, a little older than herself, Miles. Henriette and 
 Sophie Cannet, and grew very fond of them of Sophie 
 especially. When she left the convent, and went back to 
 her father in the Quai de Lunettes, she opened an active 
 und constant correspondence with Sophie, who herself had 
 returned to Amiens. It is this correspondence, preserved 
 as a great treasure in the family of the ladies Cannet, which 
 M. Auguste Breuil, an advocate, has recently obtained for 
 publication from the hands of their worthy heirs. 
 
 It comprises and fills, almost without interruption, the 
 interval between January 1772 and January 1780. At 
 its commencement, the young girl was not quite eighteen ; 
 when the last letter was written, she was almost twenty-six. 
 There were others, doubtless, that had no regular connec- 
 tion with the rest, and have not been preserved. The final 
 letter mentions the writer's approaching marriage with M. 
 Roland, the earliest announcement of which was due to the 
 Amiens friends. A four years' residence in that place inter- 
 rupted the correspondence ; at least it could no longer con- 
 tinue on the same footing as before. The letters end, like any 
 romance, with a wedding ; and a romance indeed they are,
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 129 
 
 a romance of early years, and of the friendship of two young 
 girls, school friends, just entering upon life. 
 
 Sophie is the more cool, calm, and happy of the two. 
 Manon Phlipon is what might be supposed, just what she 
 so clearly describes herself in her Memoirs. But here the 
 progressive development appears in every letter, rich, 
 artless, continuous. We behold her soul, her talents, her 
 reasoning powers, slowly taking shape, and struggling 
 towards the light. The letters of Mine. Roland to her 
 young friends furnish proof to my mind of the truth of this 
 idea. If the perfect moral creature is ever to be formed 
 within us, it is formed early. It exists at twenty in all its 
 integrity and all its grace. Then, if at all, we bear within 
 us our Plutarchian hero, our Alexander. Subsequently we 
 come too often to survive our hero. In proportion as he 
 develops and is displayed before the eyes of others, he 
 actually loses. When the world begins to appreciate him, 
 he is already deteriorating. Sometimes (horrible thought ! ) 
 he has already ceased to be. Frankness, self-sacrifice, 
 fidelity, courage, these keep their old names, but scarcely 
 deserve them. Each soul in its progress incurs all the 
 stains, undergoes all the waste, of which it is capable. 
 "All men," says the noble and charitable Vauvenargues, 
 " are bom truthful, and die deceitful." It might have 
 sufficed him for the expression of his bitter thought to say, 
 "they die undeceived." At all events, even with the best 
 of us, the result of what is called progress in life is very 
 inferior to the pristine ideal realized in some moment of 
 our youth. We are fortunate, therefore, whenever we can 
 discover original likenesses of those who are foreordained to 
 fame ; when some unforeseen chance reveals them to us 
 exactly as they were at the chosen and unique moment, at 
 their blossoming, "their hour of beauty," as the Greeks 
 used to say. In all the rest of our view of them there must 
 be more or less of anachronism. 
 
 Mme. Roland certainly appeared greater at a later day ; 
 but was she ever wiser, more profound, more loveable, than 
 in these youthful hours of intimate outpouring ? When the
 
 130 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 public declared in her favour, by how many scenes was hot 
 triumph purchased ! The fourth act of the drama notice- 
 ably dragged, and was greatly injured by bombast. The 
 fifth happily repaired all deficiencies, and the halo of the 
 scaffold hides the errors of ambition. But at present OUT 
 only concern is to give a simple, tender, faithful portraiture 
 of her humble first attempts. 
 
 Mme. Roland might have lived on to the end in the 
 sphere which fate at first ordained her, and not have seemed 
 greatly out of place. Her friends, while regretting her narrow 
 circumstances, would never have dreamed of transporting her 
 to that stormy region where she breathed so freely and died so 
 victoriously. And yet she was the same then as afterwards ; 
 only her consummate moral nature could rule itself so well 
 that she did not seem under constraint. The interest wo 
 feel in obscure lives depends on our power of divining and 
 tracing out the character and genius which are destined one 
 day to illuminate the world, but which might just as easily 
 have remained hid. "How many a Hampden," says Gray 
 in his "Country Churchyard," " sleeps unknown beneath the 
 sod ! " I have sometimes tried to imagine what Cardinal 
 Richelieu would have been if fate had restricted him to 
 private life. What a disagreeable neighbour ; or, to speak 
 vulgarly, what a bad bed-fellow ! Bonaparte, just before 
 1795, suggests a similar idea, when he is without employ- 
 ment, endeavouring to quench with a few whiffs Bourrienne 
 or Mme. Permon. How rare are the beings who are both 
 good and excellent in private life, and great in public life, 
 like Washington and Mme. Roland ! 
 
 One precaution is needful in approaching these letters. 
 To avoid misunderstanding, we should call to mind some- 
 thing of the habits and aims of the young girl who penned 
 them. In some respects, and in very many of their pages, 
 they are like recitations in rhetoric and philosophy to which 
 we seem to be listening. The young Phlipon, in her hunger 
 for knowledge, and with the instinct of genius, read all 
 sorts of authors, kept a list of them, made extracts, anJ 
 discussed them elaborately with her friends ; " for," as she
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 131 
 
 very sensibly says, "we learn nothing when we only read. 
 We must extract and convert, so to speak, into our own 
 substance the things we would preserve, iintil we become 
 penetrated with their essence." Hare and vigorous mind, to 
 which everything came naturally, even the education which 
 she gave herself ! She alludes in her Memoirs to what she 
 used very properly to call her extracts, her maiden produc- 
 tions, of which these letters are the complement. Now it is a 
 treatise on metaphysics that she analyzes ; now Delolme in 
 twelve pages (which is rather too much) ; now she attempts 
 a prose elegy. There are flourishes in her style. Circumlo- 
 cutions accounted elegant, and dictionary epithets like the 
 "bells of folly," the "docile pupil of the indolent Epicu- 
 rean," and the " playful children of laughter," abound at 
 intervals. "You know," she one day writes to her friend, 
 "that my home is on the banks of the Seine, near the 
 extremity of that island where may be seen the statue of 
 the best of kings. The river flows peacefully on the right, 
 bearing past my dwelling its wholesome waves." No doubt 
 this is a musical beginning for a description of the corner of 
 the Quai des Lunettes ; but we regret that the editor had not 
 considerably condensed this elementary portion, which has 
 no interest save as a sample. It would have enhanced the 
 charm of many of those incidental sketches that are so 
 fresh and free. In the third letter from the preceding, she 
 alludes very prettily to the prosy life she is leading at 
 Vincennes with her uncle the canon, in the midst of the 
 choristers. "The moment the good canon smites the old 
 bass-viol with his quivering bow, I begin to scrape a violin ; 
 a second canon accompanies us on a squeaking flute, and a 
 concert ensues fit to terrify the cats. This fine performance 
 over, the gentlemen congratulate themselves and compli- 
 ment one another, while I escape to the garden to gather 
 roses and parsley, or take a turn in the poultry-yard, where 
 the brooding hens are a subject of interest, and the young 
 chickens divert me. Then I turn over in my mind all the 
 novels and histories I have ever read, to revive my torpid 
 imagination, and divert my thoughts from the conversation
 
 132 SA INTE-BE UVE. 
 
 of the chapter, which sometimes puts me to sleep. This is 
 my life." And a little farther on : " I like this tranquillity, 
 broken only by the crowing of the cocks. I seem to realize 
 my being ; I have a sense of comfort, like that of a tree 
 taken out of a box and transplanted into an open field." 
 Here we have a very different style ; or rather, there is no 
 longer any question of style. The pupil has finished her 
 recitation in rhetoric, and is talking with us. 
 
 Nevertheless, it must be owned that the publication in 
 full of these letters does not seem entirely to have violated 
 the intention of their maiden author. In more than one 
 instance she is clearly thinking of the use which may bo 
 made of her words. We detect a tip of the author's ear. 
 If, unhappily, a letter miscarries, there are infinite researcli 
 and regret. Is she quite serious when she speaks of her 
 " scribblings " ? " And then what matters it how we write ? 
 When I compose my letters " (she does compose them, then), 
 " do I expect that they will find an editor when I am gone, and 
 take rank with those of Mme. de SeVigne' ? I am not so fool- 
 ish. If we preserve our scribblings, it is that we may laugh 
 over them when we are toothless." And yet, amid the most 
 confidential and tender confessions of a heart which believes 
 itself won, we find the following : " Open the letter read 
 it think of my tortures and of his, and consider whether 
 you ought to send it. But on no account burn anything. 
 Were my letters one day to be read by all the world, I would 
 not shroud in obscurity the sole monument of my weakness 
 and my love." Well, then, since we are allowed, and even 
 invited, let us penetrate into the interior of this virginal 
 heart, to which she has been pleased to afford us a clue. 
 
 The unity of this correspondence, the effect of which 
 would have been heightened by a little repression, lies in 
 the friendship of two young girls, in that friendship, im- 
 passioned at the outset, at least on the part of Mile. 
 Phlipon, and which, on being transferred from the convent, 
 with its petty storms, its everyday interests, its ups and 
 downs, runs its course in a few years, and expires with 
 marriage. When I say expires, however, I speak only ol
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 133 
 
 its intense and ardent form. The substance always re- 
 mained. Even before the passion of her friendship was 
 over we find it suffering a check, and it undergoes a 
 perfectly sensible modification towards the close of the first 
 volume, the moment the earliest sentiment of love effects a 
 lodgment iu her hitherto undivided heart. But we must 
 condense, as much as possible, the story of these early 
 years, and proceed lightly and rapidly. Mile. Phlipon, at 
 eighteen, had long been formed, and was already a devotee. 
 The letters of 1772, to Sophie, are so serious as to provoke a 
 smile. We feel that the young writer is fresh from Nicole, 
 and that she has not yet read Rousseau. "She was pre- 
 vented," she says ("prevented by grace" this is Nicole's 
 style), " a little later than her friend." Up to the age of 
 eleven she lived by a species of reason, though still folded 
 in the shades of infancy. Not until then did the divine ray 
 first shine. Nevertheless, vanity, that mighty and detest- 
 able enemy, is not overcome. ' ' I call it detestable, and I 
 detest it, too, and with good reason, for it plays me many 
 an ugly trick. 'Tis a cunning thief that always manages to 
 snatch something. Let us unite our forces, my dear friend, 
 and make war upon it. I swear it an implacable hostility. 
 Let us track it in all its windings," etc. There follows a 
 complete little harangue, in which she preaches a holy 
 crusade against the abominable me. Saint FranQois de 
 Sales, who has the air of allowing a few gewgaws to girls in 
 view of an honourable marriage, strikes her as too indulgent. 
 She enumerates and confesses, in excellent didactic style, 
 her own thorny conflicts in the matter of vanity. "Here, 
 my friend, you have a faithful picture of the revolutions 
 whereof my heart was the theatre." This semi-Jansenist 
 phase will not last long. We can trace in her correspond- 
 ence the decline of this once so fervid devotion. In March 
 1776, she still repeats her stations, but cannot be resigned 
 to the five Paters and the five Aves. In September of the 
 same year, the Amiens friends are praying for her conversion. 
 She has long been busy with what she calls her " freaks of 
 reasoning." " I am interested in the idea of universality,
 
 134 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 and the fair chimera (if it be a chimera) of utility allures 
 and intoxicates me." She estimates her recent devotion 
 philosophically, and accounts for it as follows : " Persons of 
 tender heart and thoughtful mind always begin so." On 
 the other hand, her ideal fondness for the pious and indul- 
 gent Sophie is in no degree impaired. 
 
 Austere, active, diligent, studious, passing from Plutarch 
 to the Abbe" Nollet, and from geometry to her household 
 duties,* the youthful Phlipon, in her nineteenth year, did 
 not always escape a certain dreamy melancholy, which she 
 never thought to exorcise, and which it pleased her to 
 confound with regret for her absent friend. If, on a 
 Sunday in early May, after hearing the convent mass, she 
 took a stroll with her mother in the Luxembourg, she fell 
 into reverie. The silence and calm pervading the gardens, 
 then rural and solitary, were broken for her only by the soft 
 quivering of the agitated leaves. She longed for her Sophie 
 during this delicious walk, and the succeeding letters are 
 pervaded by a deeper tinge of sentiment, a great word in 
 those days, and one which indicates the prevailing hue of 
 the last half of the eighteenth century. But native gaiety 
 and the joy of strength and innocence soon corrected her 
 languor, and restored her poise and calm. Even when 
 repeating a rustic ode, after Thomson, and moralizing on 
 the control of the passions, she added, with beautiful gravity, 
 1 ' I find in my religion the true path to happiness ; when I 
 am submissive to its precepts my life is auspicious. I sing 
 of my God, my blessings, my friend. I praise them to my 
 guitar. In short, I am happy." It was still early spring 
 with her, the first week of the heart's May. 
 
 A visit of Sophie to Paris and the small- pox cause an in- 
 terruption in the correspondence. The small-pox, before its 
 ravages were checked, used commonly to come to young 
 
 * And also to the family calling. Her father was an artist and 
 engraver. She sometimes laboured to become one. Her drawings are 
 perfection. M. Courtois (son of the member of the Convention) has a 
 very fine drawing of hers, the lines of which show a great deal of 
 power, and also some engraved stones, particularly a coral, after the 
 antique, representing a shepherd wrestling with a goat.
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 135 
 
 girls as a symptom of their entrance into the age of emotion. 
 To the physical constitution it was a terrible judgment of 
 nature, putting every charm to the test. Mile. Phlipon. 
 arose from it with a beauty that, henceforth, had nothing 
 to fear, and had scarcely recovered from her long conval- 
 escence when emulous admirers began to present them- 
 selves, whom she dazzled ever more and more. " From the 
 moment," she says in her Memoirs, "when a girl attains 
 her development, a swarm of suitors attends her footsteps, 
 like the bees that buzz about an opening flower." But 
 though she employs this graceful image, her tone is uni- 
 formly satirical, and she is very entertaining on the subject 
 of this general uprising of her lovers, whom she causes to 
 defile before us, and shows off with an air of vast enjoyment. 
 She is like one of those heroines of Jean Jacques whom he 
 was so fond of locating in the Pays de Vaud, a Claire 
 d'Orbe in her innocent raillery. She is less facetious in her 
 letters than in her Memoirs, for her suitors come one at a 
 time ; and since there is more than one whose request may 
 prove a serious matter, she appears occasionally quite pre- 
 occupied. In her inmost heart they vex and irritate, as 
 much as they will, subsequently, amuse her. "My senti- 
 ments strike me as very odd," she says. "What can be 
 stranger than for me to hate any one because he loves me, 
 and from the moment I try to love him ? Yet so it is. I 
 am giving you a faithful record of my experience." The 
 letters to Sophie, in these moments of subtile confidence, 
 become more rapid and animated. They suggest contend- 
 ing impulses and incentives. Mere friendship is but their 
 occasion and pretext, a wavering, agitated veil. Some un- 
 defined and bashful consciousness is working in the depths 
 of her heart. " But I am not always capable of application. 
 I have had recent experience of this. I snatched a pen and 
 drew j'our portrait to divert my mind. I keep it carefully. 
 I added by way of inscription, 'The portrait of Sophie.' 
 When my head aches all 1 can do is to scribble ! I write 
 everything that occurs to me, and it clears my brain. 
 A/lieu ! I am expecting a cousin to take me out walking.
 
 136 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 My imagination dances my pen runs wild my senses are 
 thrilled my feet burn. Wholly thine." 
 
 However intrinsically calm and healthy one may be, it 
 would seem difficult, in the rash of youthful thoughts and 
 feelings, and amid so many moving solicitations, to remain 
 utterly cold. Accordingly the moment came when Mile. 
 Phlipon gave forth a spark. Who, then, was the chosen 
 one, the first mortal she ever met who crossed, though but 
 for a moment, the still inviolate ideal of her noble heart? 
 
 Among her suitors there were men of all sorts and all 
 professions, from the diamond merchant to the doctor and 
 the academician, the grocer and the restaurant-keeper ; and 
 it must be owned, as the merry maiden herself said, that if 
 this more or less amorous suite could have been represented 
 in a picture, each with the attributes of his profession, like 
 the stage Turks in a certain famous ceremony, the result 
 would have been a singular medley. Yet she was not 
 always jesting ; and her one softened and serious moment, 
 by no means very violent or stormy, but sufficiently tender, 
 and somewhat embellished in description, the correspond- 
 ence does actually indicate. 
 
 There is a groat deal said, in her Memoirs, of La 
 Blancherie, a sort of author and philosopher who early 
 subsided into twaddle, and even into philanthropic broker- 
 age. She passes a superficial judgment on him, and, after 
 some sort of natural digression, she returns to the subject, 
 saying lightly, " Let us settle the claims of this individual : " 
 but before being settled by her, he had succeeded in making 
 himself beloved ; and better proof could not be furnished, if 
 required, that there is nothing in love save what we put 
 into it, and that the object of the flame counts in reality 
 for almost nothing. This spirited and sensible girl, with 
 nn imagination singularly chaste and austere, distinguishes, 
 from the very first, one who is a complete epitome of the 
 follies and affectations of his day, and fancies she sees in 
 him a realization of her most alluring dream. The fact is 
 that La Blancherie, that young sage, the friend of Greuze, 
 with his verses and his theories, and his moral advice to
 
 MADAME POLAND. 137 
 
 parents, represented to perfection the commonplace philo- 
 sophic or sentimental romanticism of his time, as it was in 
 its glory. Romanticism, however, is very likely to succeed 
 for once, and in some form or other, with the heart of a 
 young girl, even were that young girl destined to become 
 Mme. Roland. The letters to Sophie, therefore, are full of 
 this grave crisis in her interior life Postscripts, added 
 without her mother's knowledge, multiply and extend. 
 The little light closet where she writes no longer appears 
 sufficiently secure from surprise. " No answer none at 
 least that would be intelligible to any beside myself. 
 Adieu ! my heart throbs at the slightest noise. I tremble 
 like a thief." All is, her friend must believe herself, at 
 such a time, more necessary, more beloved, more precious 
 than ever. With what an agony of impatience her replies, 
 are awaited ! If the wished-for letter arrive during the 
 family dinner, there is no help for it, it must be opened at 
 once, before them all ; and she forgets that she is not alone, 
 and sheds tears ; and then her parents smile, and grand- 
 mamma speaks the word that is in all their minds. "It 
 you had a husband and children, this friendship would 
 soon vanish, and you would forget Mile. Cannet." And 
 then the young girl, who gives a ravishing account of this 
 domestic scene, revolts, as one might suppose she would, 
 at such an idea. "It surprises me to find that so many 
 people regard friendship as a frivolous or chimerical senti- 
 ment. Almost every one seems to imagine that the lightest 
 emotion of another sort is capable of changing and effacing 
 friendships which they consider the mere makeshifts of an un- 
 occupied heart. Do you believe, Sophie, that any change of 
 circumstances would break the tie between us ? " This word 
 "break" is a hard one, certainly, but why is it, maiden, 
 that your friendship seems intensified in those moments 
 when you have some peculiarly tender avowal to make? 
 "Why, after a second interview with him, whom you avoid 
 naming, one day when he has caused you to read the proof- 
 sheets of an instructive work which lie has just completed, 
 and you are perfectly transported by the discovery that the
 
 138 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 author, if he is not Rousseau, has at least in him some- 
 thing of Greuze, Avhy do you conclude your letter to your 
 friend in such an impassioned strain : " Receive my tears of 
 emotion and the hot kiss that has fallen upon these last 
 lines"? Whence came that burning kiss which suddenly 
 makes its first appearance here ? Is not original friendship 
 undergoing a change ? And why, afterwards, when a new 
 situation has been fully established, when a marriage, not 
 of passion, but of reason, is soon to end her dreams, why 
 is the last letter of the correspondence precisely the one in 
 which this announcement is made ? When grandmamma 
 delivered her La Bruyere-like oracle, she went a little too 
 far, perhaps ; but was she not half right ? 
 
 This sentiment for La Blancherie may not absolutely 
 deserve the name of love, nor quite meet our idea of the 
 prime passion of such a soul, but still it transcends the 
 bounds of common interest. Mine. Roland, in her Memoirs, 
 regarding it from a distance and in perspective, has doubt- 
 less to some extent curtailed its proportions. Here we 
 have it displayed in greater amplitude. It was a con- 
 spicuous advantage to La Blancherie, at first, that he was 
 not seen often, nor for long at a time. He was often at 
 Orleans, and seldom came to the house after the death of 
 Mme. Roland's mother : M. Phlipon, the father, had little 
 fancy for him, and he was requested to abate his visits. 
 These eclipses this twilight atmosphere enhanced his 
 brilliancy. Our heroine, whom I have compared above to 
 one of the characters in the " Nouvelle He"lolse, " had become 
 very like a certain enamoured lady in Corneille, when she 
 thinks of her fond and virtuous absent one. When La 
 Blancherie, whom she no longer had the opportunity to see 
 frequently, is descried at church, on the occasion of a 
 funeral service performed for her dear mother a year after 
 her death, "You may imagine," she writes to her friend, 
 " the emotion caused me by his presence at such a ceremony. 
 I blushed for those criminal tears which flowed at once for 
 my mother and my lover. Heavens ! what a word ! But 
 need they have shamed me ? No ; reassured by the rccti-
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 139 
 
 tude of my own feelings, I take thee to witness, dear and 
 sacred shade ! " "We recognise the tone to which she has 
 risen ; it is like that in the sublime scene, 
 
 " Adieu, trop malheureux et trop parfait amant ! " * 
 
 Elsewhere, still after the manner of Pauline, she speaks of 
 the surprise of her senses at the sight of La Blancherie ; but 
 the probability is that there was no such surprise in the 
 case, and that the affair was one of sentiment merely. The 
 first check which La Blancherie sustained arose from her 
 one day meeting him in the Luxembourg with a feather in 
 his hat. A philosopher in a feather ! Some trivial stories 
 told of him helped to compromise her ideal, and the matter 
 became serious. "You cannot think how strange it seems 
 to me. His features, though the same, have no longer the 
 same expression, and do not indicate the same qualities. Oh, 
 how powerful is illusion ! I still rate him above common 
 men, and especially above those of his own age ; but he is 
 no more an idol of perfection, no longer the first of his 
 species, in short, no longer my lever." These few pas- 
 sages, taken from her letters, in connection with some 
 pages of the Memoirs, furnish a pointed lesson concerning 
 the false light which pervades the heart's perspectives. 
 
 The last scene, in particular, where La Blancherie appeared 
 so different from what she had supposed him, but at the 
 close of which she still regarded him with generous esteem, 
 that slightly mysterious interview of four hours' duration, 
 is described in her Memoirs with an inaccuracy of remem- 
 brance very thoughtless and slightly cruel. It would seem 
 from the Memoirs that she dismissed La Blancherie with 
 something very like the air of a queen, while it appears from 
 the letter to Sophie, that, hearing the approach of a visitor, 
 she made him a slight motion with her hand to withdraw 
 by one door while she went to receive her guest at the 
 other, "assuming," she says, "her most playful manner, 
 in order to conceal her adroit stratagem." Are, then, 
 these conflicting statements with regard to past impres- 
 * Adieu, my too unhappy and too perfect lover.
 
 140 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 sions inevitable, even in the case of our most sincere 
 emotions ? 
 
 It may be, for so nice a matter demands careful scru- 
 tiny, it may be that the letter to Sophie tells but a part 
 of the truth ; perhaps she was sterner and more scornful 
 \vith La Blancherie than she dares confess to her confidant ; 
 because her vanity was wounded by the memory of the past. 
 I fear, however, that it is the Memoirs which (in condens- 
 ing into a single scene the result of subsequent judgments) 
 have unceremoniously misrepresented what in the retrospect 
 she had long despised. 
 
 And, after all, where is the autobiographer who could 
 bear to have the subsequent story of his experience com- 
 pared, at all points, with his contemporary letters ? 
 
 This sentiment, even as she afterwards represented it, 
 the loss of her mother, her varied reading, her relations 
 with some few men of mark, all combined, when she was 
 about twenty-two, to give her vigorous mind such an 
 impulse and scope that her power was fully revealed even 
 to her own contracted circle. In vain she repeats, as often 
 as possible, and with consummate grace, "I live in the 
 shade. Twilight suffices for my happiness ; " and, as Mon- 
 taigne says, "one is never so well off as in the back shop." 
 With her strong nature and superior endowments, she 
 often felt cramped behind the screen and in the entresol to 
 which fate confined her. Her life overflows. She compares 
 herself to a caged lion. She should have been a Spartan or 
 Roman woman, or at least a man in France. We venture 
 to quote the expression of a desire which certain famous 
 heroines have since realized. " Come, then, to Paris," she 
 writes to the gentle and pious Sophie; "there is nothing 
 like residence in a place where art and science, the presence 
 of great men, and all sorts of intellectual resources, concur 
 and vie with one another. How interesting it would be 
 for us to study and walk together ! How I desire to know 
 men of ability of every sort ! Sometimes I feel tempted to 
 don a hat and breeches, for the sake of being free to look 
 about and discover what is best in all orders of talent. I
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 141 
 
 have heard tales of women assuming such a disguise from 
 motives of affection or self-sacrifice. Ah, if I were a little 
 less rational, or circumstances were a little more in my 
 favour, I swear that I have the requisite zeal. I am not 
 surprised that Christina should have abandoned her throno 
 for the sake of living peacefully with her beloved arts 
 and sciences. Yet, if I were a queen, I would sacrifice my 
 tastes to the duty of making my people happy. I would, 
 indeed ; but what a sacrifice ! And so the fact that I wear 
 no crown does not greatly trouble me, although my means 
 are limited. What random talk ! I love you all the same 
 as Henry IV. loved Crillon. Adieu." Her friendship for 
 Sophie, and the letters she writes during the first months 
 of 1776, gain by this crowd of conflicting emotions. She 
 herself confesses as much, and gives us the key to her great 
 increase of tenderness. "Ah, Sophie! Sophie! you can 
 judge how fully I appreciate the blessing of friendship, 
 when I tell you it is the only sentiment I am free to 
 indulge." 
 
 But Sophie alone did not suffice her even for friendship. 
 Towards the middle of the same year (1776) a slight decline 
 is perceptible; we hear some faint reproaches: "Sophie, 
 Sophie, your letters are long delayed." While on the one 
 side there were dreams of La Blancherie, on the other, at 
 Amiens, there were thoughts of the cloister. Sophie had 
 had a passing desire to become a religieuse. The two 
 friends no longer inhabited quite the same world. They 
 make peace, they return with ardour to their mutual love, 
 but still it is a return, for in the career of friendship, as in 
 the path of virtue, we retrograde the moment we cease to 
 advance. I use Mme. Roland's own words. Henriette, 
 the elder sister of Sophie, came to Paris to pass some 
 months, and made a third in their intimacy. Her vivacious 
 imagination and brilliant wit appear to great advantage 
 beside the languor of her younger sister. At any rate our 
 heroine's heart becomes divided. Henriette becomes a 
 third self, and the ensuing letters are addressed to the two 
 sisters jointly. M. Roland, also, brgins to appear at raro
 
 142 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 intervals, an austere man, who at first inspires consider- 
 able awe. These things suffice to effect a diversion. They 
 are mixed up with the details of private annoyances and 
 domestic troubles. The correspondence, like human life, 
 loses its unity as it proceeds. 
 
 But its literary ability increases. The maiden is now an 
 able woman, mistress of her pen as well as her heart, and 
 the play of thought and movement of composition obey her 
 bidding. In what are to me the most interesting portions 
 of the correspondence the editor is sure to make numerous 
 erasures. I can imagine the difficulties and the scruples 
 which may arise when the materials in hand are so rich, 
 but I think the interest of the book depended largely on 
 the compiler's preserving a kind of unity in his selection. 
 He needed to shun both the diffuse and the fragmentary, 
 and especially to keep a watchful eye upon the Memoirs, 
 for the purpose of abridging those portions which are only a 
 sort of duplication. 
 
 A postcript to the correspondence, accompanied by full 
 details on the part of the editor, is worthy to close and 
 crown the whole. I have alluded to Henriette, the elder 
 sister, the second and more brilliant of Mme. Roland's two 
 friends. 1793 had come, and years of absence and political 
 difference had loosened, without sundering the ties that 
 united the old playmates. Mme. Roland was a captive 
 beneath the bolts of Sainte-Pelagie, awaiting sentence and 
 the scaffold. Heuriette hastened to her rescue. She 
 wanted to change clothes with her, and remain a prisoner 
 iu her stead. "But they would kill you, my dear Henri- 
 ette," persisted the noble victim ; and she would not 
 consent. 
 
 Apart from the little romance which I have endeavoured 
 to separate from the rest of the book and make prominent, 
 the reader will find in these volumes many a pleasant 
 anecdote and item characteristic of the age. It was quite 
 natural that the enthusiastic girl should have had a pas- 
 sionate desire to see and know Rousseau. She thought she 
 had discovered a way. A Genoese, a friend of her father,
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 143 
 
 had to propose to his illustrious countryman the composi- 
 tion of a few musical airs. She begged to be honoured with 
 the commission. Behold her, then, writing a beautiful 
 letter to the philosopher of the Rue Platriere, in which she 
 said that she would come in person for his answer. Two 
 days later she set out with her maid, entered the shoe- 
 maker's alley, and tremulously climbed the stairs as if they 
 had been the steps of a temple. But it was The'rese who 
 opened the door, and replied " No" to every question, keep- 
 ing, all the while, her hand upon the lock. It was certainly 
 better that she never saw Rousseau, the supreme object of 
 her worship, for so the faiths of the intellect are best 
 preserved. 
 
 Upon the wise and genial Boismorel, who plays so 
 pleasant a part in the Memoirs, on Sevelinges, the acade- 
 mician,* on a certain Genoese, a man of heavier make, 
 "whose mind is like a dark lantern, shedding light only 
 on him who holds it ; " on all these acquaintances of hers, 
 whom she speedily makes our own, she bestows bright 
 glances and remarks that indicate acute observation, and 
 are almost as delightful as conversation itself. We obtain 
 a peculiarly clear idea of one mature and very devoted 
 friend of hers, M. de Sainte-Lette, who came from Pondi- 
 cherry, and afterwards returned to that place, whose know- 
 ledge of the world was great, who had experienced passion, 
 who regretted his youth, who was, above all, an atheist. 
 The atheist was a production of the eighteenth century. 
 He took rank as such. His unbelief was almost a profes- 
 sion. When an individual was discovered to possess this 
 quality, he was regarded with a species of horror not un- 
 mixed with fascination. People communicated the fact to 
 their friends mysteriously, as did our heroine in the case of 
 M. de Wolmar and M. de Sainte-Lette. Three-quarters of 
 the people of our day believe in nothing after the grave, 
 and still never suspect that they are atheists. They go on 
 at haphazard, in perfect unconcern, and excite no particular 
 remark. Is not ours really the worse situation of the two T 
 * She calls him so, vol. ii. p. 107.
 
 I 44 SA I NT E- BE UVE. 
 
 and does not tlie incredulous solemnity of the eighteenth 
 century prove that the men of that day were nearer faith 
 than we ? 
 
 M. Roland makes his appearance early with a letter of 
 introduction from the Amiens friends ; but his character is 
 not readily divined. From the beginning, she who is 
 destined to shed historic lustre on his name, is anxious for 
 his esteem, and takes pains to appear to advantage in his 
 presence ; but the intellect only is involved ; it is a question 
 of esteem merely. During these important visits they talk 
 of everything, the Abbe" Raynal, Rousseau, Voltaire, Swit- 
 zerland, government, the Greeks and Romans ; they glance 
 by turns at all these serious subjects. For the most part 
 thoy are tolerably harmonious, but the name of Raynal is a 
 warmly-contested battlefield. M. Roland, with the common 
 sense of an economist, allows himself to pronounce the 
 philosophic historian of the two Indies an unmethodical 
 charlatan, whose heavy volumes are fit only for wrapping- 
 paper. The enthusiastic maiden cries out upon him. She 
 defends Raynal as she would defend Rousseau. She cannot 
 as yet discriminate between the two. Her taste is still 
 confused. In matters of style she has not yet assigned to 
 its proper place what is only of La Blancherie. So at every 
 epoch we have the declamatory side by side with the 
 original, and the two are easily confounded even by intelli- 
 gent contemporaries. Campistron's best borders on Racine's 
 weakest, and Raynal often suggests Rousseau. Time alone 
 makes clear and permanent distinctions. This is true even 
 of the works of the really original writer, who has catered 
 too much to the taste of his disciples, and yielded too much 
 to the desire of excessive applause. From these pages, 
 which contemporary eyes, affected by the same disease, and 
 tinged with the same jaundiced hue, as the author's own, 
 admire as among his finest, and which are lauded with a 
 kind of complacent unanimity, Time, with his humid wing, 
 soon brushes away the ephemeral, and leaves in the very 
 midst of the objects portrayed great disfiguring patches, 
 which increase the effect of permanence about the few
 
 MADAME ROLAND. 145 
 
 truthful and uninjured tints. The eye readily lights upon 
 such blemishes in these volumes of Mtne. Roland's letters.: 
 Hers are the platitudes of her age, and they are atoned for 
 by the countless marks of originality, whose freshness and 
 grace they do but enhance. 
 
 The four or five years which elapsed between the death 
 of her mother and her marriage with M. Roland brought 
 her many hard and poignant, and, at the same time, 
 petty trials. Her father was harassed, and on the road to 
 ruin. She had glimpses of the truth, and longed to know 
 all while yet she must smile on her father and on the 
 world, and dissimulate her anxiety. " I should prefer the 
 whistling of spears and the horrors of battle," she some- 
 times cried, "to the dull sound of the shafts that are 
 tearing my heart; but it is the sage's struggle with fate." 
 She was fresh from Plutarch and Seneca when she uttered 
 this stoical sentiment ; but she had read Homer as well, 
 and declared with a smile, and in imagery less forced than 
 the above, " Gaiety sometimes pierces through my anxieties 
 like a sunray through the clouds. I shall have great need 
 of philosophy to enable me to sustain the conflicts that are 
 coming. I am like Ulysses clinging to the fig-tree ; I wait 
 for the ebb-tide to restore me to my ship." 
 
 M. Roland, who had been travelling in Italy, returns by 
 way of Paris, but he does not visit her very regularly, and 
 she is a little piqued. Once she dreams of him as com- 
 pletely ruined. She writes this to the sisters very dryly. 
 Decidedly this is a busy man, not lavish of his pains. 
 She who is so ready to draw portraits of her friends 
 feels no confidence about attempting his. She observes 
 him through too long a telescope, and for all she sees of 
 him he might still be in Italy. We do not talk thus of 
 those to whom we are indifferent. It is taken as a good 
 sign by M. Roland, who is a careful observer, possibly a 
 little doubtful of success, but otherwise not unnecessarily 
 anxious, and who advances warily, slow, and sure, like 
 reason and destiny. But for my own part, I perceive that 
 I am falling into an error with which I have already been 
 K
 
 146 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 reproached, and encroaching upon the dull and prosaic 
 zone of life. 
 
 v In all this portion of the correspondence, the tone of 
 wliich has become very grave, in the midst of domestic 
 vicissitudes and the sorrows that always beset the existence 
 of a woman when she ceases to be a girl, there comes out, 
 in ever bolder relief, one quality which is beyond all praise. 
 An indescribably healthful, honourable, courageous spirit 
 breathes through these pages. "Action! Action! "is her 
 cry. " Most true it is," she is fond of repeating, "that the 
 principle of good resides solely in that precious activity 
 which rescues us from nullity, and fits us for anything that 
 may arise." This love of labour, which she practically 
 applied, brought her esteem, virtue, happiness, all needful 
 support in life and in death. It is because the last genera- 
 tion of the traduced eighteenth century believed firmly in 
 those principles of which Mme. Poland in her purity and 
 heroism offers us the worthiest illustration, because it was 
 more or less fed and formed upon these, that in the fright- 
 ful agonies which ensued, our nation, though shaken to its 
 foundations, did not perish.
 
 MADAME DE SOUZA. 
 
 A FRIEND who, after having seen much of the world, has 
 withdrawn from it almost entirely, and who judges from a 
 distance, and as it were from the shore, the swift whirlpool 
 in which the rest of us are tossing, lately wrote me, apropos 
 of certain rapid estimates I had made of contemporary 
 works, "What you say of our 'sublimities' interests me 
 extremely. Sublime they assuredly are. What they lack 
 is calm and freshness, a little pure cold water wherewith to 
 cool our burning palates." This quality of freshness and 
 delicacy, this limpidity in emotion and sobriety in speech, 
 this soft and quiet shading, as they disappear on all hands 
 from actual life and the works of imagination now pro- 
 duced, become all the more precious when we encounter 
 them in obscurity, and in those pleasing compositions 
 where they were last reflected. It would be a mistake to 
 suppose that there is aught of weakness or degeneracy in 
 regretting these vanished charms these flowers which 
 apparently could only blow in the very last days of an 
 order of society now passed away. The softly-tinted pic- 
 tures of which we speak presuppose a degree of taste and 
 soul-culture which democratic civilisation could not have 
 abolished without detriment to itself, if something analag- 
 ous thereto were not one day to reappear in our modern 
 manners. Modern society, when it shall have become a 
 little more settled and better defined, will also have ita 
 element of repose, its cool, mysterious nooks, its shades 
 favourable to refined sentiment, a few tolerably ancient 
 forests, a few undiscovered fountains. It will admit into 
 its seemingly uniform framework a thousand varieties of 
 147
 
 148 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 thought, and many a rare form of interior life : otherwise it 
 will be, in one respect, far inferior to the civilisation which 
 preceded it, and will barely satisfy the needs of a whole 
 family of souls. In stirring times, in moments of inco- 
 herent and confused inauguration like the present, it is 
 natural to make for the most important point, to busy one's 
 self with the general working, and everywhere, even in 
 literature, to strike boldly, aim high, and shout through 
 trumpets and speaking-tubes. The modest graces will, 
 perhaps, come back after a while, and come with an expres- 
 sion appropriate to their new surroundings. I would fain 
 believe it ; but while hoping for the best, I feel sure that it 
 will not be to-morrow that their sentiments and their 
 speech will once more prevail. Meanwhile, we realize our 
 need, and suffer from it. We betake ourselves, in hours of 
 ennui, to the perfumes of the past a past but of yester- 
 day, which, nevertheless, will not return. And this is 
 why I sat down the other morning and re-read "Eugene 
 de Rothelin" and "Adelede Senange," and why I speak 
 of them to-day. 
 
 A young girl issuing for the first time from the convent 
 where her whole childhood had been passed ; a handsome, 
 elegant, sentimental lord, such as used to frequent Paris 
 about the year 1780, who encounters her with a slight 
 degree of embarrassment, and appears to her from the first 
 in the light of a saviour ; a very old husband, good, 
 sensible, paternal, never ridiculous, who marries the maiden 
 solely to emancipate her from an egotistical mother, and 
 secure to her fortune and a future ; all the simplest every- 
 day occurrences among these three beings, who, by a 
 natural concurrence of events, are led to the resolve never 
 to separate while the old man lives ; scenes in the park or 
 garden, sails, chats nbout the arm-chair, calls at the old 
 convent, visits to old playmates, innocent and varied 
 prattle, jesting, tender, or crossed with gleams of passion ; 
 generosity mingling with the growth of love, and blessing 
 it ; then, for fear of a too uniform sweetness, the world 
 sketched in profile for a background, and its crimes and
 
 MADAME DE SOUZA. 149 
 
 follies indicated ; more than one original, more than one 
 fool, identified in passing by some amusing feature ; in a 
 word, the actual life of a select circle ; a gathering passion 
 which steals along like the streams of Neuilly under 
 curtains of verdure, lingering and meandering deliciously ; 
 passing storms, like April rains, that leave no ravages ; 
 and all managed to the last and in the least particular with 
 an ease that never verges on freedom, with a nobleness of 
 tone that never forces nature, with a spirit of kindly 
 allowance that is never indelicate ; such are the chief 
 merits of a book whose harmony is unmarred by a single 
 discordant word. The life and soul of it is the genius of 
 Adele a genius winning, gay, versatile, winged like a bird, 
 capricious and natural, timid and sensitive, roseate in its 
 modesty, faithful, passing from smiles to tears with all the 
 ardour of childhood. 
 
 We were on the eve of the Revolution when this charmin* 
 book was written. The author published it in London, in 
 1793, amid calamity and privation. This Adele de Se"nange 
 appeared in her festal robes, as a maiden of Verdun, escaped 
 from the massacre, and ignorant of the fate of her companions. 
 
 Mme. de Souza, then Mme. de Flahaut, had been 
 educated at a convent in Paris, and had married in extreme 
 youth the Count de Flahaut, who was already fifty-seven 
 years old. The convent is doubtless the one described in 
 ' ' Adele de Senange. " It had an adjacent hospital and a few 
 very sage pensionnaires ; and her reward of merit used to be 
 to go to this hospital every Monday evening, wait on the 
 paupers, and read prayers with them. She lost her parents 
 early, and memories of the convent were home memories for 
 her. This early education influenced, as we shall see, her 
 whole line of thought, and supplied vivid images for all her 
 works. Married and lodging at the Louvre, she owed the 
 idea of writing to the ennui induced by those political 
 discussions which became more and more animated as the 
 Eevolution drew near. She was too young, she said, to have 
 a fancy for such things, and she desired to create an inner 
 world for herself. In the romance of " Emilie et Alphonse,"
 
 150 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 the Duchess de Candale, then newly married, writes to her 
 friend, Mile. d'Astey, "I have made me a little retreatin one 
 corner of my room. Here I have arranged a single chair, my 
 piano and harp, a few books, a pretty table, on which ara 
 my sketches and my writing, and have drawn a kind of 
 imaginary circle, which separates me from the rest of the 
 apartment. If people come to see me, I hasten to overstep 
 my barrier, that no one may penetrate within it ; and when 
 any one chances to approach my asylum, I can hardly contain 
 my vexation. I cannot away with him." Mme. de Flahaut, 
 in her chamber at the Louvre, must have made herself a 
 retreat similar to Mme. de Candale's ; but in her isolation she 
 had an intimacy ready made. If any one attempted to cross 
 her imaginary barrier by speakingto her of politics, she replied 
 that M. de Se"riange had had an attack of the gout, which 
 occasioned her great anxiety. In "Euge'nie et Mathilde," 
 where she has described the effect produced upon a noble 
 family by the early events of the Revolution, we may be 
 allowed to attribute to herself some portion of the sentiments 
 of Mathilde, who declares herself fatigued, though not dis- 
 tressed, by the excesses o,f the Revolution.* ".A dele de 
 Se'nange " was, therefore, written without literary pretence, 
 and merely as a private pastime. Yet, one day, the author, 
 yielding to a confiding impulse, raised her ideal barrier, and 
 proposed to a friend to make arrangements for a reading 
 before a small number of persons. The offer thus made was 
 not accepted. People were willing to allow her an interest- 
 ing mind, but not the talent of an author. So " Adele de 
 Se'nange" failed to gain hearers, and we know that "Paul 
 and Virginia " obtained them with difficulty. 
 
 The Revolution developed its phases in rapid succession, 
 and Mme. de Flahaut quitted Paris, and, after the 2nd of 
 September, France. M. de Flahaut was imprisoned, and 
 
 * Rather minute details of the life and sentiments of Mme. de 
 Flahaut during this period may bo found in the Memorial of the 
 American Gouverneur Morris, who arrived in Paris in February 1780, 
 and very soon obtained an introduction to her. (See vol. i. of the 
 French edition, pp. 236, 241, 249, 207, and especially 250.)
 
 MADAME DE SOUZA. 151 
 
 soon full a victim. By dint of gold and diamonds, lavished 
 by Hie family and friends outside upon the jailers, ho 
 had succeeded in making his escape, and was living in a 
 safe retreat. But some one told in his presence that his 
 advocate had been imprisoned on suspicion of having 
 afforded him an asylum, and M. de Flahaut, in order to 
 justify the innocent, quitted his hiding-place at six in the 
 morning, and repaired to the Commune, where he lodged 
 information against himself, and a few days later was 
 guillotined. On the death of Robespierre, Mine, de Flahaut 
 quitted England with her son, and repaired to Switzerland, 
 hoping even then to return to France ; but the obstacles 
 were not removed.* Ever roaming about in the vicinity of 
 that forbidden France, she made her home at Hamburg, 
 and it was in that city that the celebrity she had won by 
 "Adele de Senange" procured her the acquaintance of M. 
 de Souza, whom she married in 1802. In the interval she 
 had published " Emile et Alphonse," in 1797, and " Charles 
 et Marie," in 1801. 
 
 " Charles et Marie " is a graceful, touching tittle English 
 romance, somewhat in the style of Miss Burney. The land- 
 scape of parks and English cottages, the manners, the 
 absurdities of hunting ladies and learned ladies, the pure 
 and languishing sentiment, make up a complete picture, 
 which shows how naive an inspiration the author had 
 derived from her residence in England. An ingenious, 
 and, in the matter of subtilty at least, a competent critic, 
 M. Patin.t in passing judgment upon Mme. de Souza, 
 
 * The Memorial of Gouverneur Morris, already cited, gives some 
 very curious particulars of the residence of Mme. de Flahaut in Switzer- 
 land. We behold her, in several of her letters, the active and 
 influential counsellor of a young prince who has since become a king 
 Louis Philippe. She travelled with him from Bremgarten, in 
 Switzerland, to Brunswick, and made haste to rejoin him at Hamburg. 
 (French edition, vol. i. pp. 449-458.) After the Revolution of 1830, 
 whenever any allusion was made to the Tuileries, where her son was 
 in high favour, Mme. de Souza took care delicately to hint that she 
 herself did not go there. 
 
 t " Repertoire de Litte>ature," and afterwards in his Miscellanies, 
 WO.
 
 152 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 gives his decided preference to this pretty novel of " Charles 
 et Marie." I, too, like it, but not with the same degree of 
 partiality. There is (if I may venture to say so), as in 
 Miss Burney's own stories, too great a profusion of vague 
 tints, soft even to effeminacy, a pale blonde colouring. 
 Mme. de Souza usually draws better, and with a greater 
 variety of colour. It is in "Charles et Marie" that wo 
 find that ingenious remark so often quoted, " The faults on 
 which we plume ourselves are like ugliness in full dress. 
 They are seen in the strongest possible light." If Mme. de 
 Flahaut's journey to England, and the sky and scenery of 
 that country, imparted a milky, misty hue to this romance 
 of " Charles et Marie," we find in " Eugenie et Mathilde," 
 which did not appear until 1811, an equally striking reflex 
 of nature in the north, of the shores of Holland, and the 
 roadsteads of the Baltic, where she lingered so long in exile. 
 ' ' Verdure in the northern latitudes has a peculiar tint, a 
 uniform and tender hue, which comes by degrees to soothe 
 and calm one. This aspect, producing no surprise, leaves 
 the soul unmoved, a condition which has its charms, 
 especially, perhaps, when one is unhappy. Sitting in 
 the fields, the sisters yielded to protracted reverie, and 
 lost themselves in idle thought, until, without having 
 been diverted, they returned composed." And a little 
 farther on : " M. de Revel, hoping to divert the minds of 
 his family, took pains to make them admire the rich 
 pasture-lands of Holstein, and the fine trees along the 
 shores of the Baltic, that sea whose pallid waters difi'er in 
 no respect from those of the numerous lakes which adorn 
 the country, the evergreen turf reaching to the very water's 
 edge. They were struck with that look of stiangeness 
 which Nature wears to all of us in countries far remote from 
 those which gave us birth. The smiling perspective of the 
 Lake of Ploen made them, somehow, breathe more freely. 
 Possessing nothing of their own, they learned, like the poor, 
 to find their recreation in a walk, their reward in a beautiful 
 day; to enjoy, in short, the blessings bestowed on all." 
 Mme. de Souza does not often pause to describe Nature.
 
 MADAME DE SOUZA. 153 
 
 She does it here with the more enjoyment, in that a pro- 
 found and consoling memory mingles with her words. The 
 laughing Adele de Se"nange, who knew only the alleys of 
 Neuilly and the poplars of its island, is well-nigh trans- 
 formed, beside the Baltic, into a sister of the dreamy 
 Vale'rie. 
 
 And, in fact, among those romantic conceptions which 
 have become living realities, Adele de S6nange is a sister 
 worthy of Vale'rie, as she is of Mile, de Clermont and the 
 Princess dc Cleves, and as Eugene de Rothelin is the noble 
 brother of Adolphe, Edouard, Lepreux, and that Chevalier 
 des Grieux, so fragile, and yet so easily pardoned. I omit 
 the great Rene', in the solitude of his pre-eminence. Happy 
 he, who, drawing either from himself or his surroundings, 
 from memory or from imagination, shall create a being 
 worthy the society of those whom I have named ! shall add 
 an unlooked-for brother or sister to that family which is 
 loved even more than it is admired ! He will not wholly 
 die. 
 
 " Eugene de Rothelin," published in 1808, is considered 
 by some excellent judges the most exquisite of Mme. de 
 Souza's works, superior even to "Adele de Se"nange." If 
 it were needful to decide and choose between works almost 
 equally fascinating, we should indeed be seriously embar- 
 rassed ; for if " Eugene de Rothelin" represents the talent 
 of Mme. de Souza in the utmost perfection of its skill, 
 " Adele de Se"nange" reveals the stream nearest its source, 
 in its most natural, and, so to speak, its gladdest out- 
 gushing. Yet, in respect of consummate art, power of 
 composition, nice observation, invention, and description, 
 "Eugene" is a greater achievement than "Adele." To 
 apply to the present case what I have elsewhere had 
 occasion to say of the author of " Indianna" and "Valen- 
 tine," any moderately refined and sensitive soul who should 
 dare to write unaffectedly possesses the material for a 
 good romance. Taking our actual situation for a ground- 
 work, and slightly disguising or modify ing its accessories, 
 we have at once the means of interesting oui selves, as if iu
 
 154 $AINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 the preparation of confidential memoirs, and of inducing 
 others to share our interest. The difficulty lies in making 
 a second effort, after the first has been so tender ; after one 
 has breathed, under a more or less treacherous disguise, a 
 secret which exhaled perfume as it passed away. The life of 
 Adele de Senange is divided into two periods : the convent 
 where she was reared and was happy for years, and a 
 marriage, also happy, although unequal in point of age. 
 In " Eugene de Rothelin " the author abandons the semi- 
 personal conception which touches her heart so nearly. We 
 have no more a simple picture of youth and morning, where 
 many a common trait is unconsciously revealed, and fixed 
 in living colours upon the canvas. Here is a firmer and 
 more finished outline, a subject less identified with the 
 author. There is no lack of tenderness, but observation of 
 the world occupies a larger space. Sentiment and irony are 
 balanced by means of skilfully -managed half-tints. The 
 ingenuous passion coquettish at times, but always captivat- 
 ing of Athenai's and Eugene is relieved against a background 
 of harassing mystery. Even when it gleams along the 
 garden terraces or the glazed corridor, of a sunny morning, 
 we dread the absent M. de Rieux, wherever he may be,, 
 or catch a glimpse of the austere and sorrowful figure of 
 the father of Eugene; and if we return to the drawing- 
 room, the tenderness of the two lovers is diverted, and 
 wreathes with doubtful grace the arm-chair of the charming 
 but terrible old martchale, who jokes and laughs and pro- 
 pounds questions about happiness, a kind of unguarded La 
 Bruyere. 
 
 Marie Joseph Chenicr has briefly eulogized Mme. de 
 Souza, in words characterized by his own precision and 
 elegance, and specially applicable to Eugene. ' ' The so 
 pretty romances," he says, "do not, it is true, represent 
 the development of great passions ; neither must we look 
 in them for any deep study of humanity at large : but we 
 are at least sure of finding here the most subtile social 
 perceptions, pictures true to the life and delicately finished, 
 a style moderately ornate, the correctness of a good book
 
 MADAME DE SOUZA, 155 
 
 with the ease of eloquent conversation, the intellect which 
 says nothing commonplace, and the taste which says 
 nothing superfluous." But, apart from these general en- 
 comiums, which are applicable to a whole class of literary 
 artists, it should be said of "Eugene de Rothelin" that it 
 portrays one side of a century, and that a brilliant, chaste, 
 poetic side, and one whicli we sometimes fail to recognise. 
 Under this aspect the graceful romance is no longer an 
 individual and isolated work. It acquires a higher, or, at 
 least, a wider significance. 
 
 The mind and genius of Mme. de Souza belong wholly to 
 the eighteenth century. She observed it very closely, and 
 loved its society, its tone, its customs, its culture, its nicely- 
 apportioned life. We do not examine the influence upon 
 her of Jean Jacques, or any other noted writer of that 
 stamp, as we do in the case of Mme. de Stael, Mme. de 
 Kriidcner, Mme. Cottin, or Mme. de Montolieu. Mme. de 
 Flahaut was less of the nineteenth century than they ; 
 less carried away by enthusiasm towards unknown regions. 
 Society and the world were her teachers. She trained 
 herself to see and feel within definite limits. There grew 
 up in the last half of the reign of Louis XIV., under the 
 special influence of Mme. de Maintenon, a school of 
 politeness, of self-restraint, of decorous prudence even in 
 youthful passions, of mild but unlimited authority in old 
 age. People were pious, they were worldly, they were witty ; 
 but all was regulated and softened by conventionalism. 
 We may follow the footsteps of this illustrious dynasty, 
 from Mme. de Maintenon, Mme. de Lambert, Mme. du 
 Deffand (after her reformation), Mme. de Caylus, and the 
 young girls who enjoyed Esther at Saint -Cyr, down to' 
 the Mare"chale de Beauvau,* who seems to have been the 
 original of the Mare'chale d'Estouteville in "Eugene do 
 Uothelin," and that Marquis de Crequy, who, we are told, 
 died a, centenarian, and whose Memoirs, I strongly suspect, 
 
 * It was certainly she, and not the Marechale de Luxembourg, as 
 erroneously stated in the first volume of the Memoirs of Mine, de 
 Crequy, who was the original of the portrait of Mme. d'Estouteville.
 
 156 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 have slightly suffered at the hands of a certain man of 
 genius.* Mme. de Flahaut, who was young when the 
 century died, preserved this very portion of the inherit- 
 ance she derived from it, modified indeed by her own 
 good taste, and adapted to the new court in which she 
 was to live. 
 
 Others have depicted the eighteenth century under its 
 cynical or stormy aspects, its incongruities and irregular- 
 ities. Voltaire has scoffed at it ; Jean Jacques has extolled 
 and underrated it by turns ; Diderot, in his correspondence, 
 makes us admire it as a brilliant and magnificent medley ; 
 Crebillon ,/iZs sets forth its ultra refinement of speech and its 
 real licentiousness; the author of "Eugene de Rothelin" 
 paints for us the age itself in its exquisite flower, its ideal 
 and harmonious splendour. "Eugene de Rothelin "is, as 
 it were, the romance of eighteenth-century chivalry ; what 
 "Tristan le Le'onois" and other romances of the thirteenth 
 century were to the chivalry of that day ; what "Le petit 
 Jehan de Saintre" or "Galaor" were to the fifteenth; 
 that is, a likeness, idealized and flattered, but a likeness 
 still. Any well-born man of that day might have taken 
 Eugene for his model. He is a Sir Charles Grandison 
 without mawkishness or ennui. He has not, as yet, quite 
 arrived at the dignity of that slightly solemn portrait which 
 represents the mardchale's idea of what he was to be at 
 twenty-five, a portrait in the style of Mile, de Montpensier. 
 Eugene, amid the world of amenities and conventionalities, 
 has his jealousies, his ebullitions of mirth, his passing 
 
 * In a passage of doubtful friendliness, the author of these Memoirs, 
 speaking of that exquisite tone of the great world which he cannot 
 deny to the author of " Adele de fcenange, 1 ' expresses a degree of 
 astonishment at its presence which is singular and wholly misplaced 
 as regards Mme. de Flahaut. But even if the grounds of this judg- 
 ment on the part of the author of the Memoirs were not visibly 
 exaggerated, his surprise would be none the less unaccountable ; for, 
 in my opinion, one can never be in a condition to observe this same 
 world to better purpose, to appreciate and depict it more nicely, than 
 wh^n, without exactly belonging to it, one has early taken one's place 
 there.
 
 MADAME DE SOUZA. 157 
 
 follies. One day he had almost compromised his sweet 
 friend Athenais by his ill -humour at play. "What!" 
 says she to him the next day, "distress me, and, what 
 is worse, risk breaking your word ? Eugene in the wrong ? 
 I would not have believed it ! " Eugene, then, has his 
 faults, and Athenais her imprudences ; but these render 
 them only the more loveable. Nobody moralizes but the 
 marechale ; and she does it with a tact that is almost 
 always successful. Athene's and Eugene are caprice and 
 poesy, not easily rendered amenable to rules, but be- 
 coming obedient in the end, and able to soften their 
 master. When, in the last scene, in one of those straight 
 alleys where one can be seen at so great a distance, Mme. 
 d'Estouteville advances slowly, leaning on the arm of 
 Eugene, all is summed up for me in this single picture. 
 If ever author succeeded in uniting the thoughtfulness of 
 the moralist to the animation of the painter, and raising 
 romance to the level, of poetry, it has been accomplished 
 in "Eugene de Rothelin."* What if, in the characteriza- 
 tion of her charming hero, the author supposed herself to 
 be presenting a model for imitation, while the present 
 generation is no longer disposed so to regard it ? She 
 succeeded in drawing from a recent past a type of cha- 
 racter never before acknowledged or perceived, a type 
 which completes and adorns the memory of that past. 
 The spirit of Eugene was invoked in the quatrains of 
 Mme. d'Houdetot. 
 
 After "Eugene de Rothelin," there still remain to be 
 noticed two romances of Mme. de Souza, more prolix than 
 the masterpieces we have mentioned, but, nevertheless, 
 excellent compositions "Eugenie et Mathilde" and the 
 "Comtesse de Fargy." The convent plays a conspicuous 
 part in these two tales, as we have already seen it in 
 "Adele de Se"nange." There was, in short, a more im- 
 
 * This very name of Rothelin so graceful and easily pronounced 
 recalls one branch of the descendants of the valiant Duncis. The 
 Abbe de Rothelin, the tender and faithful friend of Polignac. was of 
 this family.
 
 158 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 portant item in the life and thought of Mme. de Souza 
 than the facts of her having read Jean Jacques and La 
 Bruyere, beheld the French Revolution, suffered as an 
 emigrte, and assisted at tlic pomps of the empire, her 
 education, namely, in a convent. I would venture to 
 affirm that no circumstance in her career had a more 
 lasting significance than this ; none furnished so stedfast 
 a groundwork for her dreams. The religion and morals 
 of her books are strict and pure ; yet she seldom regards 
 the cloister on its fervent and mystical side. She sees in 
 it little of the contrite expiation of the Heloises and the 
 La Vallieres. The author of " Lelia," who was also reared 
 in a convent, and who received a deep impression from her 
 training, has rendered with very different expression the 
 pious tranquillity of such a home. But, as I have said, 
 the author of the "Comtesse de Fargy" and "Eugenie et 
 Mathilde " actually belongs, by her tastes, to the eighteenth 
 century. To her the convent is something gay, gracious, 
 and romantic, like Saint-Cyr, an aviary of friendly doves, 
 filled, as a rule, with the inquisitive chatter of volatile 
 innocence. ' ' That portion of the garden which they pom- 
 pously denominate the wood, is only a cluster of trees before 
 a very minute house, wholly separate from the convent, 
 although enclosed by its walls. But the religiexises have 
 a way of pleasing themselves by giving great names to their 
 little possessions. Accustomed to privation, the least things 
 are considerable in their eyes." Such are the convents of 
 Blanche and Eugdnie. Yet in Eugenie's, at the time of the 
 dispersion of the communities by the Revolution, there were 
 eloquent scenes ; and that despoiled prioress who joyfully 
 profits by the retreat of Eugenie to rule the house, if only 
 for a day, is a well-studied character. 
 
 Two elements are blended in the " Comtesse de Fargy," 
 observation, experience, and the conflict with obstacles, 
 as illustrated by Mme. de Naiicay and her old friend, M. 
 de Entraguc, and the sentimental story of the Marquis de 
 Fargy and his father. The latter pleases me least ; and, in 
 general, aside from "Eugene de Rothelin" and "Adele de
 
 MADAME DE SOUZA. 159 
 
 Senange," the development of sentiment in the tales of 
 Mme. de Souza is not as original as the moral observations 
 and the piquant discourse. These specimens of handsome, 
 melancholy young persons, like the Marquis de Fargy, and, 
 elsewhere, the Spaniard Alphonse and Ladislas the Pole, in 
 " Eugenie et Mathilde," easily fall into mere romanticism, 
 while the rest is real life portrayed with the most deli- 
 cate truth. In the connection between the venerable M. 
 d'Entrague and Mme. de Nan9ay, Mme. de Souza has 
 essayed to depict one of those friendships of the olden 
 time which endured for half a century, and ended only 
 with life. A woman, when she left her convent, was at 
 once married, from motives of pure expediency ; but tho 
 needs of her heart soon asserted themselves, and then 
 she proceeded consciously and deliberately to form a single 
 permanent tie. This, at least, was the order where ex- 
 pediency reigned, and in that ideal of the eighteenth 
 century which was not, it must be confessed, universally 
 accepted. The amiable M. d'Entrague, perpetually scolded 
 by Mme. de Nancay, and as constantly nattered by Blanche, 
 who finds herself involuntarily subserving every one of hit 
 ends, is a person whom we have known and loved, although 
 the species is well-nigh extinct. Mme. de Nan9ay is alive 
 also, captious but kindly, one who can be influenced by a 
 little manoeuvring, without herself suspecting it. "Mme. 
 de Nanay re entered the house disposed to quarrel with 
 everybody. She knew well enough that she was a little 
 irritable ; for, in a life where we have had repeated ex- 
 perience of ourselves, if we do not know ourselves perfectly, 
 we at least have our suspicions." 
 
 "Eugenie et Mathilde," which we have already quoted, 
 is the longest and best sustained of Mme. de Souza's pro- 
 ductions, always excepting "Eugene" and "Adele." Here 
 we have a complete picture of the inner life of a noble 
 family during the years of the Revolution. Eugenie, who 
 has been forced to quit her convent, and who becomes a 
 kind of tutelary angel to her family, constantly attracts 
 and detains the gaze by her meek figure, her long black
 
 160 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 robe, her gauze-veiled tresses, and the great abbess's cross 
 which she wears so worthily. There is a very fine sugges- 
 tion of sentiment where she goes out into the park to 
 breathe the fresh air of the autumn morning, carrying in 
 her arms her sister's child, little Victor ; and when the 
 baby clings to her neck, and nestles up to her face to avoid 
 the cold, she feejs in her heart the vague stirrings of 
 maternal tenderness, at the very moment when Count 
 Ladislas meets her. It is not for words to express these 
 dim thrills of Eugenie's ; melody alone could translate 
 them.* 
 
 In "Eugenie et Mathilde" Mme. do Souza has revealed 
 her own personality more fully than in any other work. 
 There is one page which I can never read without emotion, 
 
 * Here follows what M. Sainte-Beuve calls " a sketch of that virginal 
 air," which he " offers to some graceful composer," and of which the 
 following is an inadequate version. TR. 
 
 Sleep, precious one ! "Pis sweet to feel anew 
 Thy little hand along my bare neck gliding, 
 Thy little forehead in my bosom hiding; 
 
 Sleep, precious one 1 I am thy mother too ! 
 
 Thine own poor mother, love, is suffering 
 Such terror for her Edmund, thou must know, 
 Gone from him whither honour bade him go, 
 
 To give his life, if need be, for his king. 
 
 Ijay thy soft hand upon my neck anew; 
 Sleep, precious one 1 I am thy mother too 1 
 
 Can so much sorrow, then, dissolve in peace, 
 Beneath the bright smile of the misty morn, 
 And warmth of new-born sunrays, at each turn 
 
 Rekindling where they died among the trees? 
 
 Lay thy soft hand on my bare neck anew ; 
 Sleep, precious one I I am thy mother too ! 
 
 Given Into my tender care, it seems, 
 How comes it, then, dear, that thine innocent lips 
 Call forth my sighs, and that my spirit slips 
 
 Backward, allured by long-forgotten dreams?
 
 MADAME DE SOUZA . 161 
 
 and which I beg leave to quote in illustration of her cha- 
 racter. It contains the heart-cry of many a mother under 
 the empire, which Mme. de Souza, thinking of herself and 
 her son, could not suppress. Mme. de Revel, who is 
 secretly unhappy, begins to compassionate those mothers 
 who have only daughters, because, as soon as these are 
 married, they are separated from their families in interest 
 and name. For the first time since the birth of Mathilde, 
 she regrets that she never had a son. " Fool ! " cries Mme. 
 de Souza, interrupting the narrative ; "for then would her 
 sorrows have been heavier, and her anxieties more sharp. 
 Poor mothers ! your infant sons absorb all your thoughts, 
 embrace all your future ; but just as you fancy that you 
 
 Awake, my own ! I know not what I fear : 
 Too fond, too close the little hands are gliding ; 
 Too warm the head within my bosom hiding ; 
 
 For I am not thy mother, O my dear! 
 
 For every faithful heart some vow, some word ; 
 
 Honour for Edmund, Edmund for Mathilde ; 
 
 But is this I, with sighs and yearnings filled 
 Of earthly love a maiden of the Lord 1 
 
 Awake ! thy light touch from my neck remove ; 
 For I am not thy mother, O my love 1 
 
 Can I feel baby-kisses undeflled? 
 
 With vague oblivion soothe my lonely lot? 
 
 Or, even in my dreams, see and sin not 
 The frequent vision of the Holy Child? 
 
 Awake ! thy light touch from my neck remove ; 
 For I am not thy mother, O my love 1 
 
 But no : the Father of the fatherless 
 
 Is not so cruel, will not thus ensnare 
 
 Hia exiled handmaid in this garden fair, 
 Ruth's God and Rachel's, in her dire distress. 
 
 Sleep on, my love ! Once more 'tis sweet to feel 
 Thy little hand along my bare nftck gliding, 
 Thy little forehead in my bosom hiding: 
 
 Sleep on, my child ! I am thy mother still ! 
 L
 
 1 62 SAINT E-BEUVE. 
 
 arc rewarded for your years of care, they escape you. Their 
 active youth, their foolish passions, transport and lead 
 them astray : you are smitten with an anguish hitherto 
 unknown. 
 
 "Poor mothers! you have a heart-throb for their every 
 emotion. The child of yesterday has to-day become a man : 
 he wants to be free. He thinks he is his own master : he 
 essays to go forth into the world alone. Until he have 
 purchased his experience, until you hear him coming back, 
 there will be no more sleep for your eyes. You will wake 
 long before him, but never betray the fond anxieties of your 
 indefatigable affection. By many a subterfuge, by many a 
 spell, it will be needful to conceal your surveillance over 
 that young and independent creature. 
 
 " Henceforth everything will agitate you. Scan the 
 features of the man in power to see whether or no your son 
 have compromised his own fortune and promotion. Watch 
 the faces of the frivolous women who smile on him : see 
 that he is not betrayed by a false or unhappy love. 
 
 " Poor mothers ! you are no longer your own. Always 
 preoccupied, answering with an absent air, your watchful 
 car catches the words let fall by yoiir son in the next room. 
 His voice rises ; the conversation becomes warm. Perhaps 
 he has made an implacable enemy or A dangerous friend, or 
 involved himself in a mortal quarrel. All this first year 
 you know, though he knows it not, that his happiness, his 
 life are at stake every instant and at every step. Poor 
 mothers I poor mothers ! you can only advance with 
 trembling ! 
 
 " He is going into the army ! Ineffable grief ! ceaseless, 
 restless, heart-rending anxiety ! And yet, if, after his first 
 campaign, he return from the tumult of the camp eager 
 for glory, and yet satisfied with your peaceful dwelling ; 
 if he is still frank and kindly to your old servants, gay 
 and attentive to your old friends ; if his open look, his 
 childlike smile, his watchful and deferential tenderness, 
 make you feel that he loves to be near you, happy, 
 happy mother ! " This was printed in 1811 ; and it is said
 
 MADAME DE SOUZA. 163 
 
 tli.it Bonaparte read portions of the book, and did not 
 like it.* 
 
 We will not speak of Mtne. de Souza's other works, 
 "Mile, de Tournon"and the " Duchesse de Guise; "not 
 that they are by any means wanting in snbtilty and grace, 
 but because in them the historical issue is complicated by 
 moral observations, which come between the reader and the 
 book, and, for us, spoil its effect. In "Mile, de Tournon" 
 we have the development of a touching incident related in 
 the Memoirs of Margaret of Valois. The author of "Cinq- 
 Mars " is the only writer of our time who has succeeded in 
 harmonizing the truthful portraiture of an epoch with the 
 glow of romantic sentiment. People were less critical in 
 the days of the " Princess de Cleves," or even at the time when 
 "Mile, de Clermont" appeared. We cannot complain. Sup- 
 pose this charming novel had, unhappily, not been executed, 
 could it be so much as attempted, now that we have read, 
 in the spiteful, conjuring book of the Princess Palatine, 
 "The duchess's three daughters are the handsomest girls 
 that ever lived. The so-called Mile, de Clermont is the 
 most beautiful, but I think her sister, the Princess de 
 
 * He changed his mind, however. Returning from Berlin, on one 
 occasion, Mme. de Souza went to Saint Cloud to see the Empress 
 Josephine. The emperor was on the steps, impatient to be off hunt- 
 ing. The fiery horses were stamping at the foot of the flight. He was 
 vexed at the sight of a woman, thinking that she would detain the 
 empress, for whom he was waiting. He approached Mme. de Souza 
 with a sufficiently sombre brow, and, recognising her, said brusquely, 
 "Ah! you are from Berlin. Well, are they fond of France there?"' 
 She saw the ill-humour on the brow of the terrible sphinx. " If I say, 
 Yes," she thought to herself, "he will say, 'She is a fool ;' and if I 
 say, No, he will think mo insolent." " Yes, sire," she replied ; " they 
 are fond of France as old women are fond of young ones." -The 
 emperor's face brightened. "Very good, very good 1" he exclaimed 
 twice, and as if congratulating her on her escape from the snare. As 
 for Mme. rle Souza, she was rewarded by his glorious smile, and liked 
 to adduce this incident as a proof that familiarity with the world, and 
 the habit of expressing one's thoughts, help to make the latter appo- 
 site ; "for," said she, "that answer of mine was so entirely involun- 
 tary, and almost unconscious, that I was tempted to turn round upon 
 the spot to see if some one had not whispered it to me."
 
 164 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 Conti, is more amiable. The duchess can drink a great 
 deal without losing her wits, and her daughters would fain 
 imitate her ; but they soon become intoxicated, and cannot 
 control themselves like their mother." Oh, blessed ignorance 
 of history, innocence of primitive romance-writers ! where 
 are ye ? 
 
 Those who have the honour of Mme. de Souza's acquaint- 
 ance find in her that supreme good-breeding which she 
 has so well described ; none of those unnecessary and 
 widely-aimed words which are too common in our day ; 
 clear and definite turns of expression ; a skilful yet simple 
 arrangement of thought ; brilliancy without pretension ; 
 remarks which haunt the memory ; something, in short, 
 of what constituted the distinctive character of the eigh- 
 teenth century, from Fontenelle to the Abb4 Morellet, but 
 with a touch of sentiment peculiarly feminine. Moralist of 
 the heart's secret places, she has small faith in the mighty 
 progress of the present. She would be severe on many of 
 our noisy youthful notions, if her genial and indulgent 
 spirit were capable of severity. The author of "Eugene de 
 Rothelin" has, as may be imagined, small taste for times of 
 agitation and violent debate. A friend who inquired, in 
 ]814, her opinion of the real state of France, judging other- 
 wise than by the newspapers, received this reply : that the 
 condition of France resembled a book open in the middle, 
 which the ultras were reading backward, from right to left, 
 in the attempt to return to the beginning, while the 
 liberals were rushing through it from left to right, eager to 
 reach the end, but whose actual open page no one was 
 perusing. How else could the Marechale d'Estouteville 
 have spoken of our times ? 
 
 An injurious epigraph having been inadvertently attri- 
 buted to her in a recent work, 11 me. de Souza wrote this model 
 rectification, which reveals her whole character : "Monsieur 
 has been betrayed into an error. The saying in question 
 was accredited to a certain literary man, whose name, though 
 he is long since dead, I will not permit myself to mention. 
 For myself, I never either penned or uttered oich a sentence,
 
 MADAME DE SOUZA. 165 
 
 which comprehends all the ages in its sweeping injustice, 
 and whose tone is so far removed from the polished modera- 
 tion which a woman ought always to observe." 
 
 The scrupulous Atticism of Mine, do Souza shrunk, above 
 all things, from the charge of rudeness in speech. 
 
 Mme. de Souza died in Paris on the 16th of April 1836, 
 preserving to the last her courtesy of spirit and her indulgent 
 smile.
 
 MADAME DE DURAS. 
 
 THE Restoration, although comprising, in its fifteenth years 
 course, so brief a period and so narrow a space, presents to 
 view certain incidents, certain groups of opinions and of 
 individuals, and certain isolated figures, which appear to 
 great advantage under the conditions of that time, and 
 which, while we do not in the least adopt their style, wo 
 are frequently surprised to find ourselves regretting, as 
 we regret all that is rare and brilliant, harmonious, and 
 transitory. More than once we have had occasion to point out 
 under what auspicious circumstances, and by what a com- 
 bination of diverse sentiments, that school of poetry and 
 art arose, which was the natural fruit of the last years of 
 the Restoration, and which, in respect of its origin merely, 
 and entirely apart froiu the works which its scattered 
 celebrities may yet produce, will ever be held in honour. 
 
 In the several departments of history, philosophy, and 
 criticism, there were also formations essential to this era, 
 deriving from it their means of progress, growth, and 
 culture. Our present intention is merely to speak of that 
 element in the world of mind which was not hostile to the 
 principles of the Restoration, never opposing it either by 
 open attack or secret strategy, but which attempted to 
 modify the order of which it was itself an outgrowth, 
 and might have proved its strength and its adornment, if 
 that order had not made haste, one fine morning, to fire its 
 own magazine. In the realm of high society, this intellect- 
 ual movement, so fruitful even then and so flattering in its 
 promise, had its centre and focus in two or three so-called 
 doctrinary salons. The prevailing tone of these coteries was
 
 MADAME DE DURAS. 167 
 
 at nil events serious, the ordinary tone of debate, of pro- 
 tracted, sustained, political or literary discussion, with 
 psychological asides. In them "conversation savoured of 
 learning, and amusement of instruction. This picture, how- 
 ever, would need to be considerably toned down, if the 
 doctrinary zone were supposed to extend from M. Royer 
 Collard, through the salons of MM. Guizot, de Broglie, and 
 Barante, to M. de Sainte-Aulaire. But in the fashionable 
 world, and on the surface of the society which it patronized, 
 the Restoration was destined to introduce other combina- 
 tions more complex still. Between the studious, argument- 
 ative, doctrinary circles, noble in themselves, indeed, but 
 especially distinguished by their fruits, and the purely 
 aristocratic and frivolous circles, there was a strongly- 
 marked interval, an obstinate and utter divorce ; new lights 
 and modern ideas on the one hand, and the charm of 
 antiquity on the other, separated by a spirit of pretension 
 and mutual hauteur. Yet here, precisely, was reconcilia- 
 tion to be conceived and attempted. As from the midst of 
 the royalist ranks there issued, at intervals, an eloquent 
 voice, inviting legitimacy and liberty to a chivalrous alliance, 
 and invoking, in the realm of politics, the ideal of a con- 
 stitutional monarchy, so, simultaneously and with greater 
 success, there appeared in the most select circle of society a 
 rare woman, who quietly effected, in her own vicinity, a 
 marvellous compromise between the new authorities and 
 the tone and tastes of other days. The salon of Mme. de 
 Duras, her personal ascendency and everything connected 
 therewith, illustrate, in the clearest possible manner, the 
 era of the Restoration, illustrate it by an aspect of linger- 
 ing exclusiveness and partial condescension, a compound of 
 aristocracy and affability, grave, but never dull, brilliant 
 and witty, but on no account vulgar, semi-liberal and in- 
 sensibly progressive, by that system of illusions and con- 
 cessions, which, though elsewhere attended by struggle and 
 effort, produced here only a general impression of grace. 
 It was a natural product of the Restoration ; like one of 
 those flowery islets, formed temporarily upon the surface of
 
 168 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 n lake, where contrary currents meet without too great a 
 shock. The whole slightly artificial structure of those 
 fifteen years has been compared to a kind of Saint-Germnin 
 terrace, having its base washed by that popular surge which 
 \iltimately destroyed it. And on that terrace there was a 
 nook not its least attractive for shade and prospect 
 worthy to preserve the name of Mme. de Duras, and sure 
 to find mention in any detailed history of the time. No 
 doubt the influence of this salon was slight, immediate, 
 and temporary ; and though rendered positive by M. de 
 Chateaubriand, who was in some sort its political represent- 
 ative, it still accomplished less, and left upon posterity very 
 much slighter traces, than, for instance, the doctrinary 
 salons to which we have alluded, and which constituted a 
 centre of instruction and a school. The general effect of 
 society here was rather, despite the freshness of its splendour, 
 that of a last tender reminiscence, a reflex of the past amid 
 the present hopes of the Restoration, a parting glow de- 
 pendent upon a- thousand circumstances of cloud and sun, 
 never to be reproduced. There were few, besides Mme. de 
 Duras, who could have brought to her difficult position the 
 necessary qualifications, the state and influence of the 
 Duke de Duras, his deference to herself, her own simple 
 and refined mind, the generosity which predisposed her 
 in favour of all merit ; even that liberty-loving blood of 
 Kersaint which flowed in her veins, and, at certain momenta, 
 irresistibly dyed her brow, and all reduced to the same 
 mild and conciliatory tone by the supreme authority of 
 fashion. 
 
 It would betray a very imperfect knowledge of Mme. de 
 Duras to pronounce her merely a woman of refined mind, 
 and delicate, sensitive soul, as might be supposed from 
 the mollifying influence which she exercised in the world, 
 and from a cursory perusal of her charming publications. 
 She was stronger, grander, endowed with a larger capacity 
 for passion, than would appear at first sight. There were 
 mighty springs and a noble unrest in this nature, ready to 
 be engrossed by all genuine affections and all serious issues.
 
 MADAME DE DURAS. 169 
 
 Like the epoch which it was her mission to represent and 
 adorn, she concealed beneath a brilliant and finely-toned 
 exterior more than one struggle, more than one storm. 
 
 The Duchess de Duras was born at Brest, about ten years 
 before the outbreak of the Revolution. Her father, Count 
 de Kersaint, was one of the most skilful of seamen, up to 
 the time when the Revolution made of him an illustrious 
 citizen and a martyr. At the age of seven, little Clara was 
 admitted to familiar intercourse with her parents. Mine, 
 de Duras herself says that she had no childhood, having 
 been, from the first, rational and serious. Her affections 
 found full employment at the domestic hearth, until the 
 Revolution came to introduce new and distracting emotions. 
 We can imagine with what impassioned interest this 
 young spirit followed from afar her father's efforts and his 
 danger. The grief occasioned by the death of Louis XVI. 
 was the first blow given to her deep sensibility. That of 
 Kersaint* speedily followed. Flight from France having 
 become necessary, Mile, de Kersaint embarked for America 
 in company with her mother, whose health had been 
 shattered and her mind impaired by all her misfortunes. 
 She went first to Philadelphia, and afterwards to Martinique, 
 where she managed her mother's property with a prudence 
 and authority far beyond her years. Suddenly left an 
 orphan and a great heiress, notwithstanding the European 
 confiscations, she repaired to England, where she married 
 the Duke de Duras. Memories of that emigration, her 
 stay in England, and the death of the king, formed the 
 
 * Kersaint bore a great and intrepid part in the Convention. Ever 
 in the breach, ready to protest against iniquity, defend the innocent, 
 or accuse to their faces sanguinary men, he deserved to have his 
 conduct become a kind of model for this species of political action. 
 Opposed to the men who, no longer approving of a Revolution, and 
 unwilling to accept anything from an Assembly, stood aside, with- 
 drew, more or less of them, and even emigrated to some extent, there 
 were those who remained upon the spot, testifying aloud, disputing 
 every step, and dying when their time came with words of warning 
 upon their lips. As an offset to the system of emigration, we have 
 the system personified by Kersaint, which might well be called by his 
 name.
 
 170 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 background of her life. She loved to revert to these things 
 and to describe them. M. de Chateaubriand, in his un- 
 published Memoirs, after a vivid picture of this period of 
 the English emigration, and of the different people whom 
 he then met, adds, "The Duchess de Duras must certainly 
 have been a bride in London at this time, but I was not to 
 know her for years. How often do we unconsciously pass 
 that by which might have constituted our life's greatest 
 joy, as the sailor clears the waters of some blessed country 
 which is removed from him but one horizon, but one day's 
 sail!"* 
 
 Returning to France, during the consulate, with her two 
 daughters, the only children she ever had, she found in 
 them an absorbing care and an object of tender interest. 
 She remained isolated under the empire, never appearing at 
 court, but living for the most part in a retired castle in 
 Touraine,t where she devoted herself to the education of 
 her girls, charity to her neighbours, and domestic life. 
 She had so little self-consciousness, that it seems as if she 
 might easily have remained for ever ignorant of her own 
 power. She was 'singularly capable of adapting herself to 
 different persons and circumstances, and that naturally, 
 without apparent effort or definite intent. She was very 
 simple with the simple, and commonplace with the in- 
 significant, not because she despised them, but because, 
 under such circumstances, it did not occur to her to bo 
 brilliant. She used to tell how people often said of her, 
 when she was quite young, " Clara is a very good girl, but 
 'tis a pity she has so little mind." Absence of pretension 
 was her most distinctive trait. She did not at that time 
 
 * During her stay in England, did not the young Duchcsi de Dums 
 have to overcome certain prejudices of the emigrant world, on the 
 gcore of her birth, noble, yet so intimately connected with the 
 Revolution? Did she not at times have painful experience of that 
 feeling of being out of place, that sense of discord, which, under 
 different aspects, seems often to have occupied her thoughts, and 
 which, in her touching productions, she has transferred to a different 
 kind of inequality? 
 
 t The Chateau d'Usse, on the Loire.
 
 MADAME DE DURAS. 171 
 
 think of authorship. The books she read scientific or 
 other were good of their kind, but few. She was familiar 
 with the English poets, and dreamed over some of their 
 verses. Thus uniting the culture of her intellect to a most 
 systematic care of her house and family, she maintained 
 that the two were mutually helpful ; that you came from 
 the one class of occupations better prepared for the other ; 
 and even went so far as jestingly to declare, that a know- 
 ledge of Latin was useful in making sweetmeats. The most 
 noble and illustrious friendships were, however, growing 
 up around her. M. de Chateaubriand devoted hours to her, 
 and many of the great pages of the future were written by 
 her at his dictation. From this time forward she seems 
 also to have kept a correspondence with Mme. de Stael, 
 and their friendly relations were destined to become yet 
 closer at the subsequent period of the illustrious exile's 
 return. Even those who have merely seen their portraits 
 cannot have failed to remark the strong resemblance, if 
 only in the black eyes and style of coiffure, between these 
 two women, whose works are so dissimilar. But that 
 which they especially had in common, and which makes the 
 author of "Edouard" at heart own-sister to the author of 
 "Delphine," was fervour of spirit, strength of feeling, a 
 capacity for generous indignation and self-devotion. 
 
 If I dared risk the effect of the contrast, I would mention, 
 as a similar term, one other name, a Girondist name, also, 
 but thoroughly plebeian, that of Mme. Roland. In these 
 household cares and this domestic simplicity, alternating 
 with the exercises of an elevated thought, who can fail to 
 discover the germ of a resemblance ? Other points of 
 sympathy between these two might possibly be detected 
 beneath the differences of education and fortune. Tho 
 mind of Mme. de Duras was certainly more delicate, less 
 masculine, and, it may be, less broad than that of Kersaiut's * 
 
 * Mme. Roland passes a severe judgment upon Kersaint in her 
 Memoirs. He had certain of the fastidious habits of a gentleman, and 
 these she did not like. But we, their posterity, love to associate their 
 generous names, consecrated by a common martyrdom.
 
 172 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 companion on the scaffold, but she yields to her in no other 
 quality of heart or intellect. 
 
 In 1813, Mme. do Duras was induced to return to Paris 
 and establish herself more permanently than heretofore, by 
 the marriage of her eldest daughter, a marriage which en- 
 grossed many of her thoughts, for she was enthusiastic even 
 in her maternal devotion. 
 
 The Restoration caused her great joy, but she had her 
 own ideas concerning it, and she was ere long to suffer 
 keenly on its behalf, as we suffer for the loved and lost. 
 Her circle of friends, however, thanks to her more con- 
 stant residence in Paris, was all the time being enlarged 
 and enriched. Not to mention the mere aristocrats and 
 diplomats, nor M. de Chateaubriand, who was seldom seen 
 in the evening, it numbered MM. de Humboldt, Cuvier, 
 Abel Remusat, Mole, de Montmorency, de Villele, and do 
 Barante. Towards M. de Villemain she felt herself drawn, 
 no less by his marvellous talent for conversation, than by 
 her sympathy with his moderate political opinions, which 
 represented the nearest approach to liberalism possible to 
 herself. M. de Talleyrand found in her salon a rejuvenated 
 image of the circles of the Marechale de Luxembourg and 
 the Marechale de Beauvau ; but lie used gracefully to com- 
 plain of a certain want of maturity, and say that it would 
 be necessary to wait fifteen years before the resemblance 
 would be complete. Amid this extreme of outward worldly 
 splendour, the health of Mme. de Duras was failing for 
 several years before she altered her manner of life ; but, in 
 1820, or thereabouts, she was obliged almost entirely to give 
 up going out. Her soul retained its freshness of sensibility, 
 its unfailing purity of passion. Her stedfast ardour only 
 increased in view of disease and suffering. She resolved to 
 bear these things ; she accepted them ; she loved them. 
 But we shall presently revert to this fine side of her 
 character. 
 
 Thus far we find no traces, in the life of Mme. de Duras, 
 of any literary effort or intention of authorship. It was, in 
 fact, by chance that she became an author. As late as 1820
 
 MADAME DE DURAS. 173 
 
 she had, one evening, been telling, at some length, the true 
 story of a young negrcss who had been brought up by the 
 Mare"chale do Beauvau, and her friends, fascinated by the 
 narrative, for she was an excellent story-teller, asked her 
 why she did not write out the history. The next morning 
 the novel was half written. "Edouard" followed almost 
 immediately ; then two or three other short romances, that 
 have never been published, but which will, we trust, appear 
 at no distant day. Thus, by describing the sufferings of 
 the soul, she strove to distract her attention from those of 
 the body, shedding over every tender page she penned a 
 reflection from those high consolations, towards which, in 
 her secret heart, she was turning more and more each day. 
 
 The prevailing idea of "Ourika" and "Edouard," and 
 probably, also, of the other works of Mme. de Duras, is the 
 idea of inequality either of nature or social position, of 
 obstacle or impediment between the heart's desire and its 
 mortal object ; of some painful want, creating a kind of 
 famine for tenderness, the colour and deformity of Ourika, 
 the birth of Edouard. Yet, in these victims of a devouring 
 jealousy, generosity always triumphs. The author of these 
 affecting tales loves to represent the unattainable, to cause 
 the hearts of her favourites, of the darlings of her own crea- 
 tion, to break for what cannot be. Only at the last does 
 heaven open, and shed some drops of refreshing dew. While' 
 in the outer world Mme. de Duras never failed to wear an 
 air of courteous concession, and readily yielded opinions, 
 here in her writings she was fond of describing a sad and 
 heart-rending antagonism. For all was struggle, suffering, 
 desire, and disappointment, in the depths of this noble soul, 
 ardent as the tropical climes in which her youth ripened, 
 stormy as the seas furrowed by Kersaint. She was one of 
 those who have infinite instincts, strong and impulsive 
 yearnings ; who are always asking of earth what it cannot 
 give them ; and who, in the frankness of their extravagant 
 desires, strive, as the Abbe* Provost somewhere says, with a 
 marvellous fervour of feeling, for objects whose attainment 
 is doubtful ; who aspire to the bliss of loving without stint
 
 1 74 SAINTE-BE UVE. 
 
 or limit ; in whom grief always finds an easy prey ; one of 
 those wounded spirits that fling themselves unceasingly 
 against the narrow bars of their fleshly prison. 
 
 The romances of "Ourika" and "Edouard" are, in our 
 opinion, merely a delicate and reserved expression a 
 picture softened and modified for the eyes of the world 
 of that mysterious leaven of unrest always working in the 
 breast of Mme. de Duras. Ourika, brought from Senegal, 
 as Mile. Aiisse' was brought from Constantinople, received, 
 us had the young Circassian, in her day, a finished educa- 
 tion, but, less fortunate than she, she was not white. So, 
 while Mile. Ai'sse, beloved by the Chevalier d'Aydie, refuses 
 to marry him because she will not disgrace him, thus play- 
 ing a part somewhat like Edouard's, poor Ourika, despised 
 by Charles, who believes only in friendship, becomes the 
 prey of a slow, consuming passion, whereof she herself 
 remains unconscious until too late. Nothing can be more 
 natural than the deep-seated and morbid feeling about her 
 colour, once betrayed by Ouvika. "I had removed all the 
 mirrors from my chamber ; I always wore gloves ; my dress 
 concealed my neck and arms. I wore, whenever I went 
 out. a large hat and a veil, which I often kept on in the 
 house. Alas ! I did but deceive myself. I closed my eyes 
 . as children do, and fancied I could not be seen." The 
 salon of the Mare"chale de Beauvau is ravishingly described 
 by the heiress of its style and traditions. The scenes of the 
 Terror are faithfully portrayed. Inequality of rank, iin- 
 guessed passion, the constraints of society, the alternative 
 of emigration or the guillotine, all the favourite ideas 
 of Mme. de Duras, are here ; the principal points of 
 the circle are touched. And when Ourika has become a 
 Gray Sister in a convent, and when, having chanced 
 suddenly and inadvertently to quote Galatsea, she exclaims, 
 speaking of the image which so inveterately pursued her, 
 "It was that of the chimeras by which I had allowed 
 myself to be beset. Thou hadst not then taught me, 
 my God, to exorcise these phantoms. I knew not that 
 there is no rest save in Thee ;" when we find the narrative
 
 MADAME DE DURAS. 175 
 
 interrupted by this simple outburst, we feel that the author 
 has betrayed herself, and stands self-confounded ; that she 
 has put her own thought into the mouth of this martyr. 
 
 "Edouard" is a more elaborate work than "Ourika," 
 and constitutes lime, de Duras's principal title to literary 
 distinction. The scene is laid at about the same period as 
 that of "Eugene de Rotheiin ; " the characters are equally 
 simple and pure ; the society perfectly elegant ; the type of 
 lovers the most graceful ever conceived. But here we have 
 no longer, as in Mine, de Souza's charming production, an 
 ideal of conduct and of happiness, and, as I believe I have 
 elsewhere said, a sort of miniature " Saintre " or " Galaor " 
 of the eighteenth century. Here are suffering and discord. 
 The sense of social inequality is introduced. There is a trace 
 of it in Eugene, also, where the hero is at first smitten by 
 Agathe, the daughter of his good nurse. But conventional- 
 ism soon interferes triumphantly, and the happiness of all 
 requires that it should be so. In "Edouard "the case is 
 different, grave and distressing. The young plebeian 
 appears before the noble and modest Nathalie, with all the 
 charm of his shyness, his solid attainments, his virgin 
 sensibility, his manly brow not incapable of a blush. He 
 is just what Hoche or Barnave will be, in the course of a 
 few years. In "Edouard" we see two centuries, two orders 
 of society, at war. The sorrow by which the lovers are 
 smitten is the presage of a new era. It is curious to note 
 the different effects produced by the same social catastrophes, 
 as reflected in the writings of Jtrne. de Souza and Mme. do 
 Duras. The first husband of the former and the father of 
 the latter died upon the scaffold. Both were obliged to 
 emigrate. But the ideas of one of these distinguished 
 persons were, so to speak, formed, and her impressions for 
 the most part stereotyped. When she came to describe the 
 emigration and its sorrows, she did so from the point of the 
 olds ocial regime. "Adele de Se'nange" was composed 
 before the Revolution, and appeared in 1793 ; but the tales 
 that succeeded are not noticeably unlike it in tone. They 
 arc shadowed by no sad funereal tint. Eugene and Athanais
 
 176 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 smile at happiness as if the Revolution were not to seize 
 them in the course of a few years. All the tales of Mme. 
 de Souza, except "Eugenie et Mathilde," belong to the 
 eighteenth century, as viewed from the empire. The novels 
 of Mme. de Duras are wholly of the Restoration. They 
 contain the echo of a conflict not yet ended, a suggestion 
 of great catastrophes to come. One of her favourite ideas 
 was, that the youth of those who were young during the 
 Reign of Terror was blasted ; that they had no proper youth, 
 but would carry to the grave the traces of their early sorrows. 
 This malady, which dates from the Terror, but which many 
 other causes combined to induce, and which has been 
 transmitted to all the subsequent generations, this malady 
 cf Delphine and Rene", she, too, suffers from it: she 
 describes it minutely ; she studies its varieties ; she tries to 
 find a cure for it in God. Her manner of introducing priests 
 and convents marks, in the most trenchant manner, the 
 difference between herself and Mme. de Souza. They are, 
 as it were, divided, at this point, by the whole of the 
 religious movement which produced the Genius of Christian- 
 ity and the Meditations. The convent to Mme. de Duras is 
 a genuine cloister, rigid, austere, expintory. The priest 
 reappears as a veritable confessor, "an old sailor," to quote 
 Ourika, "acquainted with the tempests of the soul." 
 
 An analysis of " Edouard" would be in very poor taste, 
 and we shall not attempt it. We may not take anything 
 away from so complete a fabric, nor can it be embellished by 
 our admiration. If it be true that there are a few books 
 which tender and unoccupied hearts love to re-read once a 
 year, love to have flower periodically in the memory, like 
 the lilacs and the hawthorn, " Edouard" is assuredly one 
 of them. Among all the scenes so admirably grouped and 
 connected, the principal, central, and most striking of all, 
 the one where, on a summer evening, at Faverange, 
 Edouard, while discussing the price of flour, perceives Mme. 
 de Nevers on the balcony, her figure veiled by a mist of 
 jessamine, her profile relieved against the blue sky ; that 
 scene where the flowers are presented and returned ; that
 
 MADAME DE DURAS. 177 
 
 scene of stifled tears and chaste confession, realizes a youth- 
 ful dream, which is reproduced in each siiccessive generation. 
 Nothing is wanting. Here are the choice surroundings 
 which every young man imagines and invokes for his first 
 declaration. Sentimeut, delineation, language, all conspire 
 to make up a page, sure to be adopted into countless 
 romantic imaginations ; a page which, had it appeared iu 
 the days of the "Priiicesse de Cleves," when literature was 
 less encumbered, could not have failed of immortality. 
 
 The style of Mme. de Duras, who attempted writing so 
 late in life, and with no special preparation, is never either 
 vague or careless. It is natural, but finished ; simple, 
 rapid, and yet reserved ; a style somewhat like Voltaire's, 
 but feminine; no artifices, especially in "Edouard;" 
 unfailing tact, at least in the choice of background and 
 scenery ; colour enough, and that positive ; finally, outlines 
 of the purest ; everywhere a passion stronger than the 
 words in which it is expressed, and no more trace of 
 transport or extravagance than we meet in polite 
 conversation. 
 
 While Mme. de Duras was devoting her mornings to the 
 composition of these graceful tales, whose smooth rind 
 conceals a bitter sap, she continued, notwithstanding the 
 steady failure of her health, to receive and fascinate the 
 world about her. Through her friendships and her powerful 
 influence, she even bore, we suspect, a tolerably active part 
 in the polities of her day. During the Congress of Verona, 
 Chateaubriand wrote to her almost daily of what was 
 transpiring, and the particulars of that mighty game. But 
 at the same time, in the secret depths of her being, she was 
 making a great struggle for religious submission and a pious 
 temper. She had never been what is ordinarily called 
 devout. She was led to the fountain-head by reflection, by 
 solitary reaction, by the collective might of the sorrows 
 that oppressed her. Ou the very day, in 1824, when an 
 intimate friend surprised her in all the ardour of her 
 opposition to M. de Villele, holding in her hand Count 
 Roy's pamphlet, justifiably incensed, and prophesying, by 
 M
 
 178 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 that noble faculty of indignation which the world had 
 never corrupted, the inevitable rupture with her eloquent 
 friend, on that self-same day, perhaps, she had been 
 meditating in the morning over one of those Christian 
 Reflections which she was then endeavouring to mature. 
 Her instinctive political opinions betrayed her Girondist 
 blood, a generous enthusiasm, self-devoted, self-destroying, 
 vain. When a friend remarked to her on the occasion of 
 one of her impulsive outbursts, that she had a right to be 
 thus liberal, being the daughter of M. de Kersaint, she 
 exclaimed "Oh yes! poor father! He loved liberty as it 
 should be loved. He did not go too far in the Revolution. 
 He would gladly have defended Louis XVI." She made a 
 careful distinction between liberal ideas and revolutionary 
 ideas, abhorring the latter and adoring the former. This 
 added to the habit of self-repression, and the ease of a 
 woman of high fashion apt to seize an advantage led to 
 her complete conformity with the softened type of the 
 Restoration. 
 
 Nevertheless, this too frank nature could not fail to 
 receive wounds and shocks at a time of so much party 
 irritation and social formality. She was spared neithei 
 envy nor hate. There was a prejudice against her, in certain 
 fanatical circles, on account of the splendour of her salon, 
 her liberal opinions, and the sort of people whom she 
 was said to see. Her friends sometimes received odious 
 anonymous letters. She could not be ignorant of these 
 manoeuvres, and she suffered on account of them, but strove 
 to wean her spirit from a world where enmities are so active 
 and where friendships are too apt to become cold and 
 faithless. All her passions, humanly speaking, so noble ; 
 her excessive zeal, whether political or maternal ; her 
 partialities, the yearnings of a heart which aspired to clasp 
 its loved ones too closely, began slowly to subside into 
 prayer and peaceful tears in the presence of her God. Her 
 physical sufferings became, at intervals, excruciating, 
 intolerable ; but she accepted them meekly, she applied her 
 whole mind to endurance. She conceived for suffering if
 
 MADAME DE DURAS. 179 
 
 one may venture to say so a kind of last sublime passion. 
 Amid the progressive decay of her organs, her heart seemed 
 redoubling its youthful ardour, even to the end. And now, 
 removed almost entirely from the world, encircled by the 
 ]>ious and perfectly unremitting care of her daughter, the 
 Duchess de Rauzan, sometimes at Paris, sometimes at 
 Saint-Germain, finally at Nice, where her deatli took 
 place, in January 1829, she was entirely absorbed in the 
 solemn thoughts of immortality, accompanied, however, 
 and nourished by the cares of a watchful, practical benevo- 
 lence. Her other idolized daughter, the Countess de la 
 Rochejacquelein, hastened to Nice, and was permitted to 
 share in the last offices of affection, and to receive her 
 mother's parting smile. 
 
 Among the brief "Reflexions Chre'tiennes " traced by her 
 own hand, we find fragments on the Passions, on Strength, 
 and on Leniency. In the first, the title of which is " Watch 
 and pray," we read :* "Almost all our moral griefs, almost 
 all those heart-rendings which desolate our lives, might 
 have been prevented if we had watched ; for then should we 
 
 * The manuscript works of Mme. de Duras wore to have been and, 
 in accordance with her own expressed intention, certainly ought to be 
 published by M. Valery, whose line taste qualified him, she thought, 
 to appreciate them. We have felt justified, however, in giving some 
 idea of the " Reflexions Chretiennes," a copy of which we have seen, 
 since these were not to have been included in the published works. A 
 part of the Reflections and Prayers have, at length (1839), been printed ; 
 but for some inconceivable reason the publication of the other MS8. 
 seems to have been indefinitely postponed. The fruits of the intellect 
 would seem to have their season, as well as those of the earth. We 
 have retained, from a cursory perusal of these inedited works, the 
 following thoughts : 
 
 " There are beings from whom we feel ourselves separated, as it 
 were, by the walls of gliss described in fairy tales. We see each other, 
 we converse, we approach, but we can never touch." 
 
 " It is with the maladies of the soul as with those of the body ; the 
 most surely fatal are those which are born with us. There are if one 
 may venture oa ti"; expression chronic despairs, akin to the bodily 
 disorders, so called. They gnaw they consume they destroy ; but 
 tb n v do not confine you to your bed." 
 
 " Discord in the movements of the heart is as irritating as discord in 
 music, and far more harmful."
 
 i So SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 never have given entrance to those passions, which are, all 
 of them, even the perfectly legitimate, death to the body 
 and the soul. Watchfulness is involuntary submission." 
 And what a profound and melancholy meaning attaches to 
 the following simple words on the lips of Mme. de Duras : 
 " As we advance, our illusions vanish, and, one by one, we 
 see removed all the objects of our affection. The charm of 
 a fresh interest, change of feeling, inconstancy, ingratitude, 
 death, these things depopulate by degrees the world of 
 enchantment, whereof we made an idol in our youth. To 
 love God is to adore, at their source, the perfections which 
 we hoped to find in His creatures, but which we have sought 
 in them in vain. That fragment of good which we some- 
 times find in man, it is in God that we must love it." 
 Farther on she invokes the fear of God as a spur to an 
 inert and languid temper. She prays for energy, "for," 
 she says, " the lack of energy is one of the greatest dangers 
 of late conversions." But we shall best give an idea of 
 her style as a Christian moralist, and of that tender subtlety 
 which reveals the deepest workings of any feeling, by 
 transcribing her meditation on Leniency. 
 
 LENIENCY. 
 " Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." 
 
 "This word at once commands the exercise of leniency 
 and assigns a reason for it. There are various ways of 
 forgiving. All are good, because all are Christian ; but these 
 several methods differ among themselves as widely as the vir- 
 tues out of which they spring. One forgives that he may be 
 forgiven ; another, because he feels that he deserves to suffer, 
 this is the forgiveness of humility ; another still, on the 
 principle of returning good for evil ; but no one of these 
 varieties of pardon includes an excuse for the pain inflicted 
 upon ourselves. The pardon of Jesus Christ is the truo 
 Christian pardon. 'They know not what they do.' In 
 these affecting words we find the excuse of the offender
 
 MADAME DE DURAS. 181 
 
 and the consolation of the offended, the only consolation 
 possible under those moral griefs where the evil done us is, 
 so to speak, only secondary. It puts the finishing touch 
 of sorrow to be unable to find an excuse for those we 
 love ; but here the explanation is offered : ' They know not 
 what they do.' They have torn our hearts, but they knew 
 not what they did. They were blind, their eyes were 
 closed ; our very anguish is the pledge of their innocence. 
 The human heart is pitiful. Great wrongs can only come 
 of great darkness. Is it conceivable that one should inflict, 
 voluntarily and in cold blood, those excruciating pangs 
 which cause us to die a thousand deaths before our time ? 
 Is it conceivable that you should be willing to break a 
 heart that has cherished, adored, defended you for years ? 
 For it is the nature of ingratitude the source of our 
 heaviest sorrows to despise the tenderness bestowed upon 
 it because incapable of returning it in kind. But in this 
 very incapacity, in this very ignorance, lies the exculpation. 
 To lavish affection on those who cannot return it, is like 
 trying to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf. For- 
 give them, my God, for they know not what they do. 
 Forgive them without their having to reproach themselves, 
 without accounting their pardon a virtue in me, for it is 
 but just. But take pity on me, and teach me to love Thee 
 only, and give me rest ! Amen." 
 
 There is nothing to be added to words like these. But 
 the different degrees of Christian pardon, the first where 
 we forgive that we may be forgiven ; that is, from motives 
 of hope or fear : the second, where we forgive because we 
 know that we deserve to suffer ; that is, from motives 
 of humility : and, finally, the case where we forgive out 
 of regard to the command to return good for evil ; that is, 
 from obedience, all these modes of pardon, which still fall 
 short of the forgiveness that is thoroughly noble and dis- 
 interested, remind me of what we read in the " Fathers of 
 the Desert," as translated by Arnauld d'Andilly. "I once 
 saw," says an Abbe of Sinai, "three solitaries who had 
 received the same injury. The first was troubled and
 
 1 82 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 indignant ; but still, because lie feared divine justice, lie 
 held his peace. The second rejoiced on his own account 
 at the evil treatment he had received, because he hoped 
 to be compensated therefor, but was sorry for him who had 
 committed the outrage. The third, thinking only of his 
 neighbour's sin, was so moved by it for he truly loved 
 him that he wept freely. Thus may we see, in these 
 three servants of God, the working of three different 
 motives : in one, the fear of punishment ; in another, 
 the hope of reward ; in the last, the unselfish tenderness . 
 of a perfect love." And is it not wonderful to observe 
 how, through all the ages, the Christian spirit maintains 
 its integrity in those who possess it, conducting to well- 
 nigh the same moral solutions and discriminations the 
 aged Abbe of the Sinaitic convent and the great lady of 
 our own day ? 
 
 Such was the consummation of one of the most brilliant, 
 complete, and appropriately diversified lives that can 
 possibly be imagined a life which reconciled the Restora- 
 tion and the old regime ; to which high birth, genius, and 
 generosity imparted their charm ; a life impassioned and 
 yet pure, with a noble Christian end, such as we find in 
 the records of the illustrious women of the seventeenth 
 century, an harmonious reflex of the finely -gifted lives 
 and pious deaths characteristic of that era, but deriving 
 from the storms of the present a new impress, which gives 
 a unique value to the whole. 
 
 Among the many persons whom it has been needful to 
 consult, in the preparation of this notice, and from whom 
 our own impressions and opinions have been derived, it is 
 impossible not to particularize M. Villemain.
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER.' 
 
 IN those of our contemporaries whose productions have led 
 us to a minute study of their characters, it is sometimes 
 interesting to determine at what point the traits of previous 
 ages predominate ; to what social epoch it would be natural 
 to refer them as to their true time. Speculations of this 
 sort have their advantage if not carried too far ; just as a 
 picture is best appreciated by receding a little, and viewing 
 it from different points, or causing it to be turned, raised, 
 or lowered by degrees, until a true and deep perspective is 
 Attained. If, for instance, we have found that Mme. de 
 Souza was purely of the eighteenth century, although her 
 days were prolonged into our own, it has been equally 
 evident that Mme. de Duras, while representing the finest 
 aspect of the Restoration, did also, by virtue of her life, 
 her elegant writings, her passionate reaction in favour of 
 Christianity, and her death, recall some of the most affect- 
 ing personal histories of the seventeenth century. And so 
 to-day, as we approach Mrne. de Kriidener, crowned with 
 
 * As a biography, this simple pastel, which deals with Mme. de 
 Krtidener's mind and character, rather than with the facts of her life, 
 is doubtless very imperfect. A friend of ours, M. Charles Eynard, who 
 has already given us a biography of the celebrated physician Tissot, 
 has long been preparing a complete history of Mme. de Kriidener. 
 Private information, original letters, nothing will be wanting to the 
 perfection of his work, especially in its religious portions ; and we 
 would gladly expedite its appearance in print (1846). 
 
 Since the above note was written, M. Eynard's life of Mine, de 
 Kriidener has appeared, and furnished occasion for an article on our 
 part, rectifying and correcting the author upon more points than one. 
 The reader is referred to our " Derniers Portraits," the present sketch 
 being left in its original form. 
 
 183
 
 184 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 her mystic aureole, enveloped in a shining cloud, and 
 smiling upon us from amid its dim white radiance, our 
 thoughts and conjectures are at once carried back beyond 
 our own and the two preceding centuries, and we do not 
 hesitate to assign her a still earlier date. We see in her 
 a mediaeval saint, a saint of the north and of the thirteenth 
 century, some Elizabeth of Hungary, or sister to the grand 
 master of the chevaliers porte- glaive. As such, drawn 
 Rhine-ward from the depths of her native Livonia, and 
 long involved in the delights of the court, after inspir- 
 ing with song the most illustrious minnesingers of the day, 
 and herself composing a romance-poem in the character of 
 a poet of the Wartburg (or, perhaps, in emulation of our 
 own Chrestien of Troyes, or some other famous French 
 troubadour, singing in what was then the most delectable 
 of all languages), she would have turned at last to peni- 
 tence and God, renounced the flatteries and illusions that 
 beset her, preached to Thibaut, consoled under calumny 
 and converted Blanche, entered some order, which slio 
 would have sustained and reformed, and, like another 
 Saint Clara in the train of some. Francis of Assisi, would 
 have drawn the people after her in crowds, and communed 
 with the birds in desert places. 
 
 This, in short, is what Mine, de Kriidener woiild have 
 been had she been able to fulfil her destiny. Instead, she 
 was merely a charming novelist, and afterwards an illuming 
 at whom we can but smile. She missed the natural sequel 
 to her part, the willing and entire consecration of the 
 remnant of her days to God, to the work of exhorting to 
 holiness, to the salvation and regeneration of the world. 
 But where was the remedy ? She was born fully as late as 
 the middle of the eighteenth century. The descendants of 
 the Teutonic order had become Lutherans. A Lutheran, 
 therefore, and also the wife of an ambassador, she had first 
 to make trial of a worldly life, of scepticism and pleasure ; 
 and when she had escaped from these, and when the blaze 
 of public events had kindlwl the fervid soul within her 
 fragile body, and convinced her that the hour was come in
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. 185 
 
 which, to proohcsy, to smite and heal by turns, she found 
 that few would hear her, and that she was like the barren 
 prophetess of Ilium in ashes. Those, even, whom her rapid 
 and stirring eloquence had arrested for a moment, like the 
 light dust raised by the electric cloud, relapsed when she 
 was gone ; and she herself without fixed order, discipline, 
 or tradition, borne aloft by the hot breath of calamity, 
 catching only broken glimpses of the future, and soon 
 losing trace of it altogether perished in the distant 
 Crimea, vainly, ineffectually, a snowflake driven by the 
 northern wind, a flash, a cry amid the raging storm, and 
 nothing more. 
 
 The latest period at which Mme. de Kriidener could 
 possibly have found full employment for her faculties, and 
 a perfectly congenial development, was the close of the 
 sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century. She 
 would then have been able, like Saint Theresa, and, at a 
 later period, Mme. de Chantal, to lean for support against 
 one of the firm pillars of the great and as yet unshaken 
 edifice of Catholicism. She would have opened a new 
 monastic route in the direction already indicated by saintly 
 careers. In her dark and dizzy moments she would have 
 had wise and experienced doctors of the soul at hand, a 
 Saint Francis de Borgia, a venerable Peter of Alcantara, a 
 Saint Francis de Sales. It would not have been well for 
 her to come later, not even in the days of the adorable 
 Fe"nelon, who would have concurred too entirely in her 
 opinions, and, it may be, fostered her chimeras.* But in 
 our time what Avas she ? Where were her guides ? A 
 whispering reed shaken by all conflicting winds, from whom 
 could she receive the gentle breath of speech ? I seek, but 
 see not at her side, the shade even of a Fe"nelon. She has 
 none but chance apostles. Plied with questions, pressed 
 for her opinion on means and ends, symbol and legitimate 
 
 * No more ought Mme. de Kriidener to have lived too early in the 
 thirteenth century, when the mvstics were just beginning to preach 
 the "eternal gospel." Her perilous imagination would have en. 
 countered one more snare in a system so akin to her dreams.
 
 186 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 tradition, she pauses ; in the fulness of her soul she finds 
 herself at fault, and turns inquiringly towards M. Em- 
 peytas. 
 
 But for us, who are to consider her chiefly with reference 
 to her authorship of an exquisite book, her character is 
 sufficiently rounded, and her destiny is the more romantic 
 for being incomplete. Since she was not a saint, ' ' Vale'rie " 
 must remain her principal title to distinction, and, whether 
 she will or no, the central achievement of her life. Let us, 
 then, no longer attempt to remove her, in imagination, to a 
 realm beyond our remotest horizon, but rather view her 
 face to face, and discern what, in her actual lifetime, she 
 was permitted to become. 
 
 Born at Higa, on the shores of the Baltic, at about the 
 same time that Mme. de Stael was bom in France, Mme. 
 Juliana de Kriidener, a daughter of the Baron de Vietingoff, 
 one of the great noblemen of the land, and member of a 
 family which the Marshal de Munich had recently rendered 
 famoiis, passed such a childhood as she has tearfully de- 
 scribed in the reminiscences of Vale'rie. She was reared in 
 the midst of wild but picturesque scenery. The lovely 
 little lake, where the wind sometimes scattered the pine- 
 cones from the forest, and over whose waters she gaily 
 guided a fragile boat ; the mountain-ash trees, friendly to 
 the birds ; the pyramidal firs, peopled with squirrels that 
 admired their own reflection in the mirrored water ; the 
 moaiiing sedges ; the moonlight on the white birch-stems, 
 such were the elements of that always beloved landscape, 
 amid which began her innocent, and even then impassioned, 
 reveries. The refinements of fashionable society soon en- 
 hanced the pleasures of her home. The high nobility of the 
 north was, at that time, irresistibly attracted towards Paris, 
 the Athens of art and pleasure. Princes and kings felt it 
 an honour to have made a brief sojourn there, and to have 
 been graduated as wits or freethinkers in that school. 
 Their ambassadors were themselves among the most indis- 
 pensable ornaments of French society and philosophy. 
 Witness the distinguished standing of Baron de Gleichen,
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. 187 
 
 ambassador from Deumark, and Baron de Creutz, ambas- 
 sador from Sweden. The young Livonian came early to 
 Paris, to a contimiation of the social experience already 
 begun. She was married, at the age of eighteen, to the 
 Baron de Krudener, a relative who, although still young, 
 was somewhat older than herself, and with whom her 
 principal concern seems to have been to paint a slightly 
 idealized portrait of him in the Count, the husband of 
 Vale'rie. Such was then the custom in high society. 
 Your husband gave you a definitive name, a position, and a 
 suitable and sufficient maintenance. He desired nothing 
 more, and beyond that point no mention was made of him 
 in the life of a celebrated woman. At most, one caught 
 his profile, or the outline of his back, in some nook of her 
 next romance. M. de Krudener, Russian ambassador to 
 divers European courts, introduced to them, successively, 
 the subject of this memoir, who charmed and captivated all 
 hearts wherever she went. 
 
 The incidents of her early life already seem very remote. 
 She had attained the age of twenty when the French Revo- 
 lution began, and had, as yet, no pretensions to literary 
 fame. She was simply a woman of fashion. Of all the 
 emotions which she must have felt and caused, by virtue of 
 her graces, her sensibility, and her wit, the traces are as 
 impalpable as herself. It would be wearisome and vain to 
 seek them elsewhere than in " Vale'rie," which gathers, as it 
 were, into a single mirror all their purest rays. 
 
 It does not appear that the first outbreak of the French 
 Revolution deranged the life or altered the worldly bias of 
 her who was to be so highly excited by its closing scenes. 
 She was still at that happy age when our own passions, 
 affections, and enjoyments are sufficiently noisy to make us 
 deaf to all other sounds. The depths of her soul to borrow 
 an expression from Vale'rie were like fountains whose 
 murmur is lost amid the din of the day's activities, and be- 
 comes audible only with the approach of evening. In spite 
 of 1789, in spite even of 1793, when prophetic and biblical 
 voices had already grown distinct, when Saint-Martin,
 
 i88 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 less obscure than formerly, was writing his "Eclatre," 
 when De Maistre had hurled his first haughty menaces, 
 and Mme. de Stae'l, while treating of sentiment, had 
 yielded to bursts of potent political eloquence, Mme. de 
 Kriidener seems still to have seen a perpetual Athens in 
 that Paris which she was finally to treat like Nineveh. 
 
 A letter, dated February 1793, and written from Leipsic, 
 to Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, proves only that great per- 
 sonal sorrow her father's death, and perhaps some secret 
 anguish of another sort had combined witli the climate of 
 Livonia to induce a derangement in her nervous organiza- 
 tion, which had continued for the fourteen previous months, 
 but from which she was at length beginning to rally. 
 "The fever," she says, "which consumed my blood has 
 disappeared ; my brain is no longer affected as it has been ; 
 and the soul agitated by such bitter sorrows, such terrible 
 storms, is once more accessible to hope and the influences 
 of nature. Yes, nature once more affords me sweet com- 
 fort and gentle diversion. She is no longer shrouded in a 
 funereal veil. When I recovered my memory and resumed 
 the exercise of my faculties, my thoughts flew to you.* 
 How is it with you in this hour of universal calamity ? " 
 This word is the only allusion to public events in the whole 
 letter. M. de Kriidener was then ambassador to Denmark. 
 She, with the concurrence of her husband, was residing at 
 Leipsic for the education of her son. But the first glance 
 of her awakened moral sense fell upon the author of Paul 
 and Virginia, the future sister of Valerie, and upon Paris. 
 
 She returned thither, after numerous journeyings about 
 Europe, in 1801, at the moment of the declaration of peace 
 and the brilliant restoration of society and letters. She was 
 still quite young, and always beautiful, a small, pure 
 blonde, delighting the eye by her grace, with deep blue 
 
 * This expression, as applied to her simple relations with Bernardin 
 de Saint-Pierre, betrays some degree of excitement on the part of 
 Mme. de Kriidener. With a really great writer and poet, we can 
 imagine that she might have shown herself a true daughter of the 
 North, like Lili, the Countess de Bernstorf, and Bettine, those objects 
 of Goethe's enthusiastic regard.
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. 189 
 
 orbs, and the extremely fair hair peculiar to Valerie. Her 
 voice was low, her speech musical and sweet, the charm of 
 all Livoniau women. Her toilets were singularly adapted 
 to her style. She was always composing them in imagina- 
 tion, and some of their secrets have escaped her. Witness 
 the shawl-dance and the ball-costume in that scene where 
 a wreath of blue mallows is placed upon the golden hair of 
 Valerie. So I always see her in my fancy, swiftly entering 
 some splendid soiree, to the sound of Carat's music, all 
 heads turning at her airy footfall. It must have been like 
 a vision of Music herself ! 
 
 It was at Paris, where "Rene*" had just appeared, and at 
 Berlin, whither she soon returned, and where she received 
 by every courier boxes of fresh finery, while Mme. de Stael 
 was publishing " Delphine " in France, that Mme. de 
 Kriidener gathered up her already dim reminiscences, arid 
 possibly, also, some pages which she had previously written, 
 ftiid set about composing "Valerie." 
 
 The work appeared in the year XII. (1804), at Paris, 
 and anonymously. While Mme. de Stael, who was then at 
 the height of her celebrity, having been enthusiastically 
 welcomed by the French school of the eighteenth century, 
 was beginning to turn her attention towards Germany, 
 Mme. de. Kriidener, a German, overlooked the already 
 glorious literature of her own country, and had eyes for 
 ours alone. She gave ns a gem of a book in this her 
 favourite language, her style being that of the La Fayettes 
 and the Souzas, enriched by a skilful admixture of northern 
 tints. After "Saint-Preux," "Werther," and "Rene," she 
 was able to retain her individuality, to be both of our 
 country and of hers, and to blend with the genuine French 
 manner something of her own Scandinavian melancholy. 
 Gustave, in the height of his amorous delirium, wrote in 
 his diary, " I have with me a few favourite authors, the 
 odes of Klopstock, Gray, and Racine. I read them little, 
 to be sure ; but they give me dreams of a different life." 
 Note the order Klopstock, tempered by Gray, and especi- 
 ally by Racine. In "Valerie," more than with Mme. de
 
 190 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 Stael even, the Germanic inspiration, sentimental as it is, 
 finds chastened expression, is subdued, so to speak, by 
 unfailing good taste, and acquires a certain French un- 
 obtrusiveness of form. What might originally have become 
 an ode of Klopstock, we should render by some few tones in 
 the language of Berenice. 
 
 "Delphine" is undoubtedly a work fall of power, and 
 passion, and eloquent detail ; but, as a whole, it leaves 
 much to be desired, and produces upon the reader, at the 
 time of its perusal, a baffling and confused impression. 
 Those books, on the contrary, which faithfully develop 
 their own leading thought, the reading whereof affects 
 the mind like a single picture finished to its last detail, 
 without slip of the pencil or muddling of the tints, 
 such books, whatever their size, have a transcendent value 
 as works of art, for they are complete in themselves. 1 
 read the other day, in a collection of unpublished thoughts, 
 "The poetic faculty is nothing more nor less than the gift 
 and the art of exhibiting each real feeling in its flower, from 
 the royal lily and the dahlia, down to the Easter daisy." 
 What is here said of poetry may properly be applied to 
 any effort of creative composition, which reflects its author's 
 beau-idtal. "Eugene de Rothelin" is, of course, a picture 
 of smaller dimensions, and, if you will, of narrower range, 
 than "Delphine;" but, in its own style and degree, it 
 is a masterpiece. A rivulet, bright with jewelled waves, 
 slipping between fair banks, over a bed of fine sand and 
 beneath a transparent sky, has its own value to the 
 painter's eye, and a beauty superior to that of the mighty 
 river unequal in its movement, and, at intervals, turbid 
 and foamy. Referring to the masters, we find that Jean 
 Jacques, in recommending for its subtile heart-analysis the 
 fourth part of the "Nouvelle Heloi'se," did not disdain to 
 compare it with the " Princcsso de Cleves," which he had 
 evidently taken for his own model. He was right, and to 
 this very day the latter is, perhaps, a more pleasing, if not 
 a more potent book than the former. In the same mariner, 
 "Eugene de Rothelin," "Valerie," and "Adolphe" are
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. 191 
 
 works whose quality and value are disproportionate to their 
 volume. " Valerie," moreover, is not inferior, in the order 
 of its ideas and sentiments, to any of our more elaborate 
 fictions, while it excels in the unstudied preservation of 
 natural proportions and a genuine unity. As a whole, like 
 the person of its author, it has infinite grace. 
 
 While conforming in parts to an ephemeral and now 
 obsolete taste, "Valerie" has its points of permanent 
 value. In the walks of fiction there have been writers of 
 remarkable talent, who have had but a temporary success ; 
 whose productions, though extolled for a time, have been 
 forgotten before many years. Mile, de Scudery and Mme. 
 Cottin, despite the wit of the one and the pathos of the 
 other, are quite gone by. No motive, save one of curiosity 
 to discern the style of our mothers' sensibility, would ever 
 induce us to reopen one of their volumes. The same is true 
 of Mme. de Montolieu. "Caroline de Litchfield," which so 
 captivated us at fifteen, can no more be re-read than " Claire 
 d'Albe." "Valerie," on the other hand, holds a permanent 
 place, and is always affecting. It is one of those books 
 which a man may read thrice at different stages of his life. 
 
 The plot of the story is very simple, and resembles that 
 of "Werther." A young man becomes enamoured of his 
 friend's wife. But here, beneath all ideal disguises, we 
 are conscious of a singular realism, lending a life to the 
 narrative which is quite its own. Werther would have 
 killed himself if he had not loved Charlotte. He would 
 have died for the infinite, the absolute, for nature. 
 Gustave dies for the love of Valerie alone. The first 
 half of the story is entirely occupied with the origin of 
 his love, its growth, and the pure emotions which help 
 to fan its flame. Varied scenes and graceful images re- 
 veal and illustrate most happily this presence of a stormy, 
 devouring passion, beside an innocent, ignorant friendship. 
 Take the scene at Venice, at the ball in the Villa Pisani. 
 Gustave had not attended, but in passing a pavilion he 
 hears the sound of music, and climbs a great flower-vase 
 to obtain a view through the window. There he sees from
 
 192 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 without ValeViu's marvellous shawl-dance, ami, intoxicated 
 by her aspect as she approaches the window, he fastens his 
 lips to the pane which is touched, inside, by her beloved 
 arm. He seems to breathe torrents of fire ; but she feels 
 nothing heeds nothing. What a perfect type of their 
 destinies, and of many others more or less like theirs ! 
 One little sheet of glass between them ; but raging flames 
 on the one side and only kindly indifference on the other ! 
 So, too, when, on the day of Valdrie's f$te, the Count begins 
 to chide her, Gustave sends a child to bear her his con- 
 gratulations, and thus remind her husband that she is not 
 to be vexed on such a day. Valerie is moved. She kisses 
 the little one, and sends him back to Gustave, who, stoop- 
 ing to kiss his cheek upon the same spot, finds there a 
 tear. " Oh, Vale'rie," he says within himself, " tears are the 
 only gift or message possible from thee to me ! " * This 
 
 This child, the innocent bearer of a kiss and a tear, reminds us of 
 ft little poem by the German minnesinger Hadloub, translated by M. 
 Marmier (" Revue de Paris," April 2, 1837), and also of that fragment of 
 Andre Chenier's, probably of Greek origin, "J'etais unjeune enfant 
 qu'elle etait grande et belle." Note the variations in the idea and its 
 progress. lu Andr6 Chenier's imitation of a Greek epigram we have 
 merely the image of the proud beauty and the abashed rivals. In 
 Hadloub, the prominent idea is that of the grief of the timid and 
 reverential lover, who seeks the adored traces of his lady's lips. The 
 love of chivalry, whose consummation was attained in Petrarch, is 
 here for the first time disclosed. But the tear upon the little cheek 
 in " Val6rie " suggests a different thought from either of the others. 
 Here is a version of Hadloub's piece, with this last idea added. It is 
 in the style of the sixteenth century, slightly modernized, and we may 
 suppose it to have been versified by Clotilde de Survillc, the neighbour 
 of Ronsard and Baif, or, better still, by Mary Stuart : 
 
 Vite me qnittant pour elle, 
 Le jeune enfant qu'elle appelle 
 
 Proche son sein se plaa. 
 Elle prit sa tfite blonde, 
 Serra sa bouchette ronde, 
 
 O, malheur ! et 1'embrassa. 
 
 Et lui, comme un ami tendre, 
 L'enlac,oit d'un air d'entendre, 
 Ce bonheur qu'on me defend.
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. 193 
 
 constant sense of separation and sorrow, the nuptial ring 
 which he feels upon. Valerie's finger whenever he takes her 
 
 J'admirois avec envie, 
 Et j'aurois donn6 ma vie 
 Pour etre 1'heureux enfant. 
 
 Puis clle aussitot sortie, 
 Jc pris 1'enfant a partie, 
 
 Et me mis a lui poser, 
 Aux traces qu'elle avoit faitcs. 
 Mcs humbles levres aujsttes : 
 
 Meme lieu, meme baiser. 
 
 Mais quand j'y cherchois le bame 
 Et le nectar de son ame, 
 
 Une larme j'y trouvai. 
 Voili done ce que m'envoie, 
 Ce que nous promet de joie, 
 
 Le meilleur jour echevd. 
 
 Or thus, in what is rather a paraphrase tl an a translation : 
 "Come, my child," my lady said: 
 Swift from me to her he sped 
 
 Nestled near her lovingly; 
 O'er his golden hair she yearned, 
 And his rosebud mouth upturned, 
 
 Softly kissed alas, for me ! 
 
 Even he, his small arms twining 
 Round her neck, seemed half divining 
 
 The great bliss to me denied; 
 I, mcthought, my all would give 
 Such sweet welcome to receive 
 
 As I enviously eyed. 
 
 Straight she left us two alone ; 
 Then I called the little one 
 
 To my side, intent to place, 
 Following her gracious sign, 
 These adoring lips of mine 
 
 Where her lips had left their trace. 
 
 Here I thought to breathe the whola 
 Balm and fragrance of her soul ; 
 
 Stooping I beheld a tear ! 
 Suddenly my heart grew light, 
 Reading there a promise bright, 
 
 And a hope of coming cheer. 
 N
 
 194 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 hand, reappears under a new aspect in each affecting scene. 
 The portrait of Valerie is constantly recurring in all sorts 
 of situations and attitudes, smiling, sad, variable, fondly 
 reflected, as it were, in a thousand faithful mirrors. 
 
 The second volume is marked \>y some of the faults 
 peculiar to the Romanesque style. I fancy I can detect 
 the point at which invention begins. The winding up 
 of one of these heart -histories, founded upon memory, 
 is hardly ever natural. They are half, or, perhaps, three- 
 fourths true ; but they must be drawn to an imaginary 
 conclusion, and it requires extreme care to prevent them 
 from assuming an air of improbability. The hero must 
 die to all intents and purposes, whereas, in reality, he 
 is living, half cured, at Baden or Geneva. There is a 
 scene in the second part, where Gustave, in a perturbed 
 interview with Vale'rie, just before he is to leave her, 
 suddenly receives a wound in the forehead, while lean- 
 ing against a window, a somewhat fallacious and con- 
 ventional wound, since the most delicate of lovers could 
 hardly get a hurt in this way. Shortly afterwards he 
 passes, in the night, through the chamber where Valerie 
 is calmly sleeping, and, moved by an irresistible desire to 
 gaze on her once more, he hears her murmur, in her dream, 
 the words "Gustave" and "death." This, again, is the 
 official dream of fiction, a pure sentimental fib of the year 
 1803. Happily, however, the situation of Gustave soon 
 resumes its reality. One of the finest passages in the book 
 is the scene in the gondola, where Vale'rie, when slightly 
 startled, lays Gustave's hand familiarly upon her heart, 
 Lut when seriously alarmed, flings herself into the arms of 
 the Count. "Then, indeed, I realized my utter insignifi- 
 cance, and the gulf that lay between us." When Gustave 
 has gone away alone with his wound into the mountains ; 
 when, throughout the autumn months that precede his 
 death, he yields himself desperately to the intoxicating 
 influence of the wild winds and his own reveries ; when he 
 becomes almost a Rene, how distinct an individual he still 
 remains, by virtue of that graceful image of the almond
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. 195 
 
 tree, to which he compares himself, the almond exiled 
 to an ungcnial clime, yet bearing flowers for the wind to 
 scatter adown the precipice I What a picture is hero of 
 soft and fragile youth on the brink of an abyss! of a 
 tender, mystical, Ossianesque nature, allied to Swedenborg, 
 prone to self-sacrifice, of a youth like Rene", mature beyond 
 his years, who has never known the mood of youth, nor its 
 pleasures, nor its faults, but whom the Count has simply 
 convicted, in words less severe than those of Father Aubrey 
 to Chactas, of those tender affections which constitute the 
 beauty of our lives, and, collectively, underlie all our 
 virtues and all our sensibility. Gustave, who, at times in 
 his dreamy solitude, is also very like "Werther, who even 
 equals the eloquent and poetic utterances of the latter in 
 that species of hymn where he exclaims, " I wander over 
 the hills perfumed with lavender," Gnstave maintains his 
 absolute individuality, rejecting the idea of suicide ; pious, 
 innocent, and pure, even in his derangement ; giving thanks 
 in the midst of his despair. In a word, Gustave actually 
 succeeds in leaving with the reader as it was his dearest 
 wish to leave with Vale'rie "a few tears only." His 
 memory is of those who endure for a lifetime, and honour 
 such as are formed to cherish them. 
 
 M. Marmier, the author of an appreciative article on 
 Mme. de Kriidener, has acutely remarked the presence, 
 in "Valerie," of certain profoundly religious thoughts, 
 affording glimpses of the future woman beneath the veil 
 of her youthful elegance. I, too, will cite a few prophetic 
 passages. 
 
 " Her delicate frame is a flower, which would bow to the 
 lightest breezes ; her high, courageous spirit would face 
 death for virtue or for love." 
 
 " ' No,' 1 1 continued, ' beauty is never overpowering save 
 when it illustrates something less transitory than itself; 
 when it turns the thought upon those things which will con- 
 stitute the enduring charm of life when the brief moment of 
 seduction shall have passed away. The soul must discern 
 it when the senses have grown dull.'
 
 196 SAINTE-BE(JVE. 
 
 '"You kiiow, my friend,' said Gustave, 'tliat I cannot 
 help loving men. In general I believe them to be estimable. 
 Were it otherwise, would not society have been subverted 
 long ago ? Order subsists in the universe ; therefore virtue 
 is stronger than vice. But the great world, the class that 
 wealth, ambition, and grandeur separate so widely from the 
 rest of humanity, the world of fashion, seems to me like 
 an arena bristling with lances, where a wound may be 
 apprehended at every step. Scorn, selfishness, vanity, 
 these natural enemies of whatever is fair and noble, mount 
 constant guard at the entrance of this arena. They pro- 
 claim laws which hamper all those generous and kindly 
 impulses whereby the soul is elevated and made better, 
 and, because better, happier. I have often pondered on 
 the causes of the fact that all the denizens of this great 
 world come finally to detest each other, and almost always 
 die calumniating life. There are few villains ; those whom 
 conscience does not restrain, society does. Honour the 
 haughty and fastidious offspring of virtue, honour keeps 
 the avenues of the heart, and repels low and base actions, 
 as the native instincts repel atrocious ones. Taken separ- 
 ately, have not all men some virtuous qualities ? Whence 
 comes, then, this throng of injurious vices? Is indiffer- 
 ence to good the most dangerous of all immoralities ? ' " 
 
 It is evident that Mme. de Kriidener here substitutes her 
 own experience for that of Gustave, and these sentences 
 have all the gravity of her subsequent predictions. The 
 sin against which she here testifies is that not of the great 
 world merely, but of the whole world ; it is that sin of 
 Pilate which Dante punished with a tepid inferno, and 
 which, in our own day, so many generous innovators, 
 beginning with herself, have grown weary of denouncing. 
 
 The style of " Valerie," like the scenes which it portrays, 
 takes at times a false colouring from the prevalent senti- 
 mentalism of the day. It is not agreeable to have the 
 Count send, for his son's grave, a tablet of Carrara marble, 
 "rosy as youth, and veined with black like life." But 
 these faults of taste are rare, and so are certain vicious
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER, 197 
 
 idioms, which might be corrected by one stroke of the 
 pen. As a whole, the style of this delightful book is 
 excellent, inclining slightly to severity. It is harmony, 
 rhythm, vivacity of movement, and a perpetual and perfect 
 command of the French idiom. 
 
 The success of ' ' Vale'rie " in the highest French and 
 German circles was prodigious. In that mass of intermin- 
 able rubbish entitled "Melanges militaires, liteVaires, et 
 sentimentaires," by the Prince de Ligne, we find a con- 
 tinuation of "Valerie," which is merely a burlesque by 
 that man of wit, too much addicted to fashionable scrib- 
 bling. The fascinating Princess Serge Galitzin having, as 
 he says, been unable to sup with him because she was so 
 afflicted by the perusal of " Vale'rie," he was fain to remove 
 that obstacle for the morrow by sending her a consoling 
 sequel, in which Gustave returns to life. It is a, parody 
 whose slight flavour has long since evaporated. Moreover, 
 the poetical world of Germany cherished a grudge against 
 Mme. de Kriidener for deserting her native language and 
 adopting ours, even Goethe having expressed his regret 
 that a woman of so much talent should have gone over to 
 France. 
 
 However, the Teutonic movement of reaction against 
 France, or at least against the man who held France in his 
 hand, was soon to gain the support of Mme. de Kriidener, 
 and hasten the adoption of her ultimate character. Even 
 in " Vale'rie " there is a trace of hostility to the first consul, 
 where the Count alludes to those pictures and statues which 
 nrnst be seen beneath their own skies, in Italy itself, and 
 which it would be preposterous to remove. After the 
 murder of the Duke d'Enghien her dislike became indigna- 
 tion, and her residence in Berlin, her intimacy with the- 
 Queen of Prussia, and the events of 1806, completed the 
 work. It must have been, I think, at about this time in 
 Sweden, in the midst of a still brilliant existence, but at 
 the age when youth is flying beyond recall, that a revolu- 
 tion was wrought in the mind of Mme. de Kriidener. "A 
 ray of divine grace " to use her own words had touched
 
 I9S SA INTE-BE UVE, 
 
 her, and she embraced religion, but with a lingering ad- 
 mixture of human motives, and not yet in the positive 
 and prophetic character which she afterwards assumed. 
 In the second volume of Mile. Cochelet's* Memoirs there 
 occurs, amid pages of platitudes, an admirable letter, which 
 decisively indicates the point to which this marvellous soul 
 had then advanced. She had not begun to prophesy, but 
 she already besieged her friends with the zealous exhorta- 
 tions of a saintly concern. Her Christian influence over 
 the Queen of Prussia, her boundless devotion to that sad 
 and heroic sufferer, and the blessed consolations and heavenly 
 hopes which she imparted, are sufficiently well attested. 
 It seems that she had even then composed other Avorks, 
 which wei-e never published. She quotes, in this letter 
 to Mile. Cochelet, a certain "Othilde," in which she had 
 attempted to portray the chivalrous piety of the middle age. 
 "Oh, how you would enjoy this book!" she naively ex- 
 claims. "I had help from Heaven in writing it, and 
 this is why I dare affirm that it has beauties." In thus 
 reverting to the mediaeval era, to the pious days of the 
 Teutonic crusaders, Mme. de Kriideuer seems instinctively 
 to have sought her native sphere. 
 
 The great Tasso, who, like our heroine, had a sensitive 
 imagination, and was subject to illusions, might, I should 
 think, have furnished her some harmonious tints for the 
 picture which she essayed to paint ; and the colours in 
 which this " Othilde " was conceived and portrayed were, I 
 fancy, those of a baptized Clorinda. 
 
 Mme. de Krtidcner spent these years of her transi- 
 tion state in wandering over Germany, now at Baden, 
 where she experienced reactions towards the world, now 
 visiting the Moravian Brotherhood, now listening at Carls- 
 
 * The " Scmenr" for October 1843 devotes two articles to Mme. de 
 Krtidener, which naturally dwell upon her religious and mystical 
 Bide. We ourselves had treated this aspect of her character seriously, 
 Imt the worthy author of these articles regards it with intense solem- 
 nity, and reproves us severely for our one faint smile. He cites the 
 letters to Mile, de Cochelet, not merely this of 1809, but others from 
 the same volume. The curious in this matter will find them there.
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. tc, 9 
 
 rime to the illuming Jung Stilling, or preaching with him 
 to the poor.* She struggled to rise higher, to free herself 
 more and more from the ideas of those whom, in her new 
 phraseology, she styled "the men of the torrent;" but 
 she altered less than she supposed. If it be allowable to 
 say, as some have done, of the conversion of certain gentle 
 souls, " it is love still," the expression would seem to have 
 been framed on purpose for her. Into these new ways of 
 hers, which, following Plato, she denominated the "soul's 
 royal route," she brought all the sensibility and imaginative 
 tenderness of her earlier mood, and all the fascination of 
 her earlier manner. Her inexhaustible desire of pleasing 
 was transformed into a vast need of loving, or rather, it 
 never deserted her.'t' 
 
 The events of 1813 disclosed in complete and luminous 
 outline the mission which Mme. de Kriidener imagined 
 herself to have received ; and that movement of regenerated 
 Germany which produced so many enthusiastic warriors, 
 national poets, and eloquent pamphleteers, determined her 
 rank also as the evangelical Velle'da and prophetess of the 
 North. Aside from the peculiarities of her religious cha- 
 racter, what specially distinguishes the part played by Mme. 
 de Krudener from that of other Teutonic enthusiasts, is her 
 strong reliance upon the extreme North, upon Russia, or, 
 
 * Some details of Mine, de Kriidener's residence in the Grand Ducliy 
 of Baden may be read in the introduction to the tenth volume of M. 
 Bignon's " History of France under Napoleon," p. 5 et seq. 
 
 f We are reminded of the following anecdote. A distinguished man, 
 who visited her often in the years succeeding her conversion, was 
 smitten with the charms of her daughter, who was like her, on'y 
 young. At last he opened his heart, and spoke to the mother of the 
 hopes he had dared to cherish. Mme. de Kiiidener, during his long and 
 somewhat embarrassed statement, had listened in silence, or mechan- 
 ically answered " Yes," but when the nme of her daughter was at length 
 pronounced, she suddenly fainted. She thought he had been speaking 
 of herself. However, if we would fairly appreciate the remnant of 
 facile romance which lingered with Mine, de Krudener in the first 
 /ears of her conversion, and also the perfect propriety which sho 
 always preserved amid her worldly inconsistencies, we must not for- 
 get the peculiar mingling in her character of Livonian levity and 
 Livoniau purity, which explains the whole.
 
 200 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 as she says, the people of the North Wind, all which she 
 reconciles in her heart with an ardent love of France. Her 
 excited imagination seeks that whereby civilisation is to 
 be renewed and regenerated, beyond the confines even of 
 ancient Germany, in what was once an ice-bound desert, 
 but has now, in her view, become the reservoir of lost 
 purity. What she invokes, and depicts by contrast in her 
 visions, is the reverse and counterpart of Attila's irruption 
 a northern invasion for the salvation of the world. 
 
 She passed, during the year 1814, from Paris to Switzer- 
 land, thence to Baden and the valley of Lichtenthal, where 
 the poor whom she had fed and comforted thronged 
 her footsteps ; thence again to Alsatia and Strasburg, where 
 she witnessed the tragical but Christian death of the prefect, 
 M. de Lezai-Marnesia,* and afterwards to the village of the 
 Banc-de-la-Roche in the Vosges, enlightened and leavened 
 by the spirit of Oberlin. All that she saw became part of 
 her hallucination, and increased it. She had, as yet, no 
 personal acquaintance with the Emperor Alexander, although 
 she had already namd him the Universal Deliverer, and 
 the White Angel, in contradistinction to the Black Angel, 
 Napoleon. The mere thought of the latter his very shade 
 would induce, whenever mentioned, the sacred vertigo of 
 the priestess. She foretold to all she met his escape from 
 the Island of Elba, and the calamities that would be un- 
 chained thereby. She had fixed her mind upon the year 
 1715, and assigned to that near date the approaching cata- 
 strophe, and subsequent regeneration of the earth. 
 
 1815, since it partially justified her predictions, increased 
 * Adrien, Count de Lezai-Marnesia, celebrated as a political writer, 
 and exiled, on the 18th of Fructidor, for his open opposition to the 
 Directorial government, was connected by marriage with the Beau- 
 harnais family, and subsequently found a powerful protector in 
 Josephine. In 1800 he was appointed prefect of the district of the 
 Rhine and Moselle, and in 1810 prefect of the Lower Rhine. His 
 administration was a model of mildness and justice, and greatly en- 
 hanced the prosperity of Strasburg. He was thrown from his carriage 
 in the streets of that city, dragged for some distance at the heels of 
 the horses, and so frightfully injured that he died on the 9th of 
 October 1814. TB.
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. 201 
 
 her faith and realized her dream of political influence. She 
 had seen the Emperor Alexander in Switzerland, just before 
 the Hundred Days, and had found in him a docile nature. 
 The prince in question had already been compared to the 
 other Alexander and to Cyrus. She went farther, and 
 compared him to Jesus Christ. She was perfectly sincere, 
 no doubt ; but a lingering remnant of address, of the world's 
 insinuating flattery, is perceptible here, and it did her no 
 harm. Her ascendency from the first was immense. As 
 soon as Alexander arrived in Paris, she became his constant 
 adviser.* Several times each day he used to quit the 
 ElyseVBourbon by a garden gate, and visit her at her 
 lodgings, where they united in a prayer for spiritual illumin- 
 ation. She confessed to a friend at that period, that it 
 was sometimes difficult for her to repress a thrill of vanity, 
 when she reflected that she was all-powerful with the most 
 powerful of sovereigns. Early in September of that year, a 
 grand review of Russian troops was held in Alexander's 
 presence, on the plains of Vertus, in Champagne. Mme. do 
 Kriidener, with her party, her daughter, her son-in-law, 
 and her spiritual director, the young minister Empeytas, 
 had taken rooms in the chateau Mesnil, close by. In the 
 morning the emperor's carriage was sent for her, and the 
 honours paid by Louis XIV. to Mme. do Maintenon in the 
 camp of Compiegne did not surpass the veneration with 
 which the conqueror treated her. It was not the grand- 
 daughter of his favourite subject, Marshal Munich, it was 
 an ambassadress of Heaven, whom he received and con- 
 ducted into the presence of his armies. Bareheaded, save 
 for a straw hat, which she laid aside at pleasure, her fair 
 
 * In 1SU, Alexander had been under the influence of his excellent 
 tutor, General de La Harpe, an influence purely liberal, with the 
 liberality of 1789 and the year III. In 1815, when he passed under the 
 sway of Mine, de Kriidener, he seemed far less liberal to our French 
 patriots, to M. de La Fayette, for instance, who notes the metamor- 
 phosis in his Memoirs. Yet even then, in his second phase of 
 charitable, Christian mystic, how much more of the love of freedom 
 he displayed, than was the case when that mood, too, had passed 
 away !
 
 202 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 hair parted and falling over her shoulders, with a few stray 
 curls gathered up and fastened in the middle of her forehead, 
 clad in a long, dark robe, confined, after the. fashion of the 
 day, by a simple girdle, and rendered elegant by her manner 
 of wearing it, such was the aspect of our heroine on this 
 occasion ; so she arrived upon the plain at dawn ; and stand- 
 ing upright while prayer was offered, she confronted the 
 prostrate troops like a new Peter the Hermit. She wrote 
 and published at the time, under the title of the "Camp of 
 Vertus," a little pamphlet on this imposing ceremony. The 
 depth of her emotion and the magnificence of her desires 
 are better expressed in her own language than by any inter- 
 pretation of ours. 
 
 "Who then present* in the plains of Champagne but 
 would have said that he beheld the defeat of Attila ? 
 Has another rod been broken ? . . . There has never been 
 but one crime, that, namely, of desiring to do without the 
 living God. Happy Alexander ! How fully must the vast 
 desire of thy heart have been answered, when thou sawest, 
 on that heavenly day, in those plains, where, six centuries 
 ago, in presence of a king of Navarre,t a hundred thousand 
 Frenchmen beheld, by the glare of funeral torches, the 
 torture of four-and-tweuty heretics, when thou sawest 
 there, I say, a hundred thousand Russians doing homage 
 to the religion of love ! Ah, who that saw that divine day 
 but shared in all our hopes ? Who but thought, as he be- 
 held Alexander beneath the great banners, of all the 
 triumphs of faith and all the lessons of charity? Who 
 dared doubt the reality of inspiration from on high ? Who 
 
 * Here we have a solecism in language. To be present is never 
 used absolutely. The author of " Valerie," after she became a seer 
 and a divine instrument, grew very careless in her style. Saint 
 Faulinus, after he was converted, allowed, and in fact imposed upon 
 himself, all manner of inaccuracies in his verse. 
 
 \ Probably Thibaut de Champagne, who was concerned in the sever- 
 Hies against the Albigenses, the Jews of Orleans, and the Shepherd 
 Boys. There is a tradition in that district of the torture of twenty- 
 four heretics, who perished upon Mount Aime, which overlooks the 
 plains. Until within a few years a tower has marked the spot
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. 203 
 
 but said with the apostle, 'The former things are passed 
 away ; lo, all things are become new ' ? 
 
 ' ' And who but felt the need of something new in the 
 midst of so many ruins ? Men pre-eminent by their sagacity 
 discerned this day in the light shed over it by the majestic 
 Scriptures. Nature confided it to her observers. Science 
 doubted. Politics, overwhelmed with shame, foresaw in it 
 the day of destruction. . . . 
 
 "Yea, all, whether rejoicing in the great secret, as yet 
 veiled like Isis, or trembling with apprehension lest the veil 
 of the future should be rent, all have looked to this epoch 
 either with confidence or dread. , . . 
 
 "What heart, in view of these things, has not throbbed 
 for thee also, France ! once so great, and destined to arise 
 yet greater from thy disasters ? France, who has banished 
 the Almighty from thy councils, and then seen the arm of 
 flesh, although stayed upon empires, fall trembling, and 
 relapse into impotency. . . . 
 
 "Say to the astonished peoples that the French have 
 been chastised for their glory. Say to the men without a 
 future, that the dust which is whirled aloft returns to the 
 earth, and is mingled with its graves. . . . 
 
 " And thou France of the olden time, ancient heritage of 
 the Gauls, daughter of Saint Louis and of so many other 
 saints, who shed upon thee everlasting benedictions, homo 
 of chivalry whose dreams have entranced the universe, 
 arise intact, for thou art living and immortal ! Thou art 
 no captive in the chains of Death, like those who have 
 reigned or served in the domains of Evil only." 
 
 She ends by pointing to the cross left on the spot like a 
 stately altar, the rallying-point of all, which seems to say, 
 " Here Christ was adored by the heroes and the army dear 
 to His heart ; and here the people of the North Wind will 
 require the happiness of France." 
 
 These pages clearly show how Mme. de Kriidener con- 
 ceived the mission of the Holy Alliance ; but her vision, 
 as well as the momentary dream of Alexander, was soon 
 brought to confusion, and vanished before the conflicting
 
 204 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 interests and positive ambitions of those who made light of 
 such noble chimeras. The species of triumph achieved by 
 Mine, de Kriidener at the camp of Vertus marks the highest 
 point, the bright culmination, so to speak, of her influence. 
 A feeling of serious alarm began to be manifested, and 
 attempts were made to alienate the emperor from her, and to 
 insure his seeing her less frequently. After Alexander had 
 quitted France, Mme. de Kriidener's powers rapidly de- 
 clined, and the pious veneration she had excited in his mind 
 ended in aversion, and even persecution. 
 
 Those who seriously believe in the intervention of Pro- 
 vidence in the affairs of this world, should not judge too 
 superciliously the mission and the attempt of Mme. de 
 Kriidener. It is certain that 1815 was a decisive epoch ; 
 and to religious minds it may well have appeared that the 
 crisis was grave enough to demand a mystical witness and 
 a prophet. Mme. de Kriidener herself was not so much 
 deceived about the importance of 1815 as about its antici- 
 pated consequences. In these moments of universal crepita- 
 tion, it may, I fancy, occasionally come to pass that rapid 
 glimpses of the ideal hidden behind this sensible cosmos are 
 revealed to the eyes, of some, causing such to believe its 
 advent near. But the rift soon closes, and the eye which 
 for an instant had seen clear and far, still believing in the 
 vanished radiance, is deceived and filled with its own light 
 only. The mistake of Mme. de Kriidener has been the 
 misfortune of many souls. It was merely that of conceiv- 
 ing, at a certain awful and critical juncture in human affairs, 
 the blessed solution which a truly great man might have 
 effected. Bat the great man did not appear, and the 
 prophet of his mission remained a simple visionary. We, 
 too, are dreamers ; and do we not daily repeat, " How would 
 it have been in 1830, if we had had a great heart at the 
 helm ? If the noble and interesting but fragile Alexander 
 had been a veritable Charlemagne, a monarch equal to his 
 fortune, Mme. do Kriidener hail been more than justified ; 
 but, in that case, would she have been necessary ? Her 
 crowning delusion lay in the belief that thoughts like hers
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. 205 
 
 may be suggested or infused, where they have not occurred 
 spontaneously. 
 
 After all, what Mme. de Kriidener did was merely this : 
 in her own peculiar fashion, and in language vaguely 
 biblical, but moved by a new and keen sense of apprehen- 
 sion, she long ago, from the very midst of the political 
 hurricane, discerned and decried that plague of modern 
 scepticism, indifference, and spiritual destitution, which, 
 with more or less of authority, genius, extravagance, and 
 personal risk, has been proclaimed, palliated, aggravated, 
 deplored, and attacked, in turn, by all those who have been 
 variously aiming at a grand regeneration of the world, by 
 Saint-Martin, de Maistre, Saint-Simon, Ballanche, Fourier, 
 and La Mennais. 
 
 . Aside from Mme. de Kriidener's political influence at 
 Paris in 1815, her purely religious action was extremely 
 transitory, but powerful and impressive while it lasted. 
 All who approached her were, to some extent, subjugated 
 by the charm of her address, and caught the fragrance of 
 her rich and open soul. Of this many examples might 
 be adduced. Mme. de Lezai-Marnesia, a beautiful young 
 woman, who had seen her husband die a frightful death at 
 Strasburg, fled in her anguish to Mme. de Kriidener, and 
 shared her mattress nightly, in the hope of recovering, 
 through her, communication with the lost one, he having 
 already appeared to her more saintly and spiritual friend. 
 In the chateau which she occupied near the camp of Vertus, 
 all the persons about Mme. de Kriidener assumed more or 
 less of her habits of exhortation. Her daughter and son- 
 in-law preached to the family of the aged gentleman with 
 whom they lodged ; her very maid preached to the old 
 castle domestic. Some casual expression, let fall no matter 
 where or upon what subject, served as a text, and a conver- 
 sation, whether it were being held at the castle entrance, 
 or on the staircase, or in the doorway of a room, was trans- 
 formed into a sermon. Yet the species of respect and 
 admiration she inspired counteracted the impression pro- 
 duced by her surroundings. Many a Parisian scoffer, going
 
 206 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 to hear her in the great drawing-room in the Rue Saint- 
 Honore, which was open to all, returned, if not convinced, 
 at least thoroughly subdued by her personal magnetism. 
 Those of her familiar acquaintances who felt themselves 
 capable of resisting her doctrines while in her presence, fell 
 into something resembling her own strain of exhortation as 
 soon as she was away. There was a peculiarly admirable 
 quality, a kind of overflowing plenitude, in her eloquence, 
 when she spoke of the sorrows of the great. ' ' Ah ! but I 
 have dwelt in palaces," she said to one young girl, a worthy 
 listener ; "and if you did but know the trouble and anguish 
 they conceal ! I never see one without feeling a pang at 
 my heart." But when she spoke to the poor of those 
 miseries of the rich, which even their own do not surpass, 
 her words possessed a special and sovereign efficacy. Once, 
 at Paris, having been earnestly solicited by a good man, M. 
 de Gerando, she made her way, with the permission of the 
 prefect of police, into the prison of Saint Lazarus, and there 
 found herself face to face with the very dregs of society. 
 She spoke to those amazed and soon deeply-affected women. 
 The corruption of the great was laid bare. She smote her 
 breast. She confessed herself as great a sinner as they all. 
 She spoke to them of that God, "who," as she often said, 
 "had snatched her from the delights of the world." She 
 continued for hours, producing an unlooked-for and ever- 
 increasing effect. There were sobs and bursts of grati- 
 tude. When she left, the doors were besieged, and the 
 corridors double-lined. The}' made her promise to return, 
 to send them good books. But other emotions super- 
 vened, and she never went again. It is this inconsequence 
 in action which makes us sensible of Mme. de Kriidener's 
 lack of fixed order and discipline, and even of definite 
 doctrine. 
 
 Many a time, when plied with questions concerning that 
 doctrine, when pressed to declare its source and adduce its 
 proofs, when her mystical utterances were met by the 
 inquiry, "Who are you ? whence come you ? " she was con- 
 tent, after the first few words, to make a gesture towards
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. 207 
 
 Empeytas, who replied, " I will explain all that presently;" 
 and then the wind of inspiration veered, and the explana- 
 tion was never given. 
 
 In the acts of her life, and their results, the same 
 vacillation was apparent. She might, perhaps, have saved 
 Labe'doyere,* if she had obeyed her first thought; but 
 different suggestions were offered in turn ; her inspiration 
 was at the mercy of the last person whom she saw ; and one 
 of these persons, an enemy of Labedoyere, was careful to 
 remain with her until just before the hour of the emperor's 
 visit, by which time her merciful and kindly impulse had 
 cooled, and was effectually resisted. 
 
 Her feelings and imagination were under no restraint. 
 Her self-deception in matters of fact was profound, and 
 sometimes amusing. One day, in the year 1315, she said 
 to some one who came to see her in the evening, at the 
 hour of prayer, "Great works are being accomplished. All 
 Paris is fasting." And her friend, who had just come from 
 the Palais Royal, where he had seen everybody at dinner, 
 tried in vain to undeceive her. A trait very characteristic 
 of one who, when a woman of the world, was always fancy- 
 ing that some Gustavo or other had died for the love 
 of her.t 
 
 It is interesting to inquire what were, in 1815, the 
 relations of Mme. de Kriidener with certain celebrated 
 individuals whose minds should have been congenial with 
 her own on more points than one. Mme. de Stael admired 
 
 * Charles Angelique Francois Hutchet, Count de Labedoyere, a 
 brilliant but unfortunate French officer, distinguished for his personal 
 bravery in some of Napoleon's most famous battles. While remaining 
 faithful to the latter in his misfortunes, and one of the first to join 
 him on his return from Elba, he yet had the courage to protest in 
 person against the emperor's system of reckless usurpation. He 
 lingered unaccountably in Paris after Napoleon's final overthrow, and 
 was one of the earliest victims of the Restoration, having been shot in 
 the plain of Crenelle, August 19, 1815. TB. 
 
 T "What!" said some one whom she had informed that a certain 
 young man was dead; "why, he is at Geneva!" "My dear friend," 
 she exclaimed, with all her natural grace, "if he is not dead, he is nut 
 much better."
 
 238 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 her as the author of "Valerie," but the genius of the former 
 was too decidedly political and historic for her to sympa- 
 thize with our heroine in her high prophetic vein, and she 
 rather made light of it. Not so Benjamin Constant. He 
 saw much of Mme. de Kriidener in 1815, and found in her 
 presence consolation for his sorrows, and food for certain 
 cravings in his soul. The political vicissitudes which the 
 illustrious publicist was then enduring are well known ; his 
 religious emotions were correspondingly agitated. They 
 returned to the charge, and made, as it were, a last desperate 
 struggle on the extreme confines of his youth. Other 
 secret troubles ho had, which were gathering into a final 
 storm. To Mme. de Kriidener ho repaired in these days to 
 seek a little rest, and remembrance in her prayers ; Adolphe 
 always the same beside a regenerated Valerie. We are 
 kindly allowed to quote a few sentences containing a precious 
 picture of their friendly relations. "I saw Mme. de 
 Kriidener yesterday," writes Benjamin Constant,* "at first 
 with other companj', afterwards for a few hours quite alone. 
 She produced upon me an unparalleled effect, which was 
 heightened by a circumstance that occurred this morning. 
 She sent me a manuscript, with the request that I would 
 transmit it to you, and to you alone. I should like to read 
 it with you, for it has done'me good. It contains nothing 
 very new. The joys and needs experienced by all alike 
 cannot well seem new ; but more than one of its passages 
 went straight to my heart. It tells some trivial, but to me 
 most poignant, truths. When I read these not very re- 
 markable words, 'Many a time I have envied those who 
 toil with sweat of the brow, who add one task to another, 
 and lie down at the end of life, all unconscious of the mine 
 of unexplored wealth man bears within him 1 Many a time 
 I have said to myself, "Be like the rest,"' when I read 
 these words, I say, I burst into tears. The memory of a 
 wasted, stormy life, which I have dashed with a kind or 
 deliberate rage against every rock I encountered, came over 
 mo with a force I cannot describe." 
 
 * To Mme. Ricamier.
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. 209 
 
 Sad and striking incongruity ! Even while bewailing, in 
 the presence of one whom he loved and admired, a certain 
 habitual harshness which he would fain have softened, he 
 was constituting himself the organ of a mystical sanctity, 
 and attempting to propagate the same. He also wrote, " I 
 tell myself that I must needs be what I am, else I could 
 not lead you into a sphere of thought which I myself, 
 unhappily, have not fully entered ; the lamp, however, 
 diffuses light without seeing its own. ... I had passed 
 the day alone, and only went out to see Mme. de Kriideuer. 
 Excellent woman ! She does not know all, but she sees 
 that I am consumed by a fearful anguish, and she kept 
 me three hours, in the hope of soothing me. She told 
 me to pray for those who had made me suffer ; to offer 
 my own sufferings, if need were, in expiation for them." 
 And again: "I am a harp broken by the storm, but re- 
 sounding as it breaks with a harmony destined for your 
 ear. ... I am fated to enlighten you while preying on my- 
 self. I want to believe; I try to pray." Unfortunately for 
 Benjamin Constant, the transports which awoke at Mme. 
 de Knidener's side, and attained their height as these two 
 recited the Lord's Prayer together, were not of an abiding 
 nature, and he soon relapsed into a mood of captious irony 
 and general disgust with the world, whence he was but 
 fitfully aroused by the working of his noble civic passions.* 
 Quitting France after 1815, Mme. de Kriidener travelled 
 through several of the German States in succession, stirring 
 up their inhabitants by the sound of her voice, but soon 
 receiving leave to withdraw from their respective govern- 
 ments. M. de Bonald having ridiculed her on this account 
 in a facetious article published in the "Journal desD4bats" 
 for March 28, 1817, t a friendly pen none other, it may 
 
 * Under this head of interesting personal relations, we may remark 
 that Mme. de Kriidener knew M. de Chateaubriand at the time of the 
 appearance of " Atala," in 1801. His famous Memoirs will contain a 
 very affectionate and impressive letter which she addressed to him in 
 Rome, on hearing of the death of Mme. de Beaumont. 
 
 t M. de Bonald commences thus : "Mme. de Kriidener was once a 
 pretty wiman. fche published a fictitious work, possibly of her own 
 O
 
 2io SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 be, than Benjamin Constant's own defended her in the 
 " Journal de Paris " of March 30, reminding the arrogant 
 patrician, that, as a man of family at least, he owed some 
 respect to the granddaughter of Marshal Munich. 
 
 Withdrawing presently beyond the echoes of Switzerland 
 and the Rhine valley, the tones of Mmc. de Kriidener's 
 voice no longer reach us, and she comes no more within 
 the range of our narrative. Anything further which we 
 might add would be but a monotonous repetition of what 
 has gone before. She published a few small works in 
 German}', extracts from which may be seen in M. Marmier's 
 notice. University professors printed in detail the con- 
 versations they had held with her. In all the latter part 
 of her apostolate, Mme. de Kriidener seems to me not very 
 unlike the numerous sectaries that daily arise in England 
 and the United States of America. The originality of her 
 role is at an end. Having at last obtained permission to 
 visit St. Petersburg, she was almost immediately banished 
 for declaring in favour of the Greeks, and died in the 
 Crimea, in 1824, while attempting to found a kind of 
 penitentiary. All honour to one who continued to the 
 end, amid all the opprobrium excited by her zeal, an un- 
 flinching martyr in the cause of charity ! 
 
 But, as a mere act of gratitude, it behooves France to 
 cherish the memory of a woman who early fixed her eyes 
 upon her, who adorned her society, adopted her language, 
 enriched her literature ; who loved her at all times with a 
 love like that of Mary Stuart ; and who, when her whole 
 soul was laid bare in her hour of mystical exaltation, 
 showed that she had conceived no higher mission than 
 
 composition, underthe title, I believe, of 'Valerie.' It was sentimental 
 and moderately tiresome. At present she is absorbed in a life of 
 mystical devotion, and in the deliverance of vaticinations which are 
 fictions too, but of another sort." He concludes in the same strain : 
 " I make bold to declare, with the Bible in my hand, that the poor 
 we shall always have with us, were it only the poor in intellect." The 
 anonymous writer In the "Journal de Paris" allows himself to cha- 
 racterize the final play upon words as worthier of Potier or Brunet 
 than of a Christian seriously penetrated with the spirit of the gospel.
 
 MADAME DE KRUDENER. 211 
 
 tliat of bf-ing to France the Joan of Arc of peace, unity, 
 and mercy.* 
 
 * In a different vein from ours, but without malevolence, and with 
 a perfect understanding of his subject, a cousin of Mme. de Kriidener's, 
 the Count d'Allonville, has devoted to her a chapter, which may be 
 consulted in vol. vL p. 292, of his "Memoires Secrets."
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 
 
 PAULINE DE MEULAN.) 
 
 THERE are certain individuals who bring into this world, 
 and exhibit from their earliest youth, a faculty of acute 
 and sagacious observation, uninfluenced by enthusiasm, 
 aiming directly at the truth, and peculiarly sensitive to 
 all that is weak, eccentric, and absurd. While, for the 
 most part, great minds begin with passion, either by a kind 
 of trustful, graceful, pastoral illusion, or by a misanthropy 
 rebellious and superb, while to some life opens gay and 
 alluring, as to Paul and Virginia, and to others its aspect 
 is rather stern, sublime, and imposing, as to Emile and 
 to Werther, the apprenticeship of the early-mature and 
 thoughtful natures which we describe is smoother and 
 less hazardous. They tiud this world, at the outset, 
 neither merry, nor sad, nor hostile to themselves, but 
 rather, at once, better and worse than so. The majority 
 of men, when youth is passed, revert to a correct apprecia- 
 tion of things. Those who, at the beginning, cherish a 
 confiding and innocent enthusiasm, are taught by their 
 mistakes the knowledge of evil, and often, during their 
 years of mortifying experience, are inclined to assign it 
 too large a place. When M. de la Rochefoucauld had 
 ceased alike to love and to rail, he no doubt laid too great 
 a stress on human malice, his wrath being excited against 
 it still more by his gout and his bad eyes. Those, on the 
 contrary, who begin by taking a very lofty tone with 
 circumstances, who are austere stoics and sombre dreamers 
 
 before twenty-five, fall back, as life advances, and become 
 111
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 213 
 
 more lenient, or, at least, more indifferent. The author 
 of " Werther," if ever for one moment he resembled his hero, 
 would furnish a beautiful instance of this gradual pacifica- 
 tion, whereof it is easy to adduce less doubtful examples. 
 But the essentially critical and moralistic mind does not 
 usually require either great mistakes or direct revelations 
 to secure the complete development and full exercise of its 
 powers. It moralizes instantaneously, instinctively, by 
 virtue of a special gift, and not from motives of weariness 
 and reaction. Boileau had no need to experience strong 
 passion, and endure floods of bitterness, in order to temper 
 his discriminating and incisive verse, and suggest its 
 application to those about him. Little as we know of the 
 life of La Bruyere, I do not believe that even he required 
 great personal trials to enable him to read hearts as he did. 
 This penetrative faculty reveals itself early in those on 
 whom it is bestowed. Vauvenargues seems to have been a 
 sage in his youth. In that illustrious and sober family of 
 moralists, which begins with La Rochefoucauld and La 
 Bruyere, and comprises Vauvenargnes and Duclos, Mme. 
 Guizot is our latest author, and, for that very reason, not 
 yet fully appreciated. 
 
 Properly speaking, the moralist has a taste and a genius 
 for observing men and things, for taking them as they 
 come, no matter how, and piercing their disguises and 
 sounding their depths. For him there is neither general 
 theory, nor system, nor method. A practical curiosity is 
 his guide. His science is, so to speak, like the botany of 
 the age before Jussieu and Linnaeus the botany of Jean 
 Jacques. Thus every person he meets, in all his inter- 
 course with society, becomes subject of remark and dis- 
 crimination. Everything affords a point of view. It is 
 his amusement nay, it is the exercise of his creative 
 power to look about him at random, and take concise 
 and piquant note of the actual. Some disagreeble or in- 
 significant individual passes speaks. He is observed and 
 his likeness seized. The moralist reads a book. From 
 the preface he derives some knowledge of the author, and
 
 214 SA INTE-BE UVE. 
 
 accepts and contradicts his theory. By the time he has 
 reached the twentieth page, how many reflections have 
 occurred to him ! The author would almost seem to have 
 made his volume for his critic's sake. Literary criticism 
 is never anything more than an occasion or point of 
 departure for the moralist. He is present at a theatrical 
 representation. What an opportunity for cxpatiation or 
 dissent ! It is not enough for him to say, "This is good," 
 or, "This is bad;" "I am amused," or, "I am bored." 
 He considers and reconstructs the drama. He reviews the 
 action of the characters, not from the dramatic point of view, 
 but supplying the details of real life. " Tartufe " suggests 
 " Onuphre." So he proceeds, calmly, but with gusto, deliber- 
 ately observing and taking notes of many items on many 
 points. As for generalization and the discussion of meta- 
 physical laws, these things he does not attempt. His 
 is a work of tact, and not of doctrine ; his special concern 
 is with civilised man and social accidents. In the state- 
 ments he makes he insists upon a few comparisons which, 
 to him, are perfectly obvious, sure, above all things, that 
 different truths can never contradict one another. La 
 Bruyere strikes me as an excellent model of the moralist 
 when so conceived. I cannot imagine a La Bruyere in our 
 own day. We are said to have freedom of the press ; but 
 would a book like La Bruyere 's find favour among us ? The 
 poor author would be disgraced, I fancy, as often as he 
 should abandon the maxim and betake himself to the 
 consideration of individual instances. The gentlemen of 
 Versailles comprehended raillery far better than do some 
 of our superb moderns. Another and more fundamental 
 reason why La Bruyere would be improbable at the present 
 time is, that we have no conception of some of those faults 
 on which the keen glance of the moralist alights, and which 
 he in some sort discovers. For instance, ' fool ' is a word 
 not veiy frequently employed of late, but one which the 
 moralist lived upon in other days. Now the fact is, that we 
 are no longer very sensitive to the defect which this word 
 implies ; and folly, a spice of folly, if joined to some
 
 MADAME GUIZ07. 215 
 
 degree of talent, has become an instrument of success. A 
 little folly, in connection with genius, is a kind of label 
 which proclaims a man's quality. Besides, we live at an 
 era when the public would rather have a man's character 
 officially announced in advance, than be obliged to discover 
 the same for themselves. But since vre have now to speak 
 of an admirable moralist, let us not be too despondent 
 concerning the future of this precious order, which, until 
 lately, had never failed in France. Mme. Guizot herself 
 has somewhere said, that when a repeated and lasting 
 derangement occurs in any order of tilings, some gifted 
 person never fails to appear unexpectedly and remedy the 
 defect. 
 
 Mme. Guizot has been better known and more frequently 
 classified as an author of remarkable treatises on education, 
 than as a moralist, strictly so called. The two volumes 
 collected under the title of " Conseils de Morale," do indeed 
 reveal her in the latter light ; but iu these her assumption 
 of the character appears, if I may so express myself, less 
 natural and spontaneous than we ascertain it to have been 
 after an attentive study of her genius. Her brilliant deb&t 
 as a moralist belongs to a portion of her life which borders 
 upon the eighteenth century, and which has excited less 
 remark than her subsequent labours. 
 
 Mile. Pauline de Meulan was born at Paris in 1773, and 
 educated in the ideas and habits of what was then the first 
 society. Her father, M. de Meulan, receiver-general for the 
 district of Paris, was in the enjoyment of a large fortune, 
 which he dispensed hospitably and in good taste. Her 
 mother, a maiden of Saint- Chamans, was highly connected, 
 being of an ancient family of Perigord, which was even 
 represented in the crusades. The company that frequented 
 the house of M. de Meulan was much the same as that 
 which visited M. Neckerand M. Turgot MM. de Rulhiercs, 
 de Condorcet, Chamfort, De Vaines, Suard, etc. M. de 
 Meulan bad taken, as a secretary, at a high salary, Colle", 
 on whose Memoirs Mile, de Meulan afterwards passed 
 judgment iuthe " Publiciste," and whom, despite his levity,
 
 216 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 she recognised as very honourable and high-minded.* A 
 thoughtful child, tenderly cherished by her mother, intelli- 
 gent but without marked vivacity, and somewhat sickly, 
 little Pauline passed her early years in a social sphere the 
 stamp of which she gradually acquired, and plainly showed 
 in after years. It constituted a rare, truthful, carefully 
 executed and permanent background to her experience. 
 But her infancy and her girlhood showed no traces of that 
 enthusiastic sensibility whereof Mile. Necker, seven years 
 her senior, gave such eloquent proofs. " I have but a 
 vague recollection of ' Werther,' which I read when I was 
 young," she remarks, a few years later ; and so it was to be 
 with many of the books whose hold upon young minds is 
 usually strongest, but to which her own did not respond. 
 As the Revolution drew near, she began to feel its impulse. 
 She took an interest in events, and in the triumph of those 
 opinions, which, as originally developed in 1787 and 1789, 
 were hers, and those of the world immediately about her. 
 But dissensions were not slow to arise, and the increasing 
 violence of the shocks which ensued soon cooled her early 
 ardour. The general impression left upon her mind by the 
 Revolution was that of a frightful spectacle, which outraged 
 all her affections and habits of life, although to some extent 
 conformable to her opinions. Perhaps this was why she had 
 no more youth. This ever-present incongruity was to her a 
 kind of sad and oppressive enigma. The self- same cause, 
 at the self-same time, bespoke the approval and excited the 
 revolt of her reason. In this painful strait were quickened 
 the powers of a mind which we shall see issuing thence strong, 
 critical, incisive, most sensitive to discord, prompt to detect 
 the genuine, and swiftly and surely to dissect it from the false. 
 In these trials, also, her serious mind was attempered to 
 virtue. Her father's death, in the year 1790, the ruin of her 
 family, her forced residence at Passy, and her uninterrupted 
 reflections during the hard winter of 1794 and 1795, caused 
 her to concentrate her moral forces upon the necessities of her 
 nearest friends, and revealed the energy of her character. 
 * See Collfe's Journal for August 1751, vol. i. p. 417.
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 217 
 
 M. de Remusat says it was during this long winter, one day, 
 while she was engaged in drawing, that the suspicion 
 occurred to her that she might possess unusual mental 
 gifts. * The idea of being able, some day, to employ her 
 talents in the discharge of her sacred obligations, moistened 
 her eyes for a moment with noble tears. She read more, 
 she read slowly. Even in the earlier pages of a book, her 
 fruitful and reflective miud turned readily to her own 
 thoughts, which were excited in multitudes by those of the 
 author. She knew English, and perfected herself in it. 
 That clear, sensible, forcible language became as familiar to 
 her as her own. Old friends of her family, such as MM. 
 Suard and De Vaines, encouraged her first attempts with 
 systematic and watchful kindness. A striking piece, 
 written in 1807, and entitled "Friends in Misfortune," seems 
 to me to contain some allusions to this her situation in 
 former years. Of course, all the friends of Mile, de Meulan 
 were not as efficient and invaluable as MM. de Vaines and 
 Suard. The same individuals, who afterwards pitied her so 
 charitably for having become a journalist, sometimes excited 
 an ironical smile by their forward and futile advice. 
 " Friends, many in number," she used to say, "on whom 
 you cannot rely ; a quantity of money to handle, without 
 the power of keeping any ; many debts, but no credit ; 
 much business, but no profit." She was probably thinking, 
 just then, of her own domestic embarrassments, of that 
 fortune of several millions overtaken by complete ruin, 
 which they say she succeeded in reducing to order, and all 
 claims upon which she met, saving nothing for herself but 
 the consciousness of freedom from debt. During the years 
 when this care was upon her, she displayed remarkable 
 practical ability, and a knowledge of business, whose 
 exercise was, however, always restricted to private life. 
 
 * We shall guard against reproducing the facts which we are pleased 
 fco find in M. de Remusat's notice, detailed with the high-minded 
 delicacy peculiar to himself, and of which he is only too sparing (1836). 
 Since then M. de Remusat has appealed from the regret here expressed, 
 jnaking manifold display of his powers, with a versatility and acumen 
 all his own.
 
 218 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 Mile, dc Meulan's first literary effort was a romance in one 
 volume, entitled " Contradictions ; or, What may Happen," 
 published in the year VII. She was about twenty-six years 
 old, and for so young an author, and a woman, her db&t 
 strikes me as very remarkable. In the first chapter, the 
 hero awakes on Decadi* morning, happy in the thought 
 that he is to be married on that day to the lively and 
 agreeable Charlotte. His servant Pierre, a kind of Jacques 
 the Fatalist, a discreet and honest man, remarks, according 
 to his wont, as he attires his master, " Well, monsieur, did 
 1 not always tell you so ? " They repair to the bride's 
 house, find her ready, and thence proceed to the muni- 
 cipality, or hall of the town council, where they were 
 expected. The municipal officer, however, is absent. His 
 wife has been confined on the previous evening, and ho 
 must have his Decadi to make merry with his friends, and 
 celebrate the birth of his child. "To-morrow, then," says 
 everybody ; and the party retire slightly disappointed, all 
 except the rival, who attends the wedding as Charlotte's 
 cousin, and who smiles, while Pierre, the optimist, having 
 greatly incensed his master by the repetition of his favourite 
 speech, rejoins, "W T ho knows? " On the morrow it rains ; 
 they are late at the municipality, and find the officer gone. 
 The next day the fiancte is summoned to the bedside of an 
 old aunt, who is dying. In short, from Decadi to Primidi, 
 from Primidi to Duodi, from mischance to mischance, the 
 marriage with Charlotte, who is something of a coquette, 
 gets itself constantly postponed, the hero himself being 
 rather fickle and very irresolute. The situation, which at 
 first appears piquant, is prolonged till it becomes uninter- 
 esting. The persistent and perpetually recurring joke has a 
 mysterious and preconcerted air. But the idea of choosing 
 ns a subject of a novel a complication arising in a great 
 measure out of the republican calendar, and the confusion of 
 Decadi and Primidi, etc. ; the capability of laying one's scene 
 in a petty provincial town, haunted by graceful but totally 
 
 * Decadi was the tenth and last day of the decade, or period of ten 
 days, which replaced the week in the revolutionary calendar. TK.
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 219 
 
 unheroic figures, bores, coquettes, and men of unstable cha- 
 racter, these things, in a person of her age, argue a decidedly 
 original turn of mind, and a keen sense of the ridiculous, the 
 incongruous, and the unsuitable. In the same manner, the 
 first effort of Despreaux was a satire on the entanglements of 
 Paris. It would be easy to collect from the Contradictions, 
 which might just as well be called the Contrarieties, a 
 number of neat remarks on tattlers and busybodies. There 
 is a very delicate allusion to the evasions which we practise 
 upon ourselves in different cases. "I cannot say," says 
 the hero, " whether everybody is like me, but when I have 
 been long engaged in any matter of unusual interest, and 
 when the difficulties which beset its successful management 
 have compelled me to regard it in many different lights, I 
 grow cold, and cease to attach any importance to what, 
 a moment before, I considered indispensable." And, else- 
 where, "As always happens when one is very much 
 occupied with any plan, however unimpoitant, I forgot, 
 for a moment, all my sorrows." What could a satirical 
 recluse of forty-five say more ? Of melancholy and reverie, 
 so called, there is not a trace, save one touching chapter in 
 " L'Ecu de six Francs," which at once recalls some remarks 
 on Sterne, by Mile, de Lespinasse. Henriette, who finally 
 displaces Charlotte in the hero's heart, is a fresh, plump 
 little lady of twenty-four, not without her charm. Charlotte, 
 the frail, is droll but fascinating. The unimpassioned 
 hero, odd as one of La Bruyere's characters, who dreams 
 one night the pleasant dream that he is going to marry four 
 wives, becomes tender at the last, when he bursts into tears 
 at the feet of Henriette.* The style is good, concise, pure, 
 clear, free from objectionable idioms. Once, indeed, she 
 speaks of a person who had never been regarded under a 
 
 * Mine. Guizot loved to relate that when, in her girlhood, she 
 attempted this first romance, she studied to secure its success by 
 mimicking certain peculiarities of the spirit of her time ; some few, in 
 fact, whose importance she, in her perfect innocence, hardly guessed. 
 She put them in without scruple, as fast as they occurred to her, 
 saying, " It is all for my mother." " If I had suspected more," she 
 declares, " I should have added more such confidence was inspired in
 
 220 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 like aspect, one of those forms of expression which neither 
 Voltaire nor Courier could tolerate. M. Suard should not 
 have allowed this to pass. He should have rooted out the 
 only species of fault with which it was afterwards possible 
 to reproach a style, remarkable, otherwise, for its truth 
 and simplicity, and especially for its fidelity to the thought. 
 We find no more trace, in the Contradictions, of religious 
 sentimentalism, than of any other dreamy and impassioned 
 propensity. The part played by Pierre, with his constant 
 submission to Providence, is marked by a touch of fine and 
 gentle raillery, which is neither very shocking nor very 
 elevating. The excellent Pierre, as we have already said, 
 is a kind of respectable Pangloss, a Jacques the Fatalist, 
 whose acquaintance may be acknowledged. As we pro- 
 nounce, with all due circumspection, these names, which 
 must needs be slightly offensive and suspicious, let us seize 
 the opportunity of adding, that one of the most distinctive 
 traits of Mile. Meulan's mind, as well on her first appear- 
 ance as in those contributions to the " Publiciste " which we 
 are presently to review, is an absence of all false prudery 
 and prim fastidiousness. In the sobriety of her reason and 
 the soundness of her conscience, she traced no factitious and 
 impassable circle about herself. Mile, de Meulan thought 
 it no condescension to pronounce, upon occasion, a deliberate 
 estimate of Colle". Between a paper on the " Princesse 
 de Cleves" and one on "Eugene de Rothelin," she frankly 
 approached the subject of Louvet's romance, and, without 
 disguising her identity or strongly repressing her indignation, 
 she ridiculed it as a sham picture of manners, convicted it of 
 falsity, and remanded it to the seamstresses, the milliners, 
 the hairdressers, and the lawyers' clerks of the pro-revolu- 
 tionary period, for whom, without doubt, it was composed. 
 Mme. Roland, who thought the romance pretty, and who 
 had searched it with secret pleasure for information about 
 
 ine by the simple words, ' It la all for mother.' " Notwithstanding 
 this pleasant explanation of her motives, the style (or tone) of the Con- 
 tradictions is, as a general thing, spontaneous rather than studied, 
 natural and not premeditated.
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 22 1 
 
 the manners of a class which she detested, would have 
 turned purple on the perusal of Mile, de Meulan's article ; 
 but it would have cured her on the spot. 
 
 There is one passage in the Contradictions which shows 
 very plainly how independent was Mile, de Meulan's 
 thought, and how entirely in all matters she formed her 
 own opinions. It is where Pierre, encouraged by the 
 moderate enthusiasm of his master before the colonnade of 
 the Louvre, remarks, "It is fine, of course; but, with 
 monsieur's permission, it is thought so because people have 
 to come a good way to see it. For my part, I very much 
 prefer our church, with the variety effaces and figures in its 
 niches, to these columns that are all alike, and signify 
 nothing." Was this judgment on the Gothic, put into 
 Pierre's mouth in the year VII., intended for anything but 
 a lively sally ? I should not dare affirm it. But, at a later 
 period, I find Mile, de Meulan arriving at opinions in 
 matters of poetry equally novel and just, and by virtue of 
 the same correct and independent reasoning. In two 
 articles which appeared in November 1808, on "The Use 
 of Certain Expressions in Poetry," the critic, taking for 
 her theme a verse of " Baudoin," in which M. Lemercier has 
 used " horses " instead of " coursers, " attempts to determine 
 the conditions under which it is proper to introduce 
 common expressions into verse. In another article, dated 
 March 1809, on the "Christopher Columbus" of the same 
 author, who is now so cautious and negative, but was then 
 in the mood to raise all manner of novel questions, she dis- 
 cusses still further the blending of the tragic and the comic. 
 No false scruples, no superstitious tradition, hampers her 
 sagacious logic in this delicate investigation. She does not 
 look at the picturesque side of things. She does not heed 
 the grand effects of dramatic contrast. She does not, I think, 
 make sufficient allowance for the infinite resources of genius, 
 for improvisation in art ; but at every word you recognise 
 a person of ideas, of nice and healthful taste, free from pre- 
 judice, thorough-going, an enlightened rationalist in all things. 
 
 " Ayton Chapel," which appeared soon after the Contradic-
 
 222 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 tions, and which has very much more of romantic interest, 
 soems to me far less significant as a first attempt and 
 prosngo of the author's future style. Wile, de Meulan, 
 having undertaken to translate the earlier pages of an 
 English novel "Emily Courtney " presently determined to 
 continue it on her own account, and after her own fashion. 
 English novels, full of incident, emotion, and power, were 
 then very much in vogue ; our young author attempted 
 something in the same line, and succeeded. Her imagina- 
 tion helped her in this natural and singularly moving style 
 of composition. Compared with many of the fictitious works 
 of that day, " Ay ton Chapel" appears extremely rational 
 and free from exaggeration and the sentimentalism else- 
 where prevalent. The author, who is sympathetic, but 
 always sensible, controls her characters and her situations, 
 checking the former, and prolonging or cutting short the 
 latter, at her will. This artificiality of arrangement is even 
 too apparent. It tests, and more or less clearly betrays, 
 the unreality of the whole thing. Pretty domestic scenes, 
 family interiors, the effortless consistency of her characters, 
 attest, moreover, that share of the dramatic faculty, that 
 skill in dialogue and stnge arrangement, of which Mme. 
 Guizot has given proof in many of her other works in her 
 Tales, in her Young Student, and even in her Letters on 
 Education ; for, to a moderate degree, and so far as may 
 come within the scope of the moralist, she possessed an 
 inventive imagination. Her ideas by no means remained 
 in the maxim state, but readily assumed, even in her own 
 mind, a playful and conversational form. She could produce 
 living characters that were no mere copies, and inform 
 them with a certain activity. The creative gift, when 
 displayed in its marvellous plenitude, she admired above all 
 others. Moliere, Shakspeare, and Walter Scott were her three 
 great literary heroes the only ones whom she actually loved. 
 M. Suard had established the "Publiciste" some time in 
 1801. M. Guizot's excellent remarks on the salon of this 
 distinguished academician, and the company he received, 
 are directly applicable to the sheet which expressed the
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 223 
 
 views of his clique with moderation, urbanity, and a tone 
 of honest liberalism. M. de Remusat says that the spirit 
 which animated its contents was that of eighteenth-century 
 philosophy, enlightened or intimidated by the Revolution. 
 The " Decade," which was soon to become impossible, repre- 
 sented that philosophy in its entirety its general doctrines 
 embracing politics, religion, literature, and ideology its 
 last remnant of hopeful and proselyting ardour. The 
 "Journal des De"bats" raised at all points the opposite 
 standard. M. Suard, the Abbe* Morellet, and their friends 
 who were partisans of the eighteenth century, and not of 
 the Revolution, who stopped at D'Alembert, refusing to 
 advance to Condorcet, and who in their lives remained 
 practically faithful to the habits of thought and the refined 
 tastes of the olden time, discovered that they were not 
 properly represented by the " De'cade," while, at the same 
 time, they were disturbed and outraged to the last degree 
 each morning by the diatribes and the recantations of the 
 "Journal des De" bats "and the "Mercure." Introduced to the 
 " Publiciste " in the first instance by the friendship of M. 
 Suard, Mile, de Meulan found a shade of opinion harmonis- 
 ing very well with her own, and a convenient vehicle for 
 essays of various kinds. For nearly ten years she furnished 
 contributions to this journal on all sorts of subjects on 
 ethics, society, literature, plays, novels, etc. ; and it would 
 be impossible, without a review of her articles, to form 
 an adequate idea of the versatile talent, the fertility of 
 resource, and the apt originality which she displaj*ed. 
 Sometimes her pieces were anonymous ; but she usually 
 signed them with the initial P., and occasionally with the 
 initial R., and a variety of others. Now replying in an 
 assumed character to her own articles, she maintained a con- 
 troversy with herself, sharply attacking the Geoffreys, the 
 Fie"vees, M. de La Harpe, and M. de Bonald ; for she had a 
 fondness for polemics, and never spared herself on these 
 occasions. Anon, as opportunity offered, she reviewed and 
 passed judgment on some academic eulogy, or some reprint of 
 an old author. Writers like Vauvenargurs, Boileau, Fe"nelon,
 
 224 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 Dnclos, Mine, de SeVigne, Mme. de La Fayette, Mme. des 
 Houlieres, Ninon, Mme. du Chatelet, she avenged of stupid 
 slanders. But whether she briefly characterized Collin 
 d'Harlevillc, Beaumarchais, Picard, Mme. Cottin, Mme. de 
 Souza, discussed the elegy, or gently lectured Mme. de 
 Genlis, her ardent reason never flagged under its varied 
 activities, nor lost itself in futile phrases. Speaking of the 
 logical faculty as exhibited in Boileau, she herself some- 
 where says, " In him it was a delicate, sensitive, irritable 
 organ, wounded by a false sense as a fine ear is wounded by 
 a false note, and rising in its wrath the moment it received 
 a shock." Something of this same vivacity and vigilance 
 of reasoning Mile, de Meulan. also displayed during the 
 singularly active period through which we are to follow her. 
 In this her character of literary critic and philosophical 
 partisan she is not sufficiently well known. The two 
 volumes entitled " Moral Counsels " are almost entirely made 
 up of pages extracted from her articles, of original and strik- 
 ing introductions to critiques on one or another long- 
 forgotten comedy of the day, her opinions of the authors 
 being omitted. While glancing with inexpressible interest 
 over this large collection, the pious labour of domestic love, 
 it has occurred to us to desire that another volume of 
 extracts might be published a volume more literary in its 
 character than the "Conseils de Morale," whose contents 
 should simply preserve their primitive stamp, and which 
 might restore to light, or at least rescue from utter oblivion, 
 many a nice and accurate estimate, many a minute character- 
 istic which will never be so well described again when the 
 same themes are under treatment, many which will never 
 be described at all. 
 
 The first articles furnished to the " Publiciste " by Mile, de 
 Meulan were collected and reprinted some time in 1802, in a 
 small duodecimo, which was never offered for sale. They 
 were also inserted in the volumes of Miscellanies which M. 
 Suard published at about the same time.* It was on this 
 
 * M. Suard published throe volumes of Miscellanies in 1803, and two 
 more at a later period, making five volumes in all. In the preface to
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 22$ 
 
 occasion that Mme. do Stael, always prompt to extend an 
 affectionate welcome to nascent merit, wrote to the acade- 
 mician in question, " I have read with infinite pleasure 
 some of the pieces in your Miscellanies, and I need not say 
 how far I can distinguish from all the rest those signed with 
 the letter P. But pray tell me if Mile, de Meulan is indeed 
 the author of the fragment on Vauvenargues, and those on 
 Thibet, the English, etc. They so far transcend the ordinary 
 efforts even of a gifted woman, that I fancied I detected your 
 hand in their composition." It must have been after re- 
 ceiving M. Suard's reply that Mme. de Stael wrote to Mile, 
 de Meulan, making an offer of her friendship, and begging 
 that she would use her as a banker, and give her the prefer- 
 ence over others.' Mile, de Meulan accepted only the frag- 
 rance of kind feeling which these offers exhaled. In her 
 earlier articles, Mile, de Stael had come up for discussion. 
 Alluding to a sentence in which the author of " Malvina " 
 Mme. Cottin had apparently denied her sex the- capability 
 for producing any philosophical work, the eriti* mentioned 
 .Mme. de StaeTs recent treatise- on Literature, and took 
 occasion to eulogize more than one ef his passages, and 
 animadvert on more than one of its censors ; while, in her 
 turn, although with great tenderness and reserve, she touched 
 upon certain less satisfactory points. Mme. de Stael, who 
 on this occasion received some such ingenious suggestions 
 as the following, "Care less that your praises should be 
 loud than that they should be harmonious," Avas not there- 
 by deterred, as we have seen, from a recognition as honourable 
 to her heart as were the suggestions themselves to the refined 
 and dignified intelligence of Mile, de Meulan. 
 
 Our critic, in the early maturity of her intellect, passed 
 judgment on "Atala," also, in an article marked by 
 temperate admiration, and observations of the most judi- 
 cious character. But even while thus paying homage to 
 
 the two last (1804), ho is careful to state that a large proportion of the 
 pieces they contained are by the author who in the earlier volumes 
 had adopted the signature of P. M. de Barante assures me that the 
 most important of these pieces that, namely, on the History of the 
 French Theatre is by Mile, de Meulan. 
 P
 
 226 SAIN'fE-BEUVE. 
 
 genuine talent, when enlisted in the cause of religion, Mllo. 
 de Meulau remanded to their proper places both Citizen La 
 Harpe and Citizen Vauxcelles, who had made an article of 
 her own on Fe*nelon's "Education des Filles" the occasion 
 of delivering, the one before the Lyceum itself, and the 
 other I know not where, mechanical harangues on irreligious 
 fanaticism and some other well-nigh exploded platitudes. 
 In a letter to a friend whom she supposed to be pondering 
 a pamphlet on behalf of the philosophers, she wittily de- 
 manded, "Why a pamphlet ? Is it to prove that Voltaire 
 is a great poet, and "Zaire" a touching composition, or 
 rather, that the word philosopher is not exactly synonymous 
 with Septembrist ? " * And so on in this douairidre du 
 Marais tone, which she greatly affects. "The mania of 
 your time of life," she ends by saying, "is to want to make 
 men hear reason. The experience of mine teaches me that 
 they had better be left to revert to it themselves ; that 
 time generally restores them to just and right views ; but 
 that justice and right have rarely convinced any one." 
 What a mind is this ! how practical, how trustworthy, 
 beginning where other sages end ! Patience, and with the 
 lapse of years we shall see it undergoing a marvellous develop- 
 ment in the direction of enthusiasm, tenderness, and faith. 
 These well-preserved souls, so chary of passion, have high 
 and warm impulses at the season when those who were more 
 ardent in the beginning are growing apathetic. From 
 beneath their profound reasonings come forth to light their 
 late but noble passions, as the pure wheat of the wise man's 
 last granaries is dispensed when winter and want prevail. 
 So it was with her of whom we speak. She began by 
 assuming the tone of Duclos ; she ended by listening to 
 Bossuet. But we will not anticipate. 
 
 In those of her early contributions to the "Publiciste" 
 which bear date, Florcal, year X., we find, under the title 
 " Detached Thoughts," some few of the very purest stamp and 
 deepest significance ideas at once subtile and comprehen- 
 sive, very pungent, and yet of wide application. For in- 
 * One who defended the massacres of September 1792. TB.
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 227 
 
 stance: "We care nothing for brilliant speeches, unless 
 they present some idea which we have never before enter- 
 tained ; nor for tender speeches, unless they recall some 
 emotion which we have experienced. The difference is 
 precisely that between a new acquaintance and an old 
 friend." And this other : "Glory is the superfluous part 
 of honour, and, like every other superfluity, it can hardly 
 be attained except at the expense of the needful. Honour 
 is less rigid than virtue ; glory more easily satisfied than 
 honour, because the more a man dazzles by his liberality, 
 the less we dream of asking whether he pays his debts." 
 She is always arriving at truth by way of paradox ; she 
 gives us sense under a piquant aspect ; she grasps, as it were, 
 an idea by the point. There is something of Seneca in this 
 early manner of her mind, of Seneca with less of fancy and 
 colour, but with more real soundness and accuracy. A kind 
 of humour gives jemphasis to what she says. She is fond of 
 quoting the philosopher Lichtenberg. Many of these pieces 
 of hers are charming little treatises, which together form a 
 complete whole, rendered coherent by circumstances which 
 she imagines and correspondences which she suggests. Hero 
 she can, as they say, create for herself a form. But her talent 
 is not reserved for special occasions. Many of the durable 
 thoughts collected in "Moral Counsels" were discovered 
 in the midst of articles on some silly novel or insipid vaude- 
 ville, and extracted thence, having germinated spontane- 
 ously, like flowers in the crevice of a wall. * These numer- 
 
 * " The loves of youth need a flavour of surprise, as those of later 
 years need a flavour of habit." (15th Thermidor, year XIII. From the 
 review of a novel entitled " Julie de Saint-Olmont." 
 
 " Love, youth, the sweet natural affections, afford quite as many 
 chances of life as of death ; quite as many sources of consolation as of 
 affliction. We do not surrender to sorrow so long as any other senti- 
 ment has power to distract the mind ; and he who loses what he loves 
 best will by no mtans die if he have anything left to love." (12th 
 Prairial, year XII. From the review of a talc by Mme. de Genlis.) 
 
 " A. woman who has reached the end of youth must not suppose that 
 she has any further concern with passion not even with vanquishing 
 it. Her strength must henceforth lie in calm, and not in courage." 
 (April 19, 1SC3.)
 
 228 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 ons views, never conflicting, because always just, which may 
 even be said to have met and coalesced at a certain depth in 
 Mile, de Meulan's being, constitute, when taken collectively, 
 a view of the world and of society, rather than a philosoph- 
 ical theory of the mind and its laws. A woman who has 
 borne with honour an illustrious name Mine, de Con- 
 dorcet, fifteen years the senior of Mile, de Meulan, and 
 more closely connected than she with the world of the 
 " De'cade " attempted at about this time, in her letters to 
 Cabanis on Sympathy, a strictly philosophic analysis of the 
 various human sentiments. In this essay, which is too little 
 known, it might be possible to detect some points of resem- 
 blance to the style of Mile, de Meulan, as, for example, 
 this : " The mind is like those instruments which overtask 
 and weary the hands that carry without using them." 
 But, in general, their methods are distinct and even con- 
 trary. A sort of mania, like that of Hclvetius, for universal 
 happiness, an eager confidence in the power of truth, 
 and zeal for its discovery (which Mile, de Meulan had not 
 yet attained), gave pathos to the calm analysis of Mme. 
 de Condorcet, and circulated through its pages of abstrac- 
 tions, mingling, in many places, an element of sensibility 
 and eloquence all the more affecting because held in check. 
 What an austere charm attaches to the portrait of the bene- 
 volent and sympathetic man ! And whenever she has to 
 treat of love, how fondly, and yet with what gravity and 
 sadness, does she approach the subject ! What hopeless 
 regret, amid all the wisdom of her speculations, is betrayed 
 by the final allusion to that enchanted cup. Mme. do 
 Condorcet had received the torch and inherited the passion 
 of the eighteenth century. Mile, de Meulan had only its 
 tone and turn of mind and certain of its habits of judgment 
 and speech. Passion was to come to her from another source. 
 It would certainly be a pleasant task, although too long 
 and laborious, to review those of Mine. Guizot's articles 
 which have not been collected, and her many nice and 
 accurate observations on every author she discussed. Al- 
 though literary criticism was never her forte, she has left
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 229 
 
 traces there which I should regret to see effaced and lost 
 for ever. No better or more exhaustive estimate was ever 
 made of Duclos than hers of August 6, 1810. To Boileau 
 is awarded the superior rank, which is justly his due, in 
 several articles dated Fluviose, year XIII. She was not 
 without a certain intellectual sympathy with Boileau, not- 
 withstanding the predominance in her of the moral over 
 the literary element. Her acquaintance with English 
 literature was marvellous. The poets and philosophers of 
 that nation she had thoroughly mastered, and was herself 
 worthy to be compared with the great critical moralists, 
 Addison and Johnson. In July and August 1809, I find 
 articles of hers on Collin d'Harleville. She divides the 
 history of his genius into two distinct periods, separated by 
 the Revolution, the one being marked by success, the 
 other by* reverse. In the latter, Collin, overcome by the 
 spectacle of social chaos, essayed to depict manners, and 
 failed; "for," she says, "it was not society which Collin 
 d'Harleville was destined to portray. The tendency of his 
 mind was rather subjective than objective. He describes 
 what he has felt rather than what he has seen." The name 
 of Collin d'Harleville will keep its place in the history of 
 literature, and he who overlooks Mile, de Meulan's able 
 estimate will be in danger of seeing and judging him less 
 fairly than she. At that time, 1806, Leopold Collin was 
 reprinting and publishing a vast number of letters belong- 
 ing to the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth 
 centuries, from the pen of Mile, de Montpeusier, Ninon, 
 Mme. de Coulanges, Mile, de Launay, etc. These writers 
 Mile, de Meulan discusses like one of themselves, a sort 
 of tardy contemporary. She says of Mme. des Houlieres, 
 " The only fault of her idyls is that of being too determin- 
 ately idyllic : she puts in wit everywhere, and flowers 
 wherever she can." "The talent of Mmo. Cottin is such," 
 she says, " that you cannot criticise her until the emotions 
 she excites have subsided ; and these emotions are very 
 enduring." She sa}'s of the stylo of Mme. de Genlis, that 
 " it is always good, and never better." But along with all
 
 230 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 this subtlety and acumen, by virtue of which she is the 
 latest heir to Mine, de Lambert, she has her strong qual- 
 ities. Polemics never terrified her ; and the blows which 
 she dealt in her vein of ironical courtesy were harder than 
 those which the poet attributes to ' ' Herminie." It delighted 
 her to repeat, over and over again, with an air of smiling 
 malice, the college pedantries of GeoH'roy and company, 
 even on the subject of the Latin, in which she was some- 
 what versed."'* But her most remarkable controversy, 
 and one which is worthy of republication, was that which 
 she carried on with M. de Bonald, in Venddmiaire and 
 Brumaire, in the year XIV. The author of "Primitive 
 Legislation " had set forth in the " Mercure," at great length, 
 and after the manner of violent and paradoxical minds, 
 when moved to the support of absolute theses, the idea 
 that he who is neither a Christian nor a Catholic must of 
 necessity be an atheist. Mile, de Meulan, under the guise 
 of "A Disputant," reviewed the obstinate reasoner with 
 sharp and telling ridicule. " Discussion, monsieur, is a 
 necessity. "Without it life had better be short ; it would, 
 in fact, be altogether too long. I have found a perfect 
 treasure in your argument against Deism. If I understand 
 you, monsieur, truth is necessarily one of two extremes, 
 because the same proposition cannot have degrees of truth," 
 etc. An officious partisan of M. Bonald interfered during 
 the quarrel, and addressed several letters to the " Publi- 
 ciste," in which he endeavoured to soften his friend's 
 paradox, and also animadverted on the tone of raillery 
 which the "Disputant" had employed. The latter then 
 closes the discussion by a last vigorous letter, which rises 
 
 * Mile, de Meulan, like several of our distinguished French writers, 
 was related to antiquity only by a Latin turn of mind. She had something 
 in common with Seneca ; that is to say, she touched antiquity through 
 the most modern of the ancients. In an article in the " Archives Lit- 
 tcraires " (vol. iii. page 325), she observes, " The ancients frequently 
 s.-ii'l 'swift as light,' but, if I mistake not, 'swift as thought "is of modern 
 origin." On this particular point she was mistaken, as Boissonade (page 
 818 of his " Aristsenete ") and Dugas-Montbel (in his Observations on 
 the fifteenth book of the Iliad) have shown by repeated instances.
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 231 
 
 to a strain of eloquence. After quoting this remark of an 
 ancient writer, that "an idea which cannot stand the test, 
 of ridicule is at least suspicious," after citing Pascal on 
 Grace, Boileau on the Love of God, and M. de la Harpe 
 himself making merry over the Theophilanthropists, Mile. 
 de Meulan retorts upon her adversaries their reproach of 
 danger to be apprehended to the cause of religion from this 
 too animated party strife. " You discuss in the newspapers 
 what you do not want discussed after the manner of news- 
 papers. You introduce the subject of religion. May not 
 others do the same ? A man who is a reproach to literature 
 constitutes himself the guardian of religion, and the friends 
 of religion applaud ! She is abandoned to such hands as 
 may deign to undertake her service, and considered only 
 too fortunate in obtaining defenders at all ! No, monsieur, 
 you must reserve yourself for discussions not intended for 
 the public, for more inviolable asylums, and a less corrupt- 
 ible audience," and so on to the end of the letter. Thus 
 combat suited her spirit well ; she was born for fiery argu- 
 ments, and the earnest pursuit of truth. 
 
 Much was, of course, said in the world of the articles 
 of Mile, de Meulan, and they were variously regarded. 
 Talents so remarkable, a pen so free in the treatment of 
 every siibject, do not invariably awaken a spirit of sincere 
 good-will. It was impossible to refuse respect to the 
 author, and society fell back on the question of personal 
 decorum. Those "friends in misfortune," which she has 
 hit off so fairly, those "Job's comforters," always the 
 same, bemoaned aloud the necessity which reduced a 
 woman of her birth to the writing of newspaper articles, 
 and particularly of dramatic criticism. Disgusted with this 
 venomous compassion, she replied to it nobly by her Letter 
 of a Female Journalist to a Friend, published December 18, 
 1807. "My articles are censured, are they, my friend? 
 That, of course, is to their credit ; but you tell me tho 
 censure extends to me personally, to the stand I have 
 taken as contributor to a journal, and especially as a critic 
 of theatrical novelties. I am reproached, therefore, with
 
 232 SA1NTE-BE UVE. 
 
 being a woman, not surely with being a journalist, for those 
 of my censors who know me know very well why I am that. 
 But do they not fear that they may have wherewitli to 
 reproach themselves, if, by words lightly uttered, they 
 succeed in destroying, or at least in rendering more diffi- 
 cult of exercise, the courage found requisite for the sacrifice 
 to what I considered a duty, of the conventionalities which 
 my education and habits had taught me to respect. I 
 know them, my friend, and so do you, these convention- 
 alities which make the rdle of a journalist the very oddest 
 for a woman to choose, if, indeed, it ever were adopted 
 from choice. It cannot, I assure you, appear as ridiculous 
 to these friends of yours as to me, for they have never seen 
 it so near. If they knew, as well as I, the grave interests 
 at stake, the important considerations to be weighed, the 
 absurd griefs to be consoled, and the still more absurd 
 homage to be accepted; the buzz of petty passions, whose 
 noise invades a woman's very solitude ; and if they could 
 see, amid all this, a work to be done without charm for the 
 mind, or indemnification for the vanity, then they might 
 say what they thought, and think, if they pleased, that I 
 had undertaken - this work for my own pleasure. But let 
 them not attempt to pity me, for that would be as un- 
 reasonable as to blame. 
 
 ' Ce que j'ai felt, Abner, j'al cru le devoir faire.' * 
 
 "I think so still, and I see no reason why I should now 
 distress myself about annoyances which I foresaw without 
 trepidation. You know how gladly and hopefully I sub- 
 mitted to these ; you saw me face them with something of 
 pride, perhaps, when I formed the resolution whose sole 
 merit lay in these annoyances. Circumstances have not 
 changed since then, and why should my feelings ? " Here 
 is a woman wholesomely penetrated with the ideas of duty 
 and of work, such as regenerated society imperatively 
 demands ; and such Mme. Guizot always remained. Issuing 
 from the idle and polished salons of the eighteenth century, 
 I have done what I thought it my duty to do.
 
 MADAME GU1ZOT. 233 
 
 she becomes a shining example of vigorous, intellectual, 
 efficient womanhood, in the first rank of the middle class. 
 
 During her long connection with the " Publicists " there 
 occurred an incident, often related, and almost romantic in 
 its character, as much so as is possible, at least, between 
 persons of intelligence and circumspection, and whose 
 influence upon the destiny of Mile, de Meulan was supreme. 
 In the month of March 1807, under the pressure of fresh 
 domestic misfortunes, and with health greatly impaired, 
 she had resolved to suspend her labours for a time, when a 
 letter arrived containing the offer of articles which the 
 writer would attempt to render worthy of her, as long 
 as her own should be interrupted. The author of this 
 anonymous letter, and of the articles which, after some 
 slight hesitation, she accepted, was M. Guizot. Very 
 young, and still obscure, he had heard M. Suard speak of 
 Mile, de Meulan and her situation, and he addressed her. 
 We find, therefore, in the "Publiciste" for the ensuing 
 months, certain miscellaneous, dramatic, and literary 
 criticisms signed F. This singular circumstance came 
 presently to constitute a stronger bond between these two 
 eminent minds than the inequality of their ages, and the 
 want of harmony, even, in their opinions, would probably 
 else have allowed. M. Guizot brought with him into the 
 Avorld of letters decided political and religious convictions, 
 which had still something of the absolute rigour of youth. 
 Inimical to the eighteenth century and its scepticism, rather 
 than to the Revolution, whose results, with his own inter- 
 pretations and modifications, he accepted, he encountered in 
 Mile, de Meulan precisely the opposite temper. The latter, 
 moreover, held rather, as we have seen, to the idea that 
 "time alone brings men to just and right views, but that 
 justice and right have rarely convinced any one." She 
 used also to say, " Reason, unhappily, is only for reasonable 
 people." The young man, fresh from Nisines and Geneva, 
 and guarding, with Calvinistic fervour, his faith in Unitarian 
 Christianity and a sort of enthusiastic rationalism, felt the 
 duty and the necessity of pursuing some definite end, of
 
 234 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 convincing others and urging them towards the same, of 
 testifying before the world to the idea that was active and 
 dominant in himself. In a word, when he and Mile, de 
 Meulan met at a great intellectual altitude, it was the 
 encounter of mental tendencies of an opposite, not to say 
 hostile, origin. True it is, that during her years of long 
 and serious labour, Mile, de Meulan had learned a more 
 sincere devotion to truth ; she had learned to believe in its 
 utility, to defend it, to agonize for it, indirectly at least, by 
 attacking every form of error, and also to bring each act of 
 her austere life under the already religious empire of her 
 reason and her will. Yet it was not the least of M. Guizot's 
 intellectual triumphs, to conquer and warm up by degrees 
 to his own convictions and hopes to regenerate, in short, 
 by union with himself that other and maturer mind, 
 to which the scope of M. Suard had long sufficed, and 
 which seemed to have attained the natural limit of its 
 growth in a striking originality. 
 
 For the rest, when we see what he gave, we can imagine 
 what he must have received. A mind as forcible as Mile, 
 de Mculan's is not vanquished and occupied save by one 
 who can modify and accommodate his own at many points. 
 In these cases of reciprocal action, each of the actors, in 
 turn, seems to have triumphed, according as we examine the 
 other. And here, while retaining the prevailing influence, 
 the victorious spirit must have received, and that consciously, 
 its own indispensable share in the mitigation of its in- 
 tolerance, and in a precocious knowledge of the world, and 
 of the manipulation of society and men. 
 
 Their marriage did not take place until April 1812. 
 And now a new era that in which she is best known 
 begins for Mme. Guizot. The glow of affection heightened 
 in her the ardour of conviction ; and this twofold fire, warm- 
 ing rather than shining, was to sustain and animate to the 
 end her years of sober happiness. We have no longer to do 
 with a moralist of the expiring eighteenth century, but 
 with a writer of the new and busy age ; an assiduous and 
 careful mother, who has felt sorrow, and is forming men ;
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 235 
 
 with a righteous philosopher intent upon proving the 
 harmony, in every order of creation, between right and 
 duty, faith and inquiry, liberty and law. Her style becomes 
 less vivacious than in the past, less paradoxical and incisive, 
 and loses its tone of loud and reckless irony. A constant 
 feeling for the genuine, the true, the right, controls and 
 directs, at all points, the mere artistic sense. Her principles 
 are now fixed and high ; her aim, henceforth, a practical one. 
 Her first attempt in this direction was made after her 
 marriage, and consisted of several articles, tales, and 
 dialogues, inserted in the " Educational Review," a compila- 
 tion by M. Guizot, whose publication was interrupted by the 
 events of 1814. She also published at about the same time a 
 volume of juvenile stories, the first of her works, to which, 
 urged by a sense of moral responsibility, she attached her 
 name. This line of labour, which had naturally been 
 suspended during the early years of her husband's political 
 career, she resumed in 1821, being moved thereto both by 
 her own zeal for doing good, and by their honourable 
 domestic necessities. She produced successfully, "Ralph 
 and Victor ; or, The Young Student," in 1821, the "New 
 Tales" in 1823, and "Familiar Letters on Education " in 
 1826, which last is her true monument. " A Family" did 
 not appear till 1828, after the author's death. In all these 
 works, the "Familiar Letters" excepted, which must be 
 considered by themselves, her excellent sense takes on the 
 form of happily conceived fiction, of probable and interesting 
 incident, where the author never intrudes herself. She who, 
 at twenty-five, had assumed the airs of a person of uncertain 
 age, or even a douairiere du Marais, enters no less 
 successfully, as she grows older, into the little world of 
 children from ten to fourteen, and constantly brings home 
 to them some wholesome evangelical moral, which she 
 adapts to their comprehension without detracting from its 
 dignity. " A fond and favourite idea of hers," says the 
 preface to "A Family," "was, that the same moral 
 education can and ought to be given to all ranks ; that, 
 under the sway of the most various external circumstances,
 
 236 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 in good or bad fortune, whether the lot bs obscure or 
 distinguished, uneventful or stormy, man may attain there 
 may be induced in the -child an inner development almost 
 identical the same integrity, the same delicacy, the same 
 refinement of thought and feeling ; that the human soul, 
 in short, bears within it something which renders it equal 
 to all the chances and changes of human condition ; and 
 that all we have to do is to reveal to itself the secret of its 
 strength, and teach the true method of its employment. 
 And how was Mme. Guizot, with her satirical reason, her 
 somewhat scornful habits of thought, led so swiftly and 
 surely to this, the plenary idea of genuine human democracy ? 
 Whence came to her the singular and vivid inspiration of all 
 her subsequent works? She had become a mother. Her 
 filial pity had been of the warmest. Her maternal love, as 
 with all who marry late, was transcendent, clinging with 
 unparalleled tenacity to the son whom she had never hoped 
 to see, and upon whom, to use the father's happy expression, 
 she has left her perfect impress. * Her treatises on education 
 were therefore, in her own eyes, an act of maternal affection 
 and duty. In the preface to the "Familiar Letters" she 
 jtrows eloquent about what she cttlls this precious interest. 
 Before she had a child of her own she had laboured and 
 written for the support of her mother, nothing more. 
 She had doubted -the efficiency of truth and reason in the 
 world. She beheld absurdity, stupidity, and wrong, and 
 she was not very hopeful. But once a mother, she felt the 
 necessity of believing in a better future and a perfectible 
 humanity, in the virtue of those generations that would 
 be contemporary with her child. She placed little depend- 
 ence upon man, and saw no way to ameliorate his condition 
 save by influencing his childhood, a work which she under- 
 took without delay. Persons of thirty, with some knowledge- 
 df the world and of life, if they are neither fathers nor 
 mothers, and have not the pure and simple faith of the 
 catechism, are often sorely embarrassed in the presence of 
 childhood. What shall be said to this smiling, charming 
 * He has since been snatched away in the flower of his youth.
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 237 
 
 being, with the evident germ of future faults? -'How 'is 
 lie to be gradually initiated into life ? How enlightened 
 and not saddened ; how left happy and not deceived ? The 
 man of sensibility will follow the example of the poet Gray, 
 who, on revisiting Eton College, and seeing the merry boys 
 at play, exclaims, after a complacent description of their 
 gambols, 
 
 "Alas! regardless of their doom, 
 
 The little victims play ! 
 No sense have they of ills to come, 
 
 Nor care beyond to-day ; 
 Yet see how all around 'em wait 
 The ministers of human fate, 
 
 And black misfortune's baleful train ! 
 Ah, show them where in ambush stand, 
 To seize their prey, the murderous band ! 
 
 Ah, tell them they are men. 
 
 "These shall the fury pnssions tear, 
 
 The vultures of the mind, 
 Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear, 
 
 And Shame, that skulks behind ; 
 Or pining Love shall waste their youth, 
 Or Jealousy, with rankling tooth, 
 
 That inly gnaws the secret heart 1 
 And Envy wan, and faded Care, 
 Grim-visaged C07nfortless Despair, 
 
 And Sorrow's piercing dart. 
 
 " To each his sufferings ; all are men 
 
 Condemned alike to groan, 
 The tender for another's pain, 
 
 Th' unfeeling for his own. 
 Yet, ah, why should they know their fate, 
 Since Sorrow never comes too late, 
 
 And Happiness too swiftly flies? 
 Thought would destroy their paradise. 
 No more ; where ignorance is bliss 
 
 'Tis folly to be wise." 
 
 But when one is not a sensitive and melancholy bachelor, 
 like Gray, but a father, or, still more, a mother, these 
 vague fears, and this disconsolate quietism, cease to satisfy. 
 We become more interested in vigilance, and more accessible
 
 238 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 to hope. We realize that many of those dread shadows, 
 with which imagination peoples the distance, will vanish 
 one by one, as our travellers advance. Mme. Gnizot, whose 
 turn of mind was naturally and in all respects the opposite 
 of vague and dreamy, who hated everything aimless and 
 phantasmal, felt all the anxieties which accompany 
 maternity, and made a direct attack upon the difficulty by 
 which she was confronted. Hitherto, she had believed man 
 to be incorrigible, and rationality a happy accident, at most 
 a special gift. She had written, with clever raillery, on the 
 Inutility of Good Reasons. She now desired to atone for 
 her previous prejudice, by going to the root of the matter, 
 and approaching humanity on its only sensitive and amenable 
 side, that of childhood. The whole remnant of her intel- 
 lectual life was devoted to the development and application 
 of this salutary idea. 
 
 Mile, de Meulan had frequently had occasion to broach 
 her ideas on the subject of education. In 1802, in an 
 article called forth by Fe'nelon's little treatise, she says, 
 "Educational precepts have always seemed to me the 
 least reliable things in the world. Principles must be so 
 variously applied, and rules ate subject to so many excep- 
 tions, that a treatise of this kind cannot be too short, 
 because it can neither be sufficiently long nor sufficiently 
 comprehensive to include every individual case." Under 
 the form of Letters of a Mother to a Son-in-law (Thennidor, 
 year XII.), she had discussed with varied ability the 
 question of public education for women, taking the negat- 
 ive side, displaying extreme good sense as well as much 
 wit, or rather pungency, and her own most free and easy 
 style of composition. How altered is her tone, when in the 
 first of the Familiar Letters, Mme. de Attilly opens her 
 heart, "overflowing," as she says, "with tender concern 
 for her children ! " Touches of sarcasm are not wanting 
 here and there, as in the description of " Uncle de Revcy," 
 who, when he seated himself to his whist, always declared 
 it to be improving. In the main, however, the work is 
 entirely serious, which does not preclude an extraordinary
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 239 
 
 degree of subtilty upon many points. One should have 
 authority and experience, and his own ideas on the subject 
 under discussion should be formed before he is fitted to 
 pass judgment on a treatise like this, whose chief import- 
 ance lies in the utility and feasibility of its suggestions. 
 "The hour of political reform is also that of educational 
 schemes," says Mme. de Re'musat, a gifted and generous 
 woman, who has paid, after a charming fashion, her own 
 debt of service to the world. In fact, there has been since 
 "Emile" no lack of educational theories, and their number 
 has redoubled in these latter days ; or rather the special out- 
 cry against the education and the condition of women has 
 been renewed with clamorous insistance. Amid so many 
 vain declamations, in which there figure at intervals some 
 considerable difficulties and some real grievances, Mme. 
 Guizot's book, which embraces the whole subject of educa- 
 tion, masculine as well as feminine, offers a kind of honest 
 and manly compromise between old ideas and modern pro- 
 gress. What I have called "a compromise," was, to her 
 mind, nothing more nor less than truth adapted to the 
 needs of humanity, but resting on an impregnable basis. 
 The twelfth and thirteenth letters, which are marked by 
 great philosophic beauty, set forth those principles of 
 reason and conscience upon which she founds the idea of 
 duty, and show that her chief care is to suggest, and make 
 gradually clear to the child's mind, the notion of authority, 
 that he may learn early and freely, and as far as in him 
 lies, to direct his own young will thereby. Early to diffuse 
 about the growing mind a moral atmosphere, to give it for 
 a guide the love of right, to make the child as soon as 
 possible a conscientious individual, this is her earnest 
 aim, and, despite conflicting prejudices, we must concede, 
 as we listen to her, that she has discovered and indicated 
 the true means of success. It is at least certain that in the 
 majority of instances, when the child is, as they say, well 
 born, when there does not lurk within him any faculty so 
 eccentric, or temper so obstinate, as utterly to baffle calcu- 
 lation, a good result must follow such care as she enjoins.
 
 2 4 o SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 For the rest, Mme. Guizot, whose arguments are founded 
 on absolute fact, foresees and freely admits that there may 
 be cases for which her system will not suffice. "I see 
 more and more clearly each day," says Mme. de Attilly, 
 "that youth is, of all ages, the one which is least explic- 
 able by childhood. The character seems then to be swayed 
 by an independent influence, strength to resist which we 
 may indeed supply, but with no previous conception of 
 how that strength will have to be employed." Mme. Guizot 
 alludes in one place to a dictum of Mrs. Hannah More about 
 the total depravity of childhood, and combats it. On this 
 point, let it be observed, Mme. Guizot is decidedly of the 
 present century of the thorough and indomitable school of 
 experimental philosophy. She will allow no mysterious 
 and irrational element in education. Here is her essential 
 point of difference with Mme. Necker de Saussure, that 
 other excellent author, with many of whose views she coin- 
 cides, as Mme. Necker herself, in her second volume, is 
 pleased repeatedly to remark. She occupies a sort of mean 
 between Jean Jacques and Mme. Necker, being at the same 
 time practical, which Jean Jacques is not, and reasonable, 
 which Mme. Necker does not think it enough to be. In 
 the second volume, the forty-ninth and fiftieth letters, with 
 those that immediately follow, discuss exhaustively, and 
 with admirable moderation, the whole delicate and embar- 
 rassing question of the .religious education required by 
 children. If her views do not meet and satisfy the ideas 
 of those who adhere firmly to pure faith and rigorous tradi- 
 tions, she has the advantage of answering and providing 
 for all the other more or less complex requirements and 
 situations likely to be encountered in society, and also of 
 proposing an attainable result both to Mme. Mallard and 
 Mme. de Lassay. Somewhere in the discussion the name 
 and authority of Turgot are invoked, and we are made to 
 feel that the author's preferences, though modified arid 
 extended, are still retrospective, and cling to the eighteenth 
 century. Mme. Guizot's book will stand next to "Emile," 
 marking the difference, in this particular direction, between
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 241 
 
 fr.lie bold guesses of genius, and the sound, temperate, recti- 
 fied reasoning of our own day ; just as, in politics, M. de 
 Tocqueville's " Democracy " is an advance upon the "Contrat 
 Social." Invaluable for consultation to those who would, 
 by previous training, prepare strong men fov our painful 
 modern society, this work also contains pages of morality, 
 the finest in their manner of exposition, and, saving a few 
 of M. Jouffroy's, the most earnest and the most convincing 
 with which the doctrines of spiritualistic rationalism have 
 inspired any philosopher of our age. 
 
 What share, apart from her own personal labours, had 
 Mme. Guizot in those of her husband, in all those valu- 
 able accessory publications by which he accompanied his 
 main historical work, and in which, beginning with the 
 translation of Gibbon, she must have been his principal 
 auxiliary? Let it suffice us to know that she had espoused 
 all his interests, his studious labours as well as his con- 
 victions, and let us not attempt to discover what she 
 preferred to conceal. Her happiness was great. Her sensi- 
 bility, which grew with her years (refined privilege of a 
 virtuous life), caused her to cling to that happiness more 
 and more tenderly I had almost said regretfully as time 
 went by. This sensibility, whereof she had so deliberately 
 declared in youth, sensibility spares us more suffering than 
 it brings, for it removes at one stroke the pains of egotism, 
 vanity, ennui, and inertia, this sensibility, to which she 
 owed so much pure delight, did its spring within her never 
 fail ? Did not her soul, as she neared the end, even hers, 
 strong and calm reasoner that she was, grow sorrowful? 
 Her failing health amid a life so congenial, so virtuous, so 
 affectionate ; the great disparity in age between her husband 
 and herself ; her secret yearnings ; her one acute presenti- 
 ment that husband and child would yet be made happy by 
 another than herself, these things doubtless mingled with 
 her last years more of passion and pathos than she would 
 ever have dared anticipate in her youth. The exquisite 
 rejuvenation in her impressions of all things was revealed 
 in a thousand different ways. With the exception of a 
 Q
 
 242 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 tour in Languedoc and the South, where M. Guizot had 
 taken her in 1814, she had never travelled much. She had 
 scarcely seen the country, much less resided there ; but she 
 enjoyed it in her last summers as only those who have been 
 forced to live by wax lights enjoy verdure and the fields. 
 The tiniest tree in Passy or in the Bois de Boulogne gave 
 her a new and refreshing emotion. 
 
 Yet she never described nature. Her care was less to 
 depict what she felt than to express what she thought. 
 She did not love art supremely. She looked rather to the 
 substance than to tho form, and preferred modern thought 
 to antique beauty. Her ingenious, and perhaps too just, 
 idea was, that the emotional element cannot predominate 
 in a work of art without being withdrawn from the life of 
 the artist. In one of her pieces, dated July 17, 1810, I 
 read, "Our torch is lighted at the flames of sentiment," says 
 the poet in "La Metromanie ; " and I suppose that sensi- 
 bility may in fact be regarded as the ailment of poesy, but 
 only when it is not otherwise employed, and when, being 
 entirely at the poet's command, it serves to stimulate with- 
 out absorbing his imagination. It is necessary, no doubt, 
 that a poet should be impressible, but I do not know thaf 
 it is desirable for him to be deeply moved ; and she con. 
 tinues refuting, or rather interpreting, Boileau's verses on 
 the elegy. This idea that there is a species of illusion, or 
 even of deception, inherent in art, did not prevent her 
 being extraordinarily moved, towards the close of her life, 
 by certain books and dramatic representations, moved 
 even beyond the point of enjoyment, so that the effect 
 of her agitation was more than she could bear. Herself a 
 simple, practical person who had known sorrow, she did not 
 readily yield to any artificial grief, neither could she submit 
 to any restraint, or accept any consolation in the region 
 of the ideal. M. de Remusat has adduced the following 
 pathetic avowal made by her in 1821 : "The effect of a 
 work of art should be unimpaired by any association with 
 the actual ; for the moment it seems real, the impression 
 produced is painful, and soon becomes intolerable. This is
 
 MADAME GUIZOT. 243 
 
 why I cannot endure, on the stage, or in poems or novels, 
 under the name of Tancred, or Zaire, or Othello, or Delphine, 
 the spectacle of great and fatal anguish of spirit. As far 
 as joy and sorrow arc concerned, my own lite has been so 
 full, so intense, that I cannot explore its depths, save with 
 a trembling hand. With me the actual pierces through all 
 the enveloping veils of art. My imagination once stimu- 
 lated, I realize the whole at a flash. It is long, however, 
 since the music in Agnes has produced upon me the ordinary 
 effect. I never could bear the finale of Romeo and Juliet : 
 only thit of Agnes draws tears without rending my heart." 
 Was it, then, by virtue of a rare sympathy, a kind of predi- 
 lection, that she undertook, at the very last, to treat that 
 story of Abelard and Heloise, where asceticism is crossed 
 and penetrated by passion, and the accomplished abbess 
 often breathes the woes of Sappho in the words of Seneca ? 
 This earnest effort of her pen, eminently successful in its 
 completed half, was interrupted by her death. 
 
 But if, as Mme. Guizot's sensibilities grew more refined, 
 they acquired a kind of pensive cast, her deepening religious 
 experience was disturbed by none of those anxieties with 
 which religion is too often associated in serious and sensitive 
 minds. Born a Catholic, early tainted with the indiffer- 
 entism which she inhaled in the very atmosphere of tho 
 time, restored after doubts which had never been systematic- 
 ally hostile to a fervent Christian deism, a genuine piety, 
 she rested here, and was at peace. She had no oppressive 
 consciousness of the unfathomable depths of grace and 
 salvation disclosed along her path. She simply trusted. 
 Prayer, as an interview with a kind and omnipresent Being, 
 strengthened and consoled her. One day, shortly after her 
 return from Plombieres, where she had vainly sought some 
 comfort from the conversation of those about her, and had 
 meditated long and deeply on the question whether indi- 
 viduality outlasts death, or the soul is absorbed in the 
 Supreme Being, she suddenly revived from her extreme 
 prostration, and in a voice that gathered strength by 
 degrees, she reviewed the various opinions, and declared
 
 244 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 her clear and confident conviction of the continuance of 
 the soul's personality in the bosom of God. On the 1st of 
 August 1827, at ten o'clock in the morning, her lingering 
 illness drew near its close. She had begged her husband 
 to read her something good, and he had read a letter of 
 Fenelon's to an invalid, and then passed to a sermon of 
 Bossuet on the immortality of the soul. While he was 
 reading, she passed away. She was buried, in conformity 
 with her own desire, with the rites of the Reformed Church, 
 to which her husband belonged, and whose funeral service did 
 not contradict her own simple creed. Truthful to the end, 
 she would have nothing factitious and conventional, nothing 
 inconsistent with her most ser.rct thoughts, even in those 
 last ceremonies which follow death. 
 
 She took a lively pleasure in conversation, loving it, 
 not as an occasion for shining, bat as a means of mental 
 stimulus and exercise. Her manner may have seemed 
 slightly brusque at first. Her inquisitive reason, as she 
 somewhere says, searched the depths of every subject. 
 But as her interest grew, her ideas multiplied, and, with- 
 out at all intending it, she exercised a powerful influence. 
 "What more can we, who had not the honour of her personal 
 acquaintance, say of this gifted, sagacious, exemplary, and 
 virtuous woman, who has had no superior, in our generation, 
 save Mme. de Stael ? and even Mme. de Stael did not excel 
 as a thinker, but only in a few special gifts. The sentiment 
 which she inspires is such as can be expressed only in terms 
 of respectful admiration, such that it seems almost a sin 
 against one who was always intent upon being, rather than 
 seeming, to pronounce on her behalf the words future and 
 glory.
 
 MADAME DE REMUSAT. 
 
 I HAVE always had a great fancy for unsuspected authors. 
 We meet them in society, we enjoy their wit, we display our 
 own in their presence, but without the remotest suspicion 
 that we are associating with a writer, a man or woman 
 of letters, none of our acquaintances, in fact, having less 
 of that air. But there comes a time, a summer in the 
 country, a season of ennui, when, life's brilliant years 
 being over, the individual, generally the woman in question, 
 takes up the pen. For her own behoof solely, and at first 
 without definite aim, she composes a romance, or arranges 
 her reminiscences, or even merely writes to her absent 
 friends letters which are a trifle long, and none too formal. 
 But fifty years hence, when the rest of us are ail dead, 
 when the professional litterateur who was the rage in his 
 day no longer finds readers, and his thirty heavy, old- 
 fashioned volumes lie buried in funereal catalogues, the 
 modest, intelligent woman will be studied and enjoyed 
 almost as much as by us her contemporaries. Her pure 
 and vivacious utterances will be known and loved, and she 
 will have become one of the gracious and enduring orna- 
 ments of that literature wherewith she seemed to concern 
 herself as little as did we when at her side. 
 
 Examples of this sort of literary fate have not been tin- 
 frequent in the past, and the future, we must hope, holds 
 a few of them in reserve. All things are not henceforth to 
 be done professionally and deliberately, and the turn of un- 
 premeditated efforts will come. In the refined and exclusive 
 lineage of the de Se'vigne's and the do Mottevilles, Mme. de 
 Re"musat will hold a prominent place, especially after her 
 
 245
 
 246 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 "Memoirs of the Empire" shall have been given to the world. 
 Meanwhile we may be permitted to claim for her the author- 
 ship of an excellent Essay on the Education of Women, 
 which has recently been reprinted. We shall not, however, 
 confine ourselves to the book. The individual will attract 
 us far more powerfully, and we shall hold it an honour and 
 a privilege to make our readers intimately acquainted with 
 this noble-minded woman. Some of them remember her 
 well ; others have barely heard of her. Ours is the thorough 
 knowledge which springs from long and confidential friend- 
 ship. To describe her worthily and minutely would seem 
 to many, no doubt, the natural and easy task of another 
 writer, as fastidious as he is earnest ; but filial modesty is 
 the most delicate of all sentiments. 
 
 Claire Elizabeth Gravier de Vergennes was born at Paris 
 in the year 1780. She was grand-niece to that minister of 
 Louis XVI. who bore the same name. Her father, who held 
 the office of Master of Bequests, had been intendant at Anch, 
 and occupied in Paris, on the outbreak of the Revolution, 
 an important post, amounting to a kind of general director- 
 ship. He took part in the administration of the Commune 
 in 1789, but was soon set aside, and perished on the scaffold 
 in 1794. His widow (n6e Mile, de Bastard), whose influence 
 predominated in the education of their daughters, was a 
 worthy woman, of an original mind, acute, hvely, and ex- 
 tremely intelligent. Deeply moved by the experiences of 
 her time, she seems to have been endowed with that superi- 
 ority of character and insight which enables one, while 
 comprehending life as it is, to control and make it what it 
 should be for others. Mme. de Vergennes reared her two 
 girls soberly and even austerely, with a view to the altered 
 social conditions which she foresaw. The sudden diminu- 
 tion of importance which the family experienced on the 
 death of the minister uncle in 1787 was her first lesson. It 
 did not surprise her, for she had early studied her La 
 Bruyere. She entertained a deep distrust of the Revolution, 
 and her advice to her husband had been to quit France 
 before matters reached a fatal extremity. He not consent-
 
 MADAME DE REMUS AT. 247 
 
 ing, she resolved to abide by Ms decision, to face misfortune 
 bravely, and to save their young family on the morrow of 
 their disasters. 
 
 We may therefore consider that Mme. de Remusat was 
 fortunate in her cradle. By her first decisive circumstances 
 of environment in infancy, there had been planted and de- 
 veloped within her the germs of a prudence which was to 
 grow with her growth. Of that social medium to which she 
 was born, as of that in which her senior, Mile, de Meulan, 
 grew up, it may be said (I employ, as a matter of con- 
 venience, the forcible words of another), " It was a family 
 which had furnished high functionaries, and moved in 
 good society, and, without exactly belonging either to the 
 aristocratic or philosophical clique, had points of contact 
 with them both, and gave its support, though cautiously, 
 to the movements of the age," just as, in politics, M. de 
 Vergennes had helped forward the Revolution in America, 
 and, as a colleague of Turgot and Necker, prepared the way 
 for the Revolution in France, without being either a 
 philosophe or an innovator. 
 
 Little Claire remained under the sheltering wing and 
 immediate authority of her mother until their severest 
 troubles were over. Afterwards, in an extremely retired 
 part of the country, she protracted, beside her younger 
 sister,* her own simple, peaceful, studious childhood, 
 approaching without anxiety the period of early youth, 
 while the inappreciable substratum of her healthful, 
 affectionate, solid, and yet refined character was accumulat- 
 ing day by day. The qualities wherewith nature had 
 endowed her were consolidated by a slow and careful 
 education. Her very countenance and the contour of her 
 features announced, or rather betrayed, a little too clearly, 
 it may be, the sober character of her private tastes, which 
 nevertheless must not be exaggerated, for those tastes were 
 never beyond her years. Her classic face was animated 
 most of all by the expression of her very beautiful black 
 eyes. The rest of her features, though not striking at first, 
 Now Comtesse de Nsnsouty.
 
 248 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 rather gained upon inspection, and her whole person seemed 
 to improve the longer you regarded it. She must even then 
 have observed that simplicity in dress to which she recurred 
 whenever it was possible for her to do so, but which she 
 never carried beyond the point of becoming negligence. I 
 do not know whether then, as at a later period, she persisted 
 in so arranging her hair as partially to conceal her forehead, 
 which would otherwise have been very fine. 
 
 She was married at sixteen to M. de Remusat, a former 
 magistrate of the supreme court, and the marriage was one 
 of affection. In this bridegroom of double her own age she 
 found an accomplished guide and stedfast friend ; and with 
 him, her mother, and her sister, she continued for some 
 years after her marriage to live a life of retirement, quiet 
 enjoyment, and intellectual culture. Quotations from 
 Horace used sometimes to escape her, showing that, like 
 Mine, de la Fayette and Mme. de Sevigne", she knew Latin, 
 having learned it in that season of peaceful leisure under 
 the tuition of her husband and beside the cradle of her son ; 
 for she was a mother at seventeen. 
 
 Thus all things conspired to create in her an exquisite 
 good sense and what I shall call an ornate precision of mind. 
 The valley of Montmorency was the scene of their happiness. 
 They lived first at Saint-Gratien, and afterwards at Sannois. 
 I find, among the papers and notes of a somewhat later 
 period, a regretful reference to her perfect blessedness in 
 those days beside the mother whom she was so soon to lose. 
 " I think I see her still," she wrote for the benefit of ha- 
 son, "in the little house which you perhaps remember. 
 My imagination paints her in the midst of us, employed 
 upon some piece of work destined for one of her girls, 
 enlivening our evenings by her piquant and versatile con- 
 versation ; now relating in her own original style a succession 
 of delightful stories, or what appeared such because she lent 
 them a charm in the telling which no one else could ever 
 impart ; now stimulating the company by some serious 
 discussion which she knew equally well how to prolong 
 with interest, or terminate with merriment, as the occasion
 
 MADAME DE REMUS AT. 249 
 
 might demand. Amid the genial pleasantries which she 
 always had ready, there welled up at times sagacious and 
 profound reflections which her good taste made her always 
 careful to invest with a certain feminine hue." Without 
 laying too much stress on the old family portrait which wo 
 have chosen for the frontispiece to our article, and which 
 has a kind of authoritative bearing upon our whole theme, 
 without attempting either to explore the mysteries of 
 transmitted mental characteristics, does it not appear, 
 almost at the first glance, as if the ample vitality of the 
 mother must have admitted of division and manifold 
 fructification among her descendants, like any rich in- 
 heritance ? The daughter with whom we are at present 
 occupied will develop the more serious, and, if I may so 
 express myself, philosophical side of her nature. In the 
 other we possess, we welcome back to life, I had almost said 
 that we daily applaud, her smiling fertility of device and 
 brilliancy of imagination ; * while her natural, primitive 
 vein, her unfailing fount of admirable wit, is not so far ex- 
 hausted but it breaks out in the felicitous pungency of that 
 grandson whom she caressed and captivated in his infancy. 
 
 There lived, at this time, at Samiois, a woman of a very 
 different turn of mind from Mine, de Vcrgennes, and belong- 
 ing to a far earlier generation Mme. d'Houdetot. The 
 estates of the two families were separated merely by a 
 boundary wall, and they were united in the closest manner 
 by the ties of vicinage and kindly courtesy. The intimacy 
 which grew up between them had a lasting effect upon the 
 mind of Mme. de Re"musat, and, to some extent, determined 
 the social medium in which her life was passed. Mme. 
 d'Houdetot died in January 1813, at the age of eighty- 
 three. In the years to which we refer, that is, the years 
 immediately preceding 1800, there were gathered in the 
 salon of this charming old lady the remnants both of fashion- 
 able and philosophical society, never, indeed, entirely 
 exiled thence. It may be said of Mme. d'Houdetot, that 
 
 * Mine, de Nansouty is the author of a vast number of proverbs and 
 short, popular comedies.
 
 250 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 her ideal existence was always bounded by that Montmorency 
 valley where the ardent devotion of Jean Jacques has en- 
 graved her memory, as it were, in immortal characters. 
 There, again and again, her idyllic spring time renewed its 
 bloom, and the freshness of her impressions continued 
 unimpaired until her dying day. She even remained in the 
 country during the Reign of Terror, her retreat being 
 respected, and her relatives flocking about her; and "I 
 can readily believe," writes Mme. de Remusat, in a charm- 
 ing portrait of her venerable friend, "that she retains of 
 those frightful days, merely the memory of the increased 
 tenderness and consideration which they procured for her." 
 Mme. d'Houdetot was one of those spirits which may be 
 described in a word, they passed through life seeing its 
 brightest side. The thing may still be done, as far as one's 
 immediate surroundings are concerned. The blissful de- 
 lusion which enwraps a loving nature possesses the power 
 of radiation, and is imparted, temporarily at least, to 
 surrounding objects. But I have before me, as I write, a 
 detailed portrait, bearing for a motto these words of 
 Massillon : " It is always love which decides man ; " and 
 from this portrait it is my intention to extract a few 
 passages, both because its lighter tints are laid on with 
 admirable precision, and because we shall thus become 
 familiar with the nice and judicious observation and the 
 pure and elegant style of the artist. 
 
 " It would hardly be possible," writes Mme. de Rdmusat, 
 "to carry, I will not say kindness, but rather benevolence, 
 much farther than did Mme. d'Houdetot. Kindness im- 
 plies a sort of discernment of evil its recognition and 
 pardon. Mmo. d'Houdetot never observed it in any one. 
 We have seen her actually pained at the expression in 
 her presence of the lightest degree of blame. On such 
 occasions she would impose silence ; not sternly, but merely 
 by showing how unpleasantly she had been affected. To 
 this benevolent temper was due the perennial youthfulness 
 of her feelings and her tastes. It may be that a censorious 
 temper sharpens rather than enlarges the mind ; it certainly
 
 MAD A ME DE REMUS A T. 251 
 
 hardens the heart, and produces a premature disenchant- 
 ment which takes all the colour out of life. Blessed is the 
 man who dies before he is undeceived. The light, transparent 
 veil remaining before his eyes imparts to all surrounding 
 objects a freshness and a beauty which shall not grow dim 
 with age. Thus Mme. d'Houdetot used to say, ' Pleasures 
 have forsaken me, but I cannot reproach myself with having 
 ever become disgusted with any pleasure.' This mood of 
 mind rendered her habitually lenient, and always at her 
 ease with the young. She allowed them to enjoy the good 
 things which she herself had fully appreciated, and the 
 memory of which she held dear ; for she regarded with a 
 kind of gratitude each period of her life. 
 
 "From the same expansive temperament proceeded her 
 early and ardent fondness for the country. Eagerly welcom- 
 ing all impressions, she took good care not to miss those 
 which depend upon a pleasant site and smiling verdure. 
 She paused in ecstasy at a point of view which pleased her, 
 listened enraptured to the singing of birds, and dwelt with 
 delight on a beautiful flower, and this to the very end of 
 life. In her youth she had opened her heart to all the 
 world, and those tastes which she retained into the evening 
 of her days beautified her old age as much as they had 
 adorned that happy period when every sensation has its 
 attendant pleasure. 
 
 " Reappearing in society when our troubles were over, 
 she came with all her old kindliness of spirit, ready, at 
 least, to enjoy what she could. That need of loving which 
 was always paramount with her, led her to supply the 
 places of the friends she had lost by younger favourites, 
 whom she selected with taste, and whose freshness of 
 devotion made her forget her bereavements. She felt that 
 she honoured those whom she had loved, and of whom she 
 had been deprived, by cultivating at an advanced age her 
 own affections. Too weak to feed, in her declining years, 
 on memory alone, she felt the necessity of loving while she 
 lived. By the help of a kind Providence, she was preserved 
 in her last days from that isolation which ordinarily precedes
 
 252 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 the end. Assiduous and delicate attentions imparted to the 
 closing scenes of her life a colouring bright and fair as that 
 of spring. One fond friendship* even assumed the form 
 which the attachments she inspired had been wont to take. 
 An austere and disenchanted reason might smile sometimes 
 at the eternal juvenility of her heart ; but the smile had 
 nought of malice, and, to the last, Mme. d'Houdetot found 
 in the world that affectionate indulgence which is ordinarily 
 awarded to a winning child. 
 
 "She proved, moreover, by the fortitude and calmness 
 evinced in her last moments, that the faculties of ner heart 
 were not enfeebled by their protracted exercise. She real- 
 ized that she was dying; but, in taking her leave of a life 
 that'had been so blessed, she let fall but one expression of 
 regret, as tender as it was affecting. ' Do not forget me,' 
 she said to the relatives and friends who were weeping at 
 her bedside ; ' I should have more courage if I had not to 
 part from you. At least let me live in your remembrance.' 
 Thus did the life whose light was so soon to be extinguished 
 flame up once more at the bidding of affection ; and the 
 words 'I love' were the last her sonl exhaled as it passed 
 away to God."t 
 
 This pleasing portrait was executed by Mine, de Remusat 
 in 1813. Fifteen years before, she had made her first 
 appearance in that society of the Restoration which was 
 
 * That of M. de Sommariva. 
 
 t By way of commentary and pendant to this sweet pastel, we shall 
 take the liberty of transcribing some verses of Mme. d'Houdetot's own ; 
 for much of the poetry of the good old time is still pleasing, despite 
 its antiquated air. It is an imitation of Marot, containing under a light 
 disguise a tender confession. The fragment may be rendered as 
 follows : 
 
 "In youth I loved. Through all that bright, brief season 
 
 Love seemed, and love alone, my days to fill ; 
 Then when I came to years of calmer reason, 
 
 I minded reason's voice in loving still. 
 Now I am old ; the days of devastation 
 
 Are on me, and yet happiness is mine ; 
 For love is still my hope and consolation : 
 
 If love were lost, no hope for me would shine."
 
 MADAME DE REMUS AT. 253 
 
 made up of the ddbris of so many circles, and which set 
 itself to smile so graciously beneath its wrinkles. Mme. 
 d'Houdetot's salon, where the old philosophers, M. de 
 Saint-Lambert, M. Suard, and the Abbe Morellet, still 
 reigned, was philosophic from a literary point of view 
 merely, and no longer politically. The Revolution had 
 chilled and disenchanted many hearts. "Society pre- 
 sented," says an excellent judge, "a peaceable admixture 
 of modern lights with reactionary views, and of old-time 
 tastes with the simple manners induced by the misfortunes 
 of the age and the bitter regrets incident to the woes of 1793." 
 Men showed, above all things, a keen desire for happiness, 
 for ultimate repose and social enjoyments. Those who 
 would have been antagonistic ten years before consorted 
 marvellously. Amid this intersection of ideas and senti- 
 ments, nothing hindered the free play of thought, or pre- 
 determined its direction. Young minds found in their 
 own uprightness a means of self-restraint and an aid to 
 progress. Men were royalists in politics in the sense that 
 they preferred Louis XVI. to his judges, and the tmiyrte to 
 the Jacobins ; but, as a general thing, they showed them- 
 selves disposed to welcome any constituted authority, any- 
 thing which promised order and repose. Such was good 
 society under the consulate, a form of government which 
 from the outset it recognised and hailed. 
 
 Mme. de Vergennes had always had some knowledge of 
 Mme. Beauharnais, and their acquaintance continued after 
 the latter became Mme. Bonaparte. They had met by 
 chance at first in a little village in the neighbourhood of 
 Paris, whither they had gone to pass the terrible summer of 
 1793 ; and chance had again brought them together during 
 the expedition to Egypt. Mme. Bonaparte was then living 
 at Malmaison, and Mme. de Vergennes came to pass a few 
 months in the chateau of a friend at Croissi, in the im- 
 mediate vicinity. The fortune of the illustrious absentee 
 was far from being as secure at that juncture as it appears 
 to us to-day, and his distant star seemed at intervals on the 
 point of an eclipse. After the dazzling celebrity of the
 
 254 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 first Italian campaign, Mmo. Bonaparte, as it would seem, 
 found herself to some extent neglected and set aside, and 
 exposed to a thousand affronts and anxieties, amid the 
 sumptuous' remains of her first transitory grandeur. Natur- 
 ally open and prone to confide in others, she had no sooner 
 renewed her acquaintance with Mme. do Vergennes, than she 
 contrived to make her the recipient of all sorts of confiden- 
 tial disclosures. In the midst of her apprehensions came 
 the landing at Frejus, which promptly reseated her in 
 her triumphal car. About a year afterwards, when the 
 new government had become firmly established, Mme. de 
 Vergennes applied to the wife of the first consul to obtain 
 some position for her son-in-law, a place, for instance, in 
 the council of state, and found her all grace and kindness. 
 The Tuileries was reopened, and Mme. Bonaparte instantly 
 conceived the idea of taking Mme. de Remusat for one of 
 her ladies-in-waiting, and thereby attaching her husband to 
 the service of the consul. It was more than had been 
 desired, and too much ; but such favours were even then 
 commands, and not to be disputed, and M. de Remusat 
 became prefect of the palace. 
 
 An attempt was being made to found a court. It was 
 in the autumn of 1802 that Mme. de Remusat was first 
 established at Saint - Cloud, where the first consul then 
 resided. She was twenty-two years of age. Her nomina- 
 tion and her husband's were an event in the history of that 
 retinue which hitherto had been purely military. It 
 betrayed the master's thought, and was his first advance 
 towards winning persons of consideration to his court, the 
 first link, so to speak, in the chain which was to bind him 
 to the civil order. There were many degrees among the 
 old names ; but that of Vergennes was familiar, historic, 
 and associated with the old regime. It opened the way for 
 greater, but as yet rebellious, names, whose bearers, how- 
 ever, were not found wanting when the consulate became an 
 empire, but rather rushed forward in throngs. Besides, the 
 consul, who liked to have that known for him which he did 
 iiot know, found in M. de Remusat a singular and unfailing
 
 MADAME DE REMUSAT. 255 
 
 tact, as well as perfect acquaintance with the conventional 
 usages which were to be re-established with all, in short, 
 which could subserve an important and delicate part of his 
 design ; for he aimed at nothing less than a restoration of 
 the forms of polite society. 
 
 I should have too much to say, and I should say too 
 little, were I to follow Mine, de Re'musat through that 
 court-life into which she found herself thrust at twenty-two, 
 after her sober and solitary youth. Gifted with prudence 
 and maturity beyond her years, her upright soul avoided 
 danger, and her vigorous mind gathered instruction from 
 what she saw. The grateful and enthusiastic devotion 
 which she had at first felt bound to show, sustained so 
 many consecutive checks that it could not long endure. 
 She herself has described its gradual decline in those 
 Memoirs, the cream of which I hardly feel that I have a 
 right to appropriate.* We shall presently encounter some 
 of the results of her experience under the guise of fiction, 
 where we can, at least, dilate on them with greater freedom. 
 
 One essential, and, as it were, historic, peculiarity remains 
 to be noted. Mme. de Re'musat was one of those who 
 talked most with the consul during these first years. Tu 
 what did she owe this privilege ? She herself has accounted 
 for the fact in a half-bantering tone. She brought a frank 
 
 * She had done more than this. Having, like Mme. de Mottevill^ 
 an excellent place for seeing the pretty comedy then enacting, she hai\ 
 intended to perpetuate the impressions it produced upon her at the 
 time. She had each evening noted down as accurately as possible the 
 events, the emotions, and the conversations of the day. Unluckily, in 
 1815, during the hundred days, some peculiar circumstances, -which 
 she doubtless exaggerated, excited her alarm on the score of these 
 papers, teeming as they were with items and with names. Veracity is 
 almost always terrible. She sallied forth to place them in the keeping 
 of a friend, but, failing to find her, she returned in haste and threw 
 them into the fire. Before an hour had elapsed, she regretted what 
 she had done. It was not until the publication of Mme. de Stael's 
 work on the French Revolution that she felt the courage to undertake 
 once more the collection of her reminiscences. In default of the first 
 incomparable narrative, those will be partially indemnified who shall 
 one day read the second.
 
 256 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 simplicity and easy habits of conversation into that world of 
 etiquette and watchwords, the greater number of whose 
 denizens were at first both ignorant and timid. She 
 admired Bonaparte, and had not yet learned to fear him. 
 To the abnipt questions and rapid monologues with which 
 he addressed them, the other women generally replied by 
 monosyllables only, while she sometimes had a thought, 
 and ventured to express it. At first this caused something 
 very like scandal, and awakened extreme jealousy ; and she 
 was obliged to purchase forgiveness by silence on the 
 morrow. But she could do better even than respond, when, 
 as often happened, Bonaparte inadvertently thought aloud. 
 She could hear, comprehend, and follow him. He was very 
 quick to detect this sort of intelligence, and had an un- 
 bounded admiration for it, especially in a woman. Can it 
 by chance have been because it amazed him ? M. de La 
 Mennais, in a recent production, from v/liich one might 
 certainly select more gracious thoughts, has said, " I never 
 met a woman who could follow a train of reasoning for a 
 quarter of an hour." This is very hard, and savours a little 
 of spleen. Bonaparte was not exactly gallant, and he 
 showed himself capable of being very severe, especially on 
 the intellects of women ; but the memory of Mme. de 
 Remusat would have prevented him from making a remark 
 like this. 
 
 Different causes and circumstances soon checked this 
 early communicativeness, and put a stop to the conversa- 
 tions of the hero with the woman of intelligence, first her 
 own realization of the uncertainty of her position, then 
 the increasing stringency of imperial etiquette. Mme. de 
 Re"musat's was undoubtedly too grave and active a mind for 
 her to hear politics discussed without subsequent reflection. 
 This the emperor perceived, and it made him suspicions. 
 She was attached by affection as well as positiou to the 
 Empress Josephine, and she felt it to be her one duty to 
 follow the fortunes of the latter. Her health soon becom- 
 ing impaired, she was unable to discharge many of the 
 active duties of her post, simplified as these were towards
 
 MADAME DE REMUS AT. 257 
 
 the last in the retreat of Malmaison. M. de R<$musat 
 continued near the emperor, fulfilling the functions of his 
 office with more of precision and conscientiousness than 
 of ardour. They had early obtained a conspicuous 
 position, but they were never entirely in favour. After 
 the divorce, there was a marked and definitive withdrawal 
 of patronage ; and their close connection with M. de Talley- 
 rand during the last years of the empire caused the shadow 
 of his disgrace to fall upon them. 
 
 A taste for society, as affording opportunities for conver- 
 sation, and for literature, as the almost constant employ- 
 ment of her life, was now growing upon Mme. de Re'musat. 
 Sober reflections occurred prematurely to her mind, and 
 long before her youth was spent she had arrived at maturity. 
 The note-books in which she recorded her thoughts, admit 
 of our tracing her history in this regard far more minutely 
 than might be supposed possible. In a journey to Cauterets, 
 undertaken in 1806 for the benefit of her health, the solitude 
 in which she found herself after quitting the court where 
 her experience had been so accelerated, afforded her an 
 opportunity of gathering up the fruits of that experience, 
 bitter even then. Her suffering condition revived those 
 religious ideas which had never been absent in her youth, 
 and merely distracted in subsequent years. She prayed, 
 she dreamed ; above all, she meditated. " Meditation," she 
 says, "differs from reverie in being the voluntary operation 
 of a well-regulated mind." Certain reflections which she 
 penned at about this time, after reading those of Mme. du 
 Chatelet on Happiness, make it apparent that her theory of 
 morals differed as widely from the hard, selfish, calculating 
 ethics of the friend of Voltaire, as from that purely senti- 
 mental morality which softer souls had imbibed from Rous- 
 seau. Her morality sought its support in reason, and 
 aimed at the performance of difficult duty. Yet positive 
 religious beliefs, and even observances (we have and can 
 adduce the proof of what we say), blended with her ethical 
 theories as she advanced in life, exercising a greater influ- 
 ence than the world, or perhaps her friends, would have 
 it
 
 258 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 credited, though somewhat less, it may be, than Mme. do 
 Re"ruusat herself supposed. In an excellent fragment on 
 Coquetry, dated 1813, she needed but to consult her own 
 observation as a moralist, her sound judgment, her refined 
 and quiet taste, to speak as follows : 
 
 "It is in the years between thirty and forty thai women 
 are commonly most inclined to coquetiy. Younger, they 
 please without effort, and by virtue of their very ignorance; 
 But when their spring-time has passed, they begin to 
 employ address in order to retain the homage which it 
 would be painful to renounce. Sometimes they attempt to 
 adorn themselves wiih a semblance of that innocence to 
 which so much of their success was due. They are wrong. 
 Every age has its advantages as well as its duties. A 
 woman of thirty has seen the world, and has knowledge of 
 evil, even if she has done nothing but good. At that age 
 she is ordinarily a mother. Experience has long been her 
 true safeguard. She ought, therefore, to be calm, reserved, 
 nay, even a little cold. She must put off the grace of trust- 
 ful unreserve, and assume the majestic dignity conferred by 
 the titles wife and mother. At this crisis, she must havo 
 the courage to unclasp the zone of Venus. Consider the 
 charms whereof the poet declares it to be composed.* Aro 
 they the ornaments of virtuous maternity ? 
 
 " But what strength it requires to be the first to lay aside 
 an adornment like this ! With a little care it would still so 
 well become the wearer ! Yet a few more years, and the 
 zone will fall of itself, refusing to deck charms that are 
 already withered. Then how would one blush at the sight 
 of it, sadly repeating, like the Greek courtesan who conse- 
 crated her mirror to eternal beauty, ' I give thee to Venus, 
 for she is always fair. ' 
 
 "Is it not wiser to provide in advance for our inevit- 
 able disappointment by anticipating it with courage ? The 
 
 "There Love, there young Desire, 
 There fond Discourse, and there Persuasion, dwelt, 
 Which oft enthralls the mind of wisest man." 
 
 Lord Derby's Iliad. Book XIV
 
 flIADAME DE REMUS A T. 259 
 
 sacrifices which Reason dictates have this advantage, that 
 the effort they cost is itself their reward. O mothers, gather 
 your children about you early. Dare to say when they come 
 into the world that your youth is passing into theirs. 
 mothers, be mothers, and you will be wise and happy ! " 
 
 She uttered these sentences with deep feeling, with a 
 thrilling accent, and a practical reference to herself. At 
 that age she did, in fact, unclasp the girdle which, in her 
 case, had enclosed none but modest graces. We have 
 unanimous testimony to the fact that she need not so 
 soon have relinquished it. A happy idea of her personal 
 appearance at this time may be gathered from the very 
 ingenious portrait of C'lary, traced by a hand I was yoing 
 to say a claw familiar, indeed, though seldom engaged in 
 work like this, and little used to writing.* Her face, like 
 her mind, had an enduring charm. The play of her lips, 
 her fine teeth, and the brilliancy of her eyes, lit up her 
 countenance as she talked. Her figure was still youthful. 
 She was thirty-two, but she appeared twenty-eight. 
 
 She saw much in these years of Mine, de Vintimille, and 
 of that select circle whose internal history M. Joubert has 
 just unfolded in a manner as affectionate as it is vivacious. 
 Society, at Mme. de Vintimille's was more and better than 
 a sequel to the eighteenth century. In those days of 
 universal revivification, there occurred, in certain sheltered 
 nooks, a blossoming anew, or, if the expression be allowable, 
 a second crop of the pure Louis Quatorze spirit. Taste 
 ascended to remote fountains, and Religion, through her 
 servant, M. de Chateaubriand, held up for imitation the old, 
 sublime models. Meanwhile, outside, intelligent publishers 
 assisted the general reaction, by reprinting collections of old 
 memoirs, and short selections from the letters of Mme. de 
 Montmorency, Mile, de Scudery, and Mine, de Coulanges ; 
 and they even tell of a clique where the ladies used to wear 
 mourning on the anniversary of Mme. de S^vigu^'s death. 
 
 * One day, when M. de Talleyrand was President of the Senate, he 
 found that the session was becoming tedious, and, seizing a sheet of 
 official paper, he executed, in his fine handwriting, the portrait of Claiy.
 
 25o SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 The fashion of pen-and-ink portrnits, which had never 
 entirely passed away, seemed to revive as in the palmy 
 days of Mademoiselle. After that of Mme. d'Houdetot, 
 by Mme. de Re'musat, I might quote her portrait of Mme. 
 de Vintimille, and that of M. Pasquier, who, in many re- 
 spects, would seem hardly to belong to the world of to-day, 
 sterling qualities being in him so thoroughly blended with 
 the winning graces of society. Mine, de Re'musat, in the 
 hours of freedom remaining to her after the discharge of 
 those official duties which were now so greatly lightened, 
 loved to remain at home. People came to see her regularly. 
 Conversation flourished at her house, as in the days of the 
 >ld regime, and her drawing-room in the Place Louis Quinze, 
 was, to all intents and purposes, a salon of the empire. 
 The company which had been wont to visit Mme. de 
 Viutimille and Mme. d'Houdetot reassembled here, slightly 
 nltered and rejuvenated M. Mole, M. Suard, the Abbe 
 Morellet, M. de Bausset (the cardinal), M. Galloix, M. 
 Cuvier, Mile, de Meulan, and M. Guizot, M. de Barante 
 occasionally, M. de Fontanes, Gerard the painter, and, 
 later, M. Villemain. Among some autograph memorials in 
 one of those albums, which were richer and more suggestive 
 formerly than now, where we read the names of friends with 
 a mixture of curiosity and sadness, intent to make out the 
 peculiar and already remote evidence furnished by each one, 
 I have been delighted to discover, and I hereby purloin, 
 one luminous page, signed with the name of Chateaubriand. 
 There are pens the slightest product of which should be 
 carefully treasured, and not suffered to fade. M. de 
 Chateaubriand has a grandeur even in his grace. Homer, 
 I fancy, would have been Homer still, though reduced to 
 the proportions of the Anthology. Here is this brilliant 
 fragment. 
 
 "Glory, Love, and Friendship came down one day from 
 Olympus, to visit the denizens of earth. These divinities 
 resolved to .write the history of their journey, and to record 
 the names of those mortals who might offer them hospitality.
 
 MADAME DE REMUS AT. 261 
 
 For this purpose, Glory provided herself with a marble slab, 
 Love with waxed tablets, and Friendship with a blank book. 
 The three wandered about the world, and one evening 
 presented themselves at my door. I made haste to receive 
 them with the reverence due the gods. When they left me 
 on the morrow, Glory was unable to engrave my name upon 
 her marble. Love, after having written it upon her tablets, 
 erased it with a smile ; but Friendship promised to preserve 
 it in her book. 
 
 "DE CHATEAUBRIAND, 1813."* 
 
 It were a grave question to determine whether Mrne. de 
 Re"musat added any new or peculiar element to the social 
 intercourse of her time. Her aim was, undoubtedly, to 
 introduce earnestness into society. Until then the two 
 things had been sensibly divided. People were in earnest, 
 if possible, in the study and in retirement, but in the 
 world it was customary to give and receive nothing but 
 frivolity and pure amusement. There was room, no doubt, 
 for an attempt at compromise and reconciliation, and ol 
 
 * When this was first published, M. de Chateaubriand was annoyed 
 at being detected on friendly terms, and even high in favour, with a 
 member of thaj imperial or doctrinary world which he has since 
 regarded with constant coldness, and even antipnthy. He told Mme. 
 Rticamier that he had never written in Mme. de Remusat's album, and 
 that the fragment was not his, and Mme. Re'camier hastened to assure 
 me of the fact. Truth, for this charming woman, was merely what her 
 friends desired. There was but one answer to be made to M. de 
 Chateaubriand's disavowal, and I make it unwillingly, namely, that the 
 fragment wjis written in his own hand, and signed with his own name, 
 in the book from which I had copied it. The encomiums with which 
 I had accompanied the piece, and which he must just have read, even 
 the great name of Homer, which I had introduced designedly, and by 
 way of precaution, had not sufficed to exorcise a fit of ill-humour and 
 sharp contradiction on the part of one in whom the great man was 
 so mixed up with the man of a party and a coterie. Incredible are the 
 pains we have to take, and the well-intentioned strategy to which we 
 must resort, we critics who aim at enriching the contemporary history 
 of letters on newly-raised and delicate points, we who need to be 
 well informed, but who will write under nobody's dictation. I have 
 never, thank God, had to bear authority in this world, but I have had 
 to manage the vanities of authors, and that is quite enough.
 
 262 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 this Mme. do R&nusat must at least have dreamed. "We 
 ourselves, as professional literati, judging from a distance 
 and by books only, should say that if Mme. de Stael in- 
 troduced and maintained a kind of high-flown earnestness, 
 and if Mme. Guizot did not shrink from a logical, and, at 
 times, disputatious earnestness, Mme. de Re'musat aimed at 
 an earnestness at once more uniform and more gentle than 
 theirs. But distinctions of this sort are mere formulas, 
 drawn up after the event, and for the use of posterity. I 
 make haste to abandon all such, for I seem to see those 
 contemporaries who would have been the only competent 
 and reliable witnesses in this case, smiling at my attempt. 
 
 In any history (unhappily well-nigh impossible) of con- 
 versation in France, a single circumstance would suffice to 
 illustrate the quality and assign the rank of Mine, de 
 R<5musat (and consider, only, what a blending of seriousness 
 and grace that circumstance implies) : she was probably the 
 woman with whom both Napoleon and M. de Talleyrand 
 liked best to talk. 
 
 I have just said that the history of conversation, like 
 that of all which is essentially relative and transitory, and 
 dependent for the most part upon passing impressions, 
 seems to me impossible. Where could the material for such 
 a work be sought, and how could its limits be defined ? 
 Even if the things said could be accurately transferred to 
 writing, they would become congealed in the process, for 
 paper cannot smile.* Nothing so well illustrates the taste 
 of a time as its prevalent style of conversation. The serious 
 discussions of yesterday would seem a trifle tinTorous, or 
 superficial, or insipid by to-morrow, were echo to report 
 them faithfully. The refined and polished conversation of 
 one period will appear heavy to another. Mme. de Remusat 
 
 * The objection has been urged against Collections of Thoughts, that 
 when they are not commonplace they often appear pretentious ; yet 
 the same things would have struck us far otherwise, if we had heard 
 them said. The smile and accent of the speaker wouM have won them 
 acceptance ; but fix them upon paper and it is quite another thing. 
 Paper is brutish.
 
 MADAME DE REMUS AT. 263 
 
 has ingeniously remarked in the eleventh chapter of her 
 Essay on Education, "If we attempt to determine the 
 auspicious moment when the conversation of the past 
 arrived at ideal perfection, it eludes our grasp, and escapes 
 into the distance, like every golden age. Mme. du Deffand 
 and Mme. du Ch&telet deplore the manners of men, and 
 Mme. de Lambert declares that they have lost the true 
 tone. Mme. des Houlieres believes that we must go back 
 to Bassompierre, and Mme. de La Fayette, in her, romance, 
 removes the date to the times of the Valois. Hence I 
 would fain infer, that in this respect even our own case is 
 not entirely desperate, for all our habitual lamentations. 
 When one regrets so keenly the delights of conversation 
 (just as when one is beset by moral scruples), one is near 
 deserving a favourable exception, and snatching a few happy 
 moments. And, after all, who ever had more ? 
 
 And now that I am on the subject of introducing a graver 
 element into social intercourse, I desire to note, in passing, 
 one consequence which might ensue the more so as it is 
 especially a literary consequence. Shall I venture to say, 
 then, that to have the perpetual surface current of society 
 deeper and more even, would not be an unmixed advantage I 
 From the writer's point of view it would be decidedly 
 inconvenient, were there any greater uniformity than at 
 present between what is spoken and what is written. Wo 
 speak with more of warmth, we write with less. The tact 
 and propriety assumed with the pen are not always to tho 
 writer of talent an adequate compensation for what he 
 resigns. Were it customary, therefore, to say the things 
 which we intend to write, our ideas would perhaps be 
 rendered more flexible ; but they would also suffer a pre- 
 mature loss of strength and colour, and we should write 
 with less of freshness even than now. "We should not," 
 as some one has very wittily said, " be thrilled, some fine 
 morning, by the discovery of truth ; we should seem to have 
 known it from all eternity." Yet society would gain in 
 interest, and afford nobler employment for our leisure ; and, 
 in short, those persons for whom it is neither an accident^
 
 264 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 a thoroughfare, nor a place of forcible detention, but an 
 habitual and necessary residence, must needs make the 
 most of it must even think and reflect aloud therein, for 
 fear of not finding time to reflect at all. Now, thinking 
 aloud before the world, operating upon our ideas in presence 
 of witnesses, is a brilliant exercise, a most fascinating 
 amusement, which conies, finally, to supersede all others. 
 Chaste, collected, earnest thought is scared away by it. 
 Such thought is shy and proud. Then, too, one must 
 study as well as think aloud. The stylo is sharpened ; it 
 gains in pungency, rapidity, and interest, but it loses 
 originality and depth. Sensibility and imaginative power, 
 a reticent and fastidious mode of expression, are not so 
 acquired and preserved. M. do Buffon knew this well, and 
 too well. Outside the castle of Montbar he was not lavish 
 of these gifts. 
 
 To resume our narrative : Mme. de Bemusat's taste had 
 always been decidedly literary. She had written early with 
 facility and grace. Short essays of hers have been dis- 
 covered, composed at the age of fifteen or sixteen, as well 
 as novelettes and attempted translations and even versions, 
 of some of the Odes of Horace. Every night for years sho 
 committed to pnper a graphic narrative of the day's events. 
 AH her life sho wrote many and long letters, the greater 
 part of which have been preserved and may yet be collected. 
 I shall, however, allude only to her romances, of which she 
 composed several, and two of which I have read. The first, 
 entitled "Charles and Claire, or the Flute," was published 
 in 1814. The plot is graceful and peculiar. In a certain 
 German town, two French imigrfs, neighbours, a youth and 
 a maiden, become enamoured without ever having seen ono 
 another. The young man is in feeble health, but usually 
 plays the flute in the evening after he returns to his rooms. 
 The young girl, who lodges in the convent hard by, and has 
 the care of her invalid grandmother, writes him one day, 
 having understood that he is French, and begs him not to 
 play at certain hours, because it disturbs her grandmother, 
 while at the same time she entreats him not to desist en-.
 
 MADAME DE REMUS AT. 265 
 
 tirely, since, at other times, it is a great diversion both to 
 the poor lady and herself. Subsequently, of this vague 
 intercourse, begun by musical sounds and carried on by 
 letters, sundry sufficiently natural accidents all the while 
 preventing a meeting, there is born such a love as might 
 be expected to arise between two very young, very pure, and 
 very unhappy beings. The little servant, Marie, who acts 
 as messenger to the young man, answers his few questions, 
 thereby giving shape to the lover's dreams, while she 
 stimulates his imagination. The maiden resolves to show 
 the letters to her father when he comes, and he is daily 
 expected. Reassured by this thought, she continues the 
 correspondence. The flute, discoursing at regular intervals 
 its most affecting music, is their real rendezvous. Tho 
 young man talks of our little concerts, and, although he is 
 the sole performer, he is right, for their hearts are in unison. 
 On one occasion, a few of the airs of Languedoc, happilj 
 chosen, draw tears from the oldlady's eyes, and awaken moving 
 reminiscences, though her memory is weak ; on another, 
 it is Claire's birthday, royalist airs are not wanting, 
 "Charnumte Gabrielle " and ''Richard 6 mon roi ! " and the 
 tender passion of these two is redoubled by being associated 
 with the loves of thtir ancestors. Finally, the young man, 
 who is reading Werther, becomes excited, his letters grow 
 more ardent, and the whole thing would have been spoiled, 
 had not the maiden's father sent one of his sisters to the 
 spot in his stead, to remove her niece before the ensuing 
 day. The poor child has barely time to warn the amiable 
 and devoted neighbour, whom she has never seen. She is 
 to leave at five o'clock in the morning, and for a moment, 
 a second, merely, between the convent-sill and the step 
 of the post-chaise, the young man tries to obtain a first and 
 last sight of her ; but the handkerchief, which she presses 
 to her eyes in the emotion caused by her friend's presence, 
 conceals her face, and the moment is lost. She has, at 
 least, dropped the handkerchief, which he seizes ; but she is 
 gone for ever. Hero wo have what seems a very pretty 
 conception : two sister souls, separated by a partition, a mere
 
 206 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 veil, divining one another from the first, but never meeting 
 face to face. Perhaps, however, it is an idea more striking 
 to broach than to unfold more suited to a chapter in the 
 "Sentimental Journey," or the "Voyage an tour de ma 
 Chambre," than to a development in the form of letters. The 
 reader may remember, in the Memoirs of Silvio Pellico, the 
 mere outline of a touching romance in connection with that 
 repentant Magdalene, whom he simply hears chanting 
 canticles through his prison wall. But here the romance 
 remains, so to speak, in the air, in the condition of the 
 Virgin's thread, floating as a pure dream. Mine, de 
 lle"musat has very well arranged and rendered probable the 
 sequence of her various little scenes. Her stylo is always 
 elegant and pure, but there are places where I should prefer, 
 if not more brilliancy, at least a little negligence, and a less 
 premeditated air. This novel is very nearly worthy of a 
 place with some of the pleasing productions of Mmc. 
 Riccoboni and Mme. de Souza ; but it lacks a certain down, 
 of youth, of faded youth, even ; or rather, I would say, in 
 all simplicity, that it seems to have been kept too long in 
 the drawer, and so failed to blossom in its season for want 
 of air and sunshine. 
 
 In works of this sort, especially, works which have 
 colour and a blossom, there is an estimable difference 
 between fading in a drawer and fading in the open air. 
 Works which are in the latter case and it is the common 
 lot even of the best may be said to have had their day. 
 They won the public once for all, and produced a certain 
 impression. There is gradation in their very decay. They 
 grow old harmoniously. 
 
 The second of Mme. de Re'musat's novels to which I shall 
 allude "The Spanish Letters, or the Minister" is a com- 
 position of another and more important order. Commenced 
 in 1805, at the imperial court, it was afterwards laid aside 
 and not completed until 1820. In the course of the work 
 we find traces of the successive modifications which its 
 author's ideas underwent, for the ever austere mind of Mine, 
 de Remusat was growing and ripening continually.
 
 MADAME DE REMUS AT. 267 
 
 She had been all ready for the first Restoration. Toward 
 the close of the empire the general fatigue and indi (Terence 
 of mind became very great. For herself she had seen its 
 springs too near, and touched them too often, to have 
 escaped disgust at its workings. For years she had been in 
 the habit of discussing these things confidentially with the 
 greatest convert of the day. It was then with a feeling of 
 hope and a certain revival of old memories, that she wel- 
 comed the restoration of an order of things whereby the 
 position which she had won would at least be lowered and 
 perhaps forfeited. The little story of the two young gmif/rds, 
 published in 1814, shows clearly enough, in some of its 
 details, the Bourbon tinge which her thoughts had then 
 assumed. But the excesses and absurdities of the royalist 
 reaction, especially during the year 1815, brought her back 
 to j uster views and sounder opinions. The idea of a con- 
 stitutional government recurred to the public mind as if it 
 had been new, and her vigorous intellect embraced it at the 
 outset in its widest acceptation. During the struggle which 
 ensued, the conditions of a new order of society and a 
 laborious future were unmasked on all hands, and to these 
 she applied a mother's meditative forethought. The main 
 results of her final experience were to be summed up in her 
 work on female education ; but the "Spanish Letters" also 
 gained thereby ; and the first conception of the romance 
 was enlarged by her fuller observation of men and things. 
 
 The original aim of the story had probably been merely, 
 to analyze and describe the embarrassments in love of a 
 young Spaniard, Don Alphonso d'Alovera, placed between 
 two charming girls, one of whom he loves, while his 
 ambition counsels him to prefer the other. The general 
 tone might, I imagine, have been indicated by thoughts like 
 this: " Why must the prudence that suspects ever prevail 
 over the confidence that hopes? Why should all the 
 arrangements of society combine to disturb the heart's true 
 joy ? " But as the work proceeds, this idea is enlarged and 
 transformed. The young lover finds himself mixed up in 
 great events. The minister, the father of Inez, whom he is
 
 268 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 expected to love, occupies a larger space, and the author 
 exceeds her first plan in the delineation of his character. 
 Walter Scott's novels had by this time crossed the Channel, 
 and people began to think of fidelity in the reproduction of 
 places and of periods. Here the historic conception was 
 originally vague. The reign was not designated, and the 
 minister was merely described iu general terms ; but Mme. 
 do Remusat, while pursuing this plan, has succeeded in 
 imparting a life-like colouring to her pictures, and in pro- 
 ducing genuine Spaniards, a genuine court, and genuine 
 monks. There is a Jesuit father who speaks and acts to 
 perfection. Thus we have a long romance in the epistolary 
 form, elaborate, sensible, regular, of moderate but ever-in- 
 creasing interest, the characters well studied and consistent, 
 the situations prolonged and complicated, but clearly defined 
 and perfectly resolved. I find here the customs of the world 
 and the refinements of sentiment mingled in proportions 
 which are neither wholly worldly nor ideally romantic. 
 The writer is evidently one who knows the heart, who 
 perfectly understands what courts really are, and who does 
 not tell all. We detect under filtered names a transcript or 
 reflection of her own successive impressions during her 
 palace life. How can we fail to be reminded of her enthusi- 
 astic d6but, in 1802, when Don Alphonso exclaims, after a 
 flattering remark of his sovereign, ' ' Oh, my sister, what a 
 force and potency the words of kings possess ! How binding 
 on us are the slightest testimonials of their favour ! A littla 
 mark of kindness, a proof of their remembrance, often 
 decides our destiny. The devotion of an entire lifetime is 
 the response we feel we owe for the faintest manifestation 
 of interest on their part." It would be very surprising were 
 there no reminiscences of the Pyrenees, and of their hither 
 side too, in the description of that rural life planned by the 
 queen, when the king is ill, to afford him repose and to 
 divert his mind from business and etiquette. " In fact, as 
 soon as we arrived at Aranjuez, the king wnnounced that, 
 having perfect confidence in our reverence for himself, he 
 should suspend all ceremonial, and every one would be ut
 
 MADAME DE REMUSAT. 269 
 
 liberty to follow the dictates of his own fancy. You, my 
 sister "(this is one of Alphonso's letters), "who are some- 
 times disposed to ridicule us courtiers a little, could not 
 have failed to be amused at the embarrassment into which 
 we were thrown by this declaration. True, it was made 
 with that austere gravity which the king knows not how 
 to lay aside. Improvisation is always rather difficult to 
 manage, and especially improvised freedom. I must con- 
 fess that we hardly knew what to do with ours. Imagina- 
 tion dared not be very active in this matter, and our 
 sovereigns themselves strove in vain to effect that which 
 they had had power to permit. So, despite the favourable 
 disposition both of master and subjects, things went on 
 much as usual, and on our return to Madrid, each voluntarily 
 took up his old habits, resuming, along with their former 
 apartments, some the right to command, and others the 
 right to obey." * And the reflections which follow are 
 perfectly and deplorably just. "In reality, my sister, the 
 court ceremonial, of which so much complaint has been 
 made, seems to me to have its use, and even its moral value. 
 With the people who surround a prince, personal interest is 
 so alert, and the baser human passions are so frequently 
 aroused, that if it were necessary for us to act upon our 
 real feelings and sensations, we should present a sad spectacle 
 to the observer. Etiquette hides all this with a uniform 
 veil. It is like correct time in music, which makes even 
 discordant sounds appear harmonious." 
 
 In this court there is a certain Comtesse de Lemos, a 
 clever woman who dares to be herself, and to care little 
 for what people think of her. " The independent attitude," 
 says one author, "which she succeeds in preserving, has 
 sometimes made me fancy that even in this reticent court, 
 it might not be as difficult as we suppose to allow ourselves 
 
 * One day the emperor had the comedians of some of the smaller 
 theatres come and play before him. Whatever the occasion may Lave 
 been, he permitted and even desired more of gaiety than was customary 
 in these court performances. M. de Talleyrand, as grand chamberlain, 
 signified, with his most solemn visage, his master's august desire, 
 
 Gentlemen, the emperor earnestly requests you to be amused."
 
 270 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 perfect freedom of speech if we would first consent to allow 
 other people perfect freedom of conjecture." In fact, the 
 world is quite ready to suppose a great deal. Don 
 Alphonso has had the happiness of saving the queen's life, 
 when on a hunt, and she has testified her gratitude with 
 a vivacity which for once transcends the bounds of etiquette: 
 hence he is supposed to be a favoured lover. It is for the 
 minister's interest, and a part of his policy, that this sup- 
 position should gain credence, and Alphonso, to say the 
 least, allows it. The subtle art with which his able patroii 
 attempts to inoculate him with this idea ; the careless, 
 casual manner in which he informs him of the current 
 report ; the revulsion of feeling, and the indignation mani- 
 fested at the outset by Alphonso, who, however, is gradually 
 imbued with the spirit of his part, and almost under- 
 takes to perform it, these things are skilfully touched. 
 Throughout the romance the prime minister displays as 
 much honesty as would befit one who on all needful occasions 
 shows himself opposed to romance and sentiment. Judging 
 from numerous scenes, and from the permanent basis of the 
 character, we opine that II. de Talleyrand must often have 
 furnished the modd ; but the portrait, though recognised 
 with extreme ease, seems on the whole to have been some ; 
 what softened and flattered by friendship. Those impassive 
 features, too well trained to betray even triumph ; that half- 
 kindly, half-mocking tone, which is habitual with him ; the 
 sweetness which is perhaps only an additional ruse, these 
 are items in the description which can apply to him alone. 
 The author is far from denying to the Spanish minister all 
 loveable qualities. " We frequently err in judgment through 
 our inclination to believe that a man must be thoroughly 
 and entirely what he is in the main. There is no sucli 
 unity in nature ; and because the life of a court, and 
 familiarity with its intrigues, may have blunted the sensi- 
 bilities of a given individual, we must not conclude that 
 they are wholly destroyed." One day, after a luxurious 
 dinner given by the minister in question, the conversation 
 took a remarkably interesting turn. " It is strange," re-
 
 MADAME DE REMUS AT. 271 
 
 marks one of the characters in the story, " but thanks to 
 that independence of mind of which the minister gives us 
 all an example, his diplomatic guests never seem to be 
 studying how they may make their words as meaningless as 
 possible. I said as much to the duke at night, when all 
 the company had left. 'I think,' ho replied, 'it is a sign 
 of mediocrity, as well as of disdain, in a statesman, to allow 
 no serious question to be discussed in his presence. There 
 is a good deal of important information which can only be 
 acquired through conversation. But one must know how 
 to resist the fascinations which attend it ; for there is 
 certainly a species of intoxication about the pleasures of the 
 mind as well as about those of the body.' " The minister's 
 wily plot, while it fails to ruin the fortunes of those dearest 
 to him, does but slightly retard his own fall. His old 
 friend, the Comtesse de L6mos, had once said to him, 
 " Beware of intrigue ! "When it becomes complicated it 
 ceases to be a means, and is only an additional impedi- 
 ment." At the time of his retirement, when he travels 
 through the fair country which he had not seen for so long, 
 and on which he fixes his softened gaze with the shadow of 
 a smile, I recognise one sublime thought. "In all the 
 troubles which await us there comes one terrible moment 
 which must be met, and which we must make haste to over* 
 pass. It is a dark and difficult passage a kind of porch 
 between despair and resignation. I would give it an 
 inscription the very opposite of that which Dante places 
 over the gates of hell. Once beyond it, the mind grows 
 calm, and we measure our losses and perceive the consola- 
 tions that remain. For a retii'ing minister that moment 
 should come in the first day or the first night after his 
 disgrace." Let us hope that all ministers who have fallen, 
 or are yet to fall, may work in one day th rough this 
 subterranean passage, which, like that of Posilippo, will 
 quickly lead them to the sight of fairer skies. 
 
 I have not intended to do more than glance, cursorily at 
 a subject of which all cannot judge as well as I, and where 
 it would take too long to adduce the proofs of what I say.
 
 272 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 For this purpose I should have needed to quote some of those 
 truly tender and affecting scenes, where the queen, fettered 
 by etiquette, and deceived by the semblance of that affec- 
 tion which all the world attributes to Alphonso, betrays 
 her feminine weakness in his presence, and cannot restrain 
 her tears. In short, the " Spanish Letters" is a very 
 beautiful study, though it might need something besides 
 notoriety to make it a beautiful romance. 
 
 We come now to Mme. de Re"musat's last work the 
 " Letters on Female Education," published by her son. As 
 a general thing, serious and intelligent women are struck in 
 their youth by the obstacles which the world opposes to 
 genuine sentiments and natural affections, and later with 
 the impediments which are encountered by their sex in the 
 way of connected thought, study, and profound application. 
 Hence when young they are moved to compose sentimental 
 novels, and at a later period to elaborate plans of education. 
 In Mme. de Re'musat's case, a multitude of considerations 
 helped to give the last-named turn to her maturer efforts. 
 The Revolution had altered the condition of the different 
 orders of society, and in some sort displaced the centre of 
 power which was tending to become fixed in the middle 
 classes. But civil disturbances and the ensuing splendours 
 of the empire had concealed this result, and not until the 
 ddvent of the Restoration was it indicated with any degree 
 of clearness. The sudden return to certain superannuated 
 usages, and the attempts to wrest the new central point, 
 excited revolt, and rendered its situation more evident 
 than before. Mme. de Remusat, who had been to some 
 extent distracted by the great events which she had seen so 
 near, suddenly found herself, with her meditative turn of 
 mind, face to face with these new and unforeseen questions, 
 and in a position to be not merely keenly interested, but 
 thoroughly informed about them. Her place and that of 
 her husband were now in the constitutional party of the 
 Restoration. Their shade of opinion coincided with that 
 of the then centre-left. M. de Rdmusat, who had been 
 appointed prefect of Toulouse in 1815, and of Lille in 1814,
 
 MADAME DE REMUS AT. 273 
 
 was to retain his place until removed by minister Villele as 
 a first reactionary measure. This provincial life, although 
 not without frequent breaks, allowed Mme. de Re"musat 
 increased leisure, while she still kept up an intimate ac- 
 quaintance with the stirring world of Paris through the 
 precocious son who was just entering society, and who 
 corresponded freely with his mother. He even brought her 
 new friends, and she found congenial spirits in M. and 
 Mme. Guizot, and in M. de Barante. He also introduced 
 her to Mme. de Broglie, of whom unfortunately she saw 
 little, but for whom, during her last years, she cherished a 
 sincere and tender friendship. If the noblest need of a 
 reverent and pious son is to have his mother for prime 
 confidant and companion, such a relation is also a most 
 affecting restorative of a mother's youth. However intel- 
 lectual she may be, her happiest fate is to understand all 
 things through the heart. The peculiar affinity between 
 mothers and sons has often been remarked. Through their, 
 sons mothers acquire greater mental courage ; with them 
 they willingly undertake journeys and conflicts ; them they 
 follow into realms of new ideas. The refined and placid 
 woman, accustomed to the amenities of society, and content 
 with them, whose mind is earnest and cultivated, and who 
 scarce ever dreamed of transgressing the limits of her 
 graceful horizon, is suddenly transformed. At the very 
 season of repose, at the moment when the intellect is most 
 prone to pause, and the heart to mourn and pine for all 
 that is passing away, she, on the contrary, revives; she is. 
 kindled by new views, arid greets them with a smile; she 
 adopts projects of reform ; and, instead of turning her back 
 on the future, she hastens to meet it as in the morning of 
 her days, accompanying, or rather preceding, her beloved 
 guide. To see her from afar so light and active, J^QU would 
 declare her to be his sister. 
 
 Like Mme. Necker de Saussure and Mme. Guizot, Mme. 
 de Kemusat was deeply concerned for the future of her sex 
 in that new society about to be established upon the quiver- 
 ing bases of the old. I shall not examine in detail a book 
 s
 
 274 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 which any reader will appreciate. The whole aim and 
 spirit of the work are moral, earnest, graceful. We feel 
 the presence in it of a peculiar inspiration, a kind of secret 
 muse. One must be a mother to yearn thus tenderly over 
 coming generations ; and when she drew her ideal wife she 
 was thinking of her son. 
 
 In the year 1820, therefore, Mmo. de Eemusat was in 
 the full maturity of her powers, and her opinions, though 
 still active, had attained their final development. Her 
 manners had become very simple, and even sprightly, and 
 she is said to have been wonderfully easy in conversation. 
 She was fond of all that is fresh and youthful ; a little 
 inclined to raillery ; pious, or rather, a Christian, making 
 no great show of fervour, but decided, and deriving support 
 from definite doctrines. Although old before her time, her 
 health seemed better than formerly, or, at least, allowed 
 her greater freedom of action. She was leading a life of 
 domestic privacy, very happy, and entirely devoted to the 
 happiness of her family, when she was prematurely taken 
 from them in December of 1821. In a little autograph 
 album of " Thoughts, " I have found some precious revelations 
 concerning the continuous development of her religious 
 emotions, the distraction of her mind during her years of 
 levity, and the reaction which she subsequently experienced. 
 It is the complete history of an inner life, a vein hidden 
 from the world, and unsuspected. Let us not be too ready 
 to pass judgment on these mysteries of the soul. It is a 
 consoling thought that if we do not divine all the transient 
 evil in the world, neither do we suspect all the good. 
 After she went to Cauterets for her health, in 1806, her 
 Christian experience was revived, and never afterwards 
 wholly inteiTupted. We can trace its progress through this 
 private compilation by successive extracts from FcSnelon, 
 Pascal, Bossuet, Nicole, and Saint Augustine, and by 
 prayers which she had composed herself, or which had 
 been furnished her by Mme. de Vintimille. She also 
 took a copy of Mme. de Maintenon's beautiful letter 
 to the Duchess de Ventadour. But these things relate
 
 MADAME DE REMUS AT. 275 
 
 merely to what she called her partial enlistment. The 
 great event of her interior life, her complete reconciliation 
 with God, occurred in April 1812. Her own serious illness 
 at the beginning of that same year, and subsequently that 
 of her son, awakened her anxiety and ended her indecision. 
 Easter was approaching, and she resolved to apply to the 
 judicious Abbe Le Gris Duval. She slightly exaggerated 
 the preliminaries of religion, the difficulty of its duties, the 
 necessity of an extraordinary ordeal. We venture looking 
 not so much to her praise as to the profit of some who may 
 read to lift a corner of the sacred veil: "Thou, my 
 God, hast permitted my transient presence in this world, 
 whither we are summoned for a brief and painful journey. 
 At its end we shall return to Thee. How wilt Thou then 
 receive me, when I tremblingly present before Thy holy 
 tribunal the story of a life almost empty of good works ? 
 Shall I dare plead before Thee those feeble virtues for which 
 foolish men extolled me, knowing not that they were un- 
 accompanied by sacrifice ? Shall I boast that I was virtuous, 
 and have Thee remind me how happy I have been ? Can I 
 dilate on. trifling charities which cost me no privations ? 
 Shall I say that I did not hate my enemies, when Thou 
 didst permit my heart to be entirely occupied with gentler 
 feelings? What would become of me, wert Thou to re- 
 proach me with having been puffed up with my felicity ? 
 wert Thou to tell me that I was proud of having been so 
 happy as a daughter, wife, and mother ? Ah, then I should 
 bitterly remember that I had neglected to give thanks to 
 my Creator for all the blessings he had bestowed on me ! " 
 But the Abbe Duval answered in his own simple, persuasive 
 tones, "You say you are happy. Why, then, distress 
 yourself? Your happiness is a proof of God's love towards 
 you. And if, in your heart, you truly love Him, can you 
 refuse to respond to the divine benevolence ? Religion, 
 save in peculiar cases, demands a life of action. It is 
 easier, believe me, to yield the heart to love and peace in 
 retirement, than to serve God in the world. To succeed in 
 the last-named career is a work of genuine piety. Engrave
 
 276 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 upon your conscience this fundamental truth that religion 
 demands order above all things, and that since the institu- 
 tions of society have been allowed and consecrated, there is 
 encouragement for those duties by the performance of which 
 they are maintained. . . . But especially banish from your 
 mind the error that our pains alone are acceptable to God. 
 A general willingness to bear trial is enough. Never fear 
 but life and time will bring it. Dispose yourself beforehand 
 to resignation, and meanwhile thank God incessantly for 
 the peace that pervades your lot." 
 
 These wise words calmed her mind, and by them it is 
 probable that she ultimately regulated her inner line of 
 conduct. These humble prayers of Mme. de Remusat recall 
 others equally thrilling by Mme. de Duras. We love to 
 lu-ar the gentlest and the most unquiet souls declare their 
 longing for the self-same port. But I must pause, my 
 intention having been to approach this subject on its move 
 fathomable side, and to recommend to the reader's careful 
 study one of the most earnest, the most refined, the most 
 intelligent, and most docile minds, bequeathed by the old 
 social order to the new. 
 
 Amid a variety of well -sustained characters, amid critics, 
 literary historians, and biographers, it has seemed well to 
 me to preserve some record of one whose motto might have 
 been to introduce as far as possible, and fix for the first time 
 in literature, what previously had had no footing there, a 
 knowledge of the world derived from actual experience. 
 
 1842.
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 
 
 THE works of Frederic have not hitherto obtained in 
 France the high esteem they merit. People have ridiculed 
 certain bad verses of that metromaniac prince, which are 
 not worse, after all, than many other verses of the same 
 time which passed for charming, and which cannot be read 
 again to-day ; and one has not paid sufficient attention to 
 the serious works of the great man, who would not resemble 
 other great men if he had not really set his seal to numerous 
 pages, historical and political, which he has written, and 
 which form a vast whole. As for the letters of Frederic, 
 one has done them more justice ; in reading in the Corre- 
 spondence of Voltaire those which the king addressed to 
 him, intermingled with those which he received in return, 
 we find that not only do they bear the comparison very 
 well, but that, while equal intellectually, they have also a 
 superiority of view and of sense which is due to force of sou] 
 and of character. It is our business to-day to abandon the 
 little ideas of a rhetoric altogether too literarj', to recognise 
 the man and the king in the writer, and to welcome him as 
 one of the best historians we possess. 
 
 I say we, for it was in French that Frederic wrote ; it was 
 in French that he thought ; it was the French, again, that 
 ho had in mind, and whom he addressed in order to be read, 
 even when he wrote down judgments and recited actions 
 which were little fitted to please them. Frederic is a 
 disciple of our good authors, and, in history, he is a pupil, 
 and certainly an original and unique pupil, and in passages a 
 prolcient pupil, of the historian of the Age of Lewis XIV. 
 
 The negligence and incorrectness with which the works 
 
 2T7
 
 273 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 of Frederic were previously printed, had something to do 
 with the slight esteem in which those persons seemed to 
 hold them who are not accustomed to judge for themselves 
 upon every subject. One cannot imagine to what an 
 extreme the infidelity and the licence of the editors had in 
 this respect heen carried. I will cite but a single example, 
 which has remained secret till to-day. In France, in 1759, 
 during the Seven Years' War, one had thought of printing 
 the works of the Sans-Souci Philosopher (that was the 
 title which Frederic had taken in his poems and his first 
 literary efforts). But M. de Choiseul, minister, wrote at 
 that date to M. de Malesherbcs, director of the library, on 
 the very subject of this project, and on the request which 
 some Parisian publishers had made that they might print 
 the Collection they had obtained of the works of Frederic : * 
 
 " MARLY, December 10. 
 
 " It is important, sir, that the king's minister should not be in any 
 degree compromised, n^r suspected of having tolerated the publication 
 of the works of the king of Prussia. So, in case that M. Darget 
 (reader and secretary of the king of Prussia) comes to speak to me of 
 the matter, I shall earnestly assure him that I have no knowledge of 
 the printing, and that I am going to get the king's order to prevent its 
 being executed in France. While I am waiting for M. Darget, I hope 
 that the publication will be made, and that all will be said ..." 
 
 The publication, at once protected and clandestine, was 
 then made ; but it is curious to see how M. de Choiseul set 
 himself to falsifying it, going so far as to point out with his 
 own hand the details of the corrections and modifications to 
 be introduced into it : 
 
 "It cannot be permitted " (the Collection), ho wrote, "except the 
 greatest precautions be taken that it may appear to have been printed 
 in a foreign country, and this consideration must not be lost sight of 
 in requiring corrections. 
 
 " For this reason I have proposed but two sorts of corrections ; one 
 sort, those which may be made without one's perceiving them in 
 reading the text. As these changes relate only to some impieties of 
 the most decided character, or to strictures upon great personages, 
 
 * This Collection had been printed in Prussia in 1750 and in 1752 ; but 
 these two first editions, which were wholly confidential, were limited 
 to a very few copies, destined only for the king's friends.
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 279 
 
 there is no reason to fear that the king of Prussia will complain that 
 the text has been altered, and the public will not be able to discover 
 it. But in suppressing passages, I have carefully avoided making any 
 substitutions ; that would be a censurable infidelity. 
 
 "The other corrections are the suppressing of proper names, the 
 place of which you will supply with points or stars. This is no more 
 what I call an infidelity, than are the other changes. It is, perhaps, 
 even a regard for the king of Prussia." 
 
 One sees that the minister who drove away the Jesuits 
 knew how to practise shuffling when necessary, and secretly 
 to alter a text while declaring that it was not an infidelity. 
 Later, in the publication of the posthumous historic writings 
 of the king of Prussia, exactness, for a thousand reasons, was 
 no better observed, and one may say, in considering the 
 edition which is published to-day at Berlin by order of the 
 Prussian Government, and in comparing it with its prede- 
 cessors, that the works of Frederic appear to-day for the first 
 time in a text that is authentic and worthy of recognition. 
 
 The edition undertaken by the Prussian Government, and 
 which will comprise not less than thirty quarto volumes, is 
 monumental. It is thus that one day, and soon, France 
 should publish the works of Napoleon, works to-day 
 scattered, or collected without method and without order ; 
 not falsified, but, in general, printed almost as negligently 
 as have hitherto been those of Frederic. The monument of 
 Napoleon's tomb will not be complete till one shall have 
 added to it the national edition of his works. Be this as it 
 may, tho Prussian Government and the reigning king have 
 thought that their honour was concerned in publishing a 
 complete collection of the writings of the man who was 
 altogether the greatest king and the first historian of his 
 country. Some clever savants have been charged with the 
 execution of this project ; M. Preuss, historiographer of 
 Brandenburg, is at their head. The historic portion of 
 Frederic's works has justly had precedence over the other 
 writings ; it forms seven volumes, of which five are before 
 me. I have made their acquaintance, and I have examined 
 them with all the care of which I am capable. 
 
 That I may not have to come back to these details of
 
 28o SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 editions, I may be permitted at the outset to make two or 
 three remarks. The text, typographically, is admirable. 
 The titles are in the highest taste ; the portraits are fine : 
 I find nothing to disapprove but the kind of vignettes 
 which terminate the pages at the ends of the chapters, and 
 which make this royal volume resemble at times a book of 
 illustrations : these embellishments, of which the subject is 
 often enigmatical, are not in keeping with the monumental 
 gravity of the edition. As for the text, I have said that it 
 is for the first time exact and faithful : many bold thoughts 
 have been restored, many energetic and vivid phrases which 
 the prudence or the literary prudery of the first editors had 
 effaced or softened. I could have wished, however, that one 
 had not pushed his scrupulousness so far as carefully to 
 restore faults of grammar. Of what use is it, for example, 
 to make the king say that M. du Lowendal was marched to 
 a certain point, instead of saying that he had marched ? 
 Frederic, before publishing his work, would have had these 
 trifles corrected by some of his French academicians at 
 Berlin. Another fault of this edition, and a grave fault, is 
 that it lacks strategic maps and plans of places, which 
 renders the reading of these campaigns tedious and sterile 
 to the majority of readers. Why not join to these histories 
 of Frederic an atlas expressly prepared, of the same kind 
 as that which M. Thiers has executed for his " History of 
 Napoleon " ? Finally, if it is permissible to enter into these 
 minutiae, which do not fail to have their importance with 
 the reader, I will complain, in the name of France, that there 
 does not exist in Paris a single complete copy of the volumes 
 thus far published. The National Library has but five 
 volumes ; the Library of the Institute does not possess one 
 of them. The king of Prussia, who distributes this magni- 
 ficent edition, has forgotten our Institute of France in his 
 largesses. It is there that the great Frederic would have 
 begun.* 
 
 * Along with the great quarto edition, there is published one of 
 Smaller size, for the use of common readers ; this small edition, which 
 is sold, is easier to find.
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 281 
 
 I have said all I wish touching these details, which are in 
 some sort external, and I come from them to the great man, 
 whom one is happy in being able at length to study more 
 closely and with confidence in his successive acts and 
 writings. Frederic, in spite of the wrong he has done him- 
 self by some of his rhapsodies and speeches, by the placarded 
 cynicism of his impieties and jeers, by that versifying mania 
 which always provokes a smile, is a really great man, one 
 of those rare geniuses who are manifestly born to be the 
 chiefs and leaders of the people. When we strip his person 
 of all the anecdotal drolleries upon which the light-minded 
 feast, and when we go straight to the man and to the cha- 
 racter, we pause with admiration and with respect ; we 
 recognise at the first instant, and at every step we take with 
 him, a superior and a master, firm, sensible, practical, 
 active, and indefatigable, inventive in proportion to his 
 necessities, penetrating, never duped, deceiving as little as 
 possible, constant in all fortunes, governing his personal 
 affections and passions by patriotic sentiment and zeal for 
 th greatness and advantage of his nation ; enamoured of 
 glory, while judging it ; vigilantly careful and jealous of 
 the amelioration, honour, and well-being of the populations 
 which are entrusted to him, even at the very time when 
 he has little esteem for men. 
 
 Of Frederic as a captain, it is not for me to judge ; 
 but if I have well understood the observations which 
 Napoleon has made on Frederic's campaigns, and the 
 simple recitals of Frederic himself, it seems to me that ho 
 was not chiefly a warrior. He has nothing, on that side, 
 very brilliant or fascinating at first view. Often beaten, 
 often at fault, his greatness is shown in learning through 
 trials ; especially in repairing his faults or those of fortune 
 by coolness, tenacity, and an immoveable evenness of soul. 
 Whatever eulogium good judges may pass upon his battle of 
 Leuthen, and on some of his great manoeuvres and operations, 
 they have still more criticisms to make on many and many 
 an occasion. " He was great especially in critical moments," 
 said Napolocn ; "it is the finest eulogium one can pass
 
 282 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 upon his character." This moral character it is which is 
 conspicuous in Frederic as a warrior, and which transcends 
 his martial greatness ; it was the case of a strongly-tempered 
 soul aud a great mind applying itself to war because it must 
 do so, rather than the case of a born warrior. He had 
 neither the rapid arid lightning-like- valour of a Gustavus 
 Adolphus or a Conde, nor that transcendent geometrical 
 faculty which characterized Napoleon, and which that 
 powerful genius applied to war with the same ease and the 
 same aptitude that Monge applied it to other objects. 
 Endowed with a superior genius, with a character and a 
 will in unison with his genius, Frederic applied himself to 
 the military art as he applied himself to many other things, 
 and he was not slow in excelling it, in possessing himself of 
 it, in perfecting his command of his instruments and means, 
 although it was not, perhaps, at first, a calling for which his 
 genius fitted him, and lie was not in his proper element. 
 
 Nature had made him, before all things else, to reign, to 
 be a king, with all the functions which that lofty employ- 
 ment demands ; and war being one of the most indispen- 
 sable of these functions, he devoted himself to it, and he 
 mastered it. "One must catch the spirit of his calling," 
 lie wrote in jest to Voltaire, amid the Seven Years' War. 
 This has the air of a joke only, yet it is true. In Frederic 
 the will and the character directed the mind in everything. 
 
 Generally, one did not perceive in any of the qualities of 
 Frederic that primal freshness which is the brilliant sign of 
 the singular gifts of nature and of God. All, in him, seems 
 the conquest of will and deliberation acting upon a universal 
 capacity, which they lead hither or thither, according to 
 different exigencies. He is clearly the great king of his 
 time ; he has the stamp of the age of analysis. 
 
 One lias sought to establish a contradiction between 
 the conversations and writings of Frederic, as an adept in 
 philosophy, and his actions as king and conqueror. I do 
 not find this contradiction so great as some have wished to 
 make out. I lay aside certain essays and certain sallies of 
 Frederic, when very young and prince-royal ; but, from the
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 283 
 
 very moment that he understood his part as king, I find 
 him true. And I do not see, for example, in the histories 
 which he has written, a single word which he has not 
 justified in his conduct and in his life. He says : 
 
 " A prince, in my opinion, is the first servant and the first magistrate 
 of the State ; he should account to it for the use which he makes of 
 the imposts. He raises them that lie may be able to defend the State 
 with the troops he maintains ; in order to defend the dignity \vith 
 which he is clothed, to recompense services and merit, to establish in 
 some way an equilibrium between the rich and the debtor classes, to 
 comfort in every way the unhappy of every class, to invest with 
 magnificence all that interests the body of the State in general. If 
 the sovereign has an enlightened mind and a heart that is right, he 
 will direct all his expenditures to the promotion of the public good 
 and the greatest advantage of the people." 
 
 This is what Frederic almost always really did in peace 
 and in war, and he varied from this policy as little as 
 possible. After making every deduction for his faults, for 
 his ambitious acts, and for his personal misdeeds, the sum 
 and substance of his policy remains still what we have just 
 seen, and what he has so well described. To judge him as 
 a politician, we must get rid of the French point of view, of 
 the French illusions, and of what is left to us of the atmo- 
 sphere of the Choiseul ministry. Open once more Frederic's 
 Memoirs ; in writing them he never seeks to varnish the 
 truth. I know of no man who, when he takes his pen, is 
 less a charlatan than he ; he gives his reasons without any 
 colouring whatever; "a borrowed part," he thought, "is 
 difficult to sustain ; a person can never well be anybody but 
 himself." In writing the history of his house under the 
 title of "Memoirs of Brandenburg," he gives us the mean- 
 ing, the first inspiration, the key of his actions. Pruss : a 
 had not come really to count for anything in the world, 
 and to put, as he says, its grain into the political balance 
 of Europe, till the time of the Great Elector, which corre- 
 sponded with the prosperous days of Lewis XIV. In reciting 
 the history of that clever and brave sovereign, who to the 
 mediocre fortune of an Elector knew how to unite the heart 
 and the merit of a great king, in speaking to us of that
 
 284 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 prince, "the honour and the glory of his house, the defender 
 and the restorer of his country," who was greater than his 
 sphere of action, and from whom his posterity reckon, 
 Frederic has evidently found his ideal and his model ; what 
 the Great Elector was, as simply a prince and member of 
 the empire, Frederic will be to it as king. 
 
 This title, this appellation of king, which was given only 
 to the son of the Great Elector, and, as it were, by grace, 
 appears rather to have degraded than to have exalted the 
 Prussian name. The first Frederic who bore it, a slave to 
 ceremony and etiquette, had rendered the title of Majesty 
 almost ridiculous in his person ; he was crushed by it. 
 That first king of Prussia, by his entire life of vain pomp 
 and display, said, without knowing it, to his posterity : 
 " I have acquired the title, and I am proud of it ; it is 
 for you to render yourselves worthy of it." The father of 
 Frederic, of whom the son, who was so maltreated by him, 
 has spoken so admirably, and with sentiments not filial, 
 but truly loyal and magnanimous, that rough, economical, 
 avaricious father, the persecutor of his family and the 
 idolator of discipline, that praiseworthy man, who " had 
 a laborious soul in a robust body," had restored to the 
 Prussian State the solidity which, through the inflation 
 and vanity of the first king, it had lost. But that was not 
 enough ; Frederic's father, estimable as he was in many 
 respects, when closely viewed, was not respected at a 
 distance ; even his moderation and the simplicity of his 
 manners had been prejudicial to him. People regarded 
 his twenty-four thousand troops as a parade-show, and as 
 a corporal's grandiose madness. Prussia was not counted 
 among the European powers ; and when Frederic, at the ago 
 of twenty-eight (1740), mounted the throne which he was 
 to occupy for forty-six years, he had everything to do for 
 his own and the nation's honour : he had to create the 
 Prussian honour ; he had to win his spurs as king. 
 
 His first thought was that a prince should make his 
 person, and, above all, his nation, respected ; that modera- 
 tion is a virtue which statesmen .must not. always practise
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 285 
 
 strictly, on account of the corruption of the age, and 
 because, when there is a change of reign, it is more expedient 
 to give proofs of firmness than of mildness. He says again, 
 and he tells us frankly, that "Frederic (his grandfather), 
 in erecting Prussia into a kingdom, had, by that vain 
 display, planted a germ of ambition in his posterity, which 
 would sooner or later fructify. The monarchy which he 
 had left to his descendants was, if I may be permitted to 
 explain myself thus (it is always Frederic that speaks), a 
 kind of hermaphrodite, which partook more of the electorate 
 than of the kingdom. There was glory in deciding that 
 condition of things ; and that sentiment was surely one 
 of those which strengthened the king in the great enter- 
 prises in which so many motives engaged him." He tells 
 us these motives, and why he anticipated the House of 
 Austria, instead of waiting for it, and letting himself be 
 struck or humbled. He will explain with the same clear- 
 ness and the same frankness the motives which led him to 
 get the start of his enemies at the beginning of the Seven 
 Years' War, and which decided him to appear the aggressor 
 without being such. These motives, all drawn from the 
 interest of his cause and of his nation, seem in no respect 
 discordant with the maxims of Frederic and with his 
 favourite ideas as philosopher and writer. Knowing men 
 and the things of the world, as he did, he very properly 
 felt that one is not permitted to be a bit of a philosopher 
 upon the throne until he has proved that he knows how to 
 be something else besides. He was not in a humour to 
 play the good-natured part of a Stanislaus. To be more 
 surely a shepherd of his own people, he began by showing 
 to other peoples that he was a lion. All that he willed, he 
 did ; he boldly disentangled the position and the function 
 of Prussia, created a counter-weight to the House of Austria, 
 and established in northern Germany a focus of civilisation, 
 a centre of culture and of tolei ation. It is for his successors 
 to maintain it, and to be faithful, if they can, to his 
 designs. 
 
 All the persons who have praised Frederic have made a
 
 286 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 reservation touching Poland and the Partition of 1773, 
 which he provoked and by which he profited. Here, as the 
 Polish question is one of tho&e that cannot be treated con- 
 veniently and with entire impartiality, I will beg leave to 
 be silent. There is in that Polish name, and in the misfor- 
 tunes which are associated with it, a remnant of magic 
 which sets men in a flaiue. Frederic, however, never 
 changed his opinion regarding the character of the Poles 
 as a people : that opinion is energetically expressed in ten 
 passages in his histories, and long before the idea of a 
 partition occurred to him. 
 
 In that affair, however, and whatever was the fact re- 
 garding the motives which he has himself exposed in all 
 their nakedness, he violated that which the ancients called 
 the conscience of the human race, and he took part in 
 one of those scandals which always shake the confidence 
 of the peoples in the protective law of societies. He for- 
 got his own maxim : " The reputation of a knave is as dis- 
 honourable to the prince himself, as disadvantageous to 
 his interests." But here the considerable interest of the 
 moment and of the future, the instinct of natural enlarge- 
 ment, won the day. In that, again, he was not so incon- 
 sistent as one would believe him to be. His delicacy as a 
 philosopher was not such that it could not accommodate 
 itself to these political procedures. While ho had senti- 
 ments of relative justice and even of humanity, Frederic, 
 like all his age, was absolutely wanting in ideality ; he did 
 not believe in anything that was better than himself. He 
 governed and earnestly cared for the men who were en- 
 trusted to his keeping ; he made this duty a matter of 
 honour and dignity ; but he did not place it upon any 
 deeper foundation. We touch here upon the radical vice 
 of that wisdom of Frederic's, I mean irreverence, irreligion. 
 The cynical railleries of his conversations and letters are 
 well known : he had the capital fault, for a king, of jesting, 
 of jeering at everything, even at God. The love of glory 
 was the only thing about which he never jested.* 
 
 * One of the most competent judges, one of the assistants of M.
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 287 
 
 Strange inconsistency and protest of a noble nature ! for 
 if the human race is so foolish and so worthy of contempt, 
 and if there is no thing or person above it, why go and 
 devote body and soul to the idea of glory, which is nothing 
 else than the desire and expectation of the highest esteem 
 among men ? It is inconceivable that, looking at every- 
 thing, as he did, from the higher standpoint of the State 
 and the social interest, Frederic should have regarded 
 religion as one of those neutral grounds where people may 
 meet for after-dinner pastimes and pleasantries. He forgot 
 that he himself, writing to Voltaire, had said: "Every 
 man has in him a ferocious beast ; few know how to chain 
 him ; the majority let him loose, when fear of the law does 
 not restrain them." His nephew, William of Brunswick, 
 permitted himself one day to show him the inconsistency 
 there was in thus relaxing the religious ties which restrain 
 the ferocious beast. "Oh! against the rascals," replied 
 Frederic, "I have the hangman, and that is quite enough." 
 No, that is not enough ; when one has the hangman only, 
 it is insufficient. It is at this point especially that the 
 establishment of Frederic fails and is imperilled j he could 
 be a great organizer, he was not a legislator. 
 
 But, even setting aside the sovereign's interest, it is 
 offensive to see a great man sully his name by pleasantries 
 of this kind regarding objects which are respectable in the 
 eyes of the great majority ; it was, to a certain degree, a 
 violation of the hospitable toleration in which he gloried, 
 thus openly to despise that which he professed to welcome 
 and tolerate. It betrays a relic of native bad taste and of 
 northern coarseness, and one could say with just severity 
 of the letters of Frederic : ' ' There are vigorous and great 
 thoughts, but, close by them, we see beer and tobacco 
 
 Preuss in the preparation of the works of Frederic, M. Charles do La 
 Harpe, writes to me in regard to this subject : " There are two other 
 things also concerning which he never jested, the love of country and 
 friendship. This mocking hero is the tenderest and most faithful of 
 friends, and one knows that his passion for his country was sucli that 
 he deprived himself of everything that he might be able to alleviate 
 its miseries and endow Prussia with useful institutions."
 
 2S SA INTE-BE U VE. 
 
 stains upon these pngcs of Marcus Aurclius." Frederic, 
 who had respect for heroes at least, has said : " Since pious 
 .<Eneas and the crusades of Saint-Louis, wo have seen no 
 example in history of devout heroes." Devout, it is 
 possible, taking the word strictly ; but religioiis, one may 
 say that heroes have almost always been ; and John JVluller, 
 the illustrious historian, who so well appreciated the merits 
 and great qualities of Frederic, was right in his conclusion 
 concerning him, when he wrote: "Frederic wanted only 
 the highest degree of culture, religion, which completes 
 humanity and humanizes all greatness." * 
 
 I will say no more of Frederic to-day, except as a historian. 
 His histories are composed of "Memoirs of Brandenburg," 
 which contain all that we need to know of the Prussian 
 annals anterior to his accession ; and four other works, 
 which contain the history of his time and of his reign from 
 1740 to 1778. The history of the Seven Years' "War is one 
 of these four compositions, and that by which he naturally 
 takes a place between Napoleon and Caesar. 
 
 The " Memoirs of Brandenburg " are the on!}' portion 
 which appeared in his lifetime. From the preface it is 
 plain that we have to do with a lofty and firm spirit, that 
 has the noblest and soundest ideas upon the class of subjects 
 he handles. "A man," he says, " who does not believe 
 
 * M. Henry, pastor of the French church at Berlin, has written a 
 dissertation in which he treats of Frederic's irreligion ; without pre- 
 tending to absolve him in this matter, the worthy writer believes that 
 there has been a great deal of exaggeration of that French side of 
 Frederic, by which he flattered the philosophers of the eighteenth 
 century. He seeks to show that Frederic himself, with a kind of 
 swagger, took pleasure in exaggerating it. M. Henry thinks that this 
 irreligious mockery of Frederic transpired chiefly on the surface of his 
 soul ; that, in yielding himself to it, he yielded chiefly to a bad tone of 
 society, thinking that it would never come to the public knowledge, 
 but that the basis of his royal nature was serious, meditative, and 
 worthy of a legislator who comprehends and would provide for the 
 fundamental needs of every society and of every nation. In a complete 
 and impartial appreciation of Frederic, it is well to take note of the 
 facts to which M. Henry calls attention, and of the point of view to 
 Which he refers them.
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 289 
 
 that he has fallen from heaven, who does not date tlie 
 world's epoch from the day when he was born, must be 
 curious to know what has passed in all times and in all 
 countries." Every man must, at least, care for what has 
 passed before his time in the country which he inhabits. 
 In order that this knowledge may be really profitable, one 
 condition is indispensable, truth. Frederic wishes for 
 truth in history: "a work written without freedom can 
 be only mediocre or bad." He will speak the truth, then, 
 about persons, about another's ancestors as about his 
 own. But he believes that he should record, touching every 
 matter, only that which is memorable and useful. He 
 gives no heed to curiosities. He leaves to the professors 
 in us, fascinated with learned minutiae, to know of what 
 stuff was the coat of Albert surnamed Achilles. He is 
 firmly of opinion that a thing does not deserve to be written 
 except so far as it deserves to be remembered. He runs 
 rapidly over the barbarous and sterile times, and over those 
 of his ancestors of whom one knows only the names or 
 some insignificant dates. "It is with histories," he says, 
 "as with rivers, which become important only at the place 
 where they begin to be navigable." He chooses the French 
 in preference to every other language, because it is, he says, 
 " the most polished and the most widely-diffused language 
 of Europe, and because it appears in some way to have been 
 fixed by the good authors of the age of Lewis XIV." Ho 
 might have added, because it is the fittest to express the 
 thoughts of a clear-headed, bold, sensible, and resolute 
 genius. 
 
 All the little biographies of the primitive Electors, of 
 whom there is nothing great to be said, are sketched with 
 sobriety and with a severe taste. A few sarcasms thrown 
 out by the way, some philosophical sallies, mark the pupil 
 of Voltaire ; but these pleasantries are hasty ones, and do 
 not here derogate from the general tone. That tone is 
 simple and manly, and the narration is enriched with 
 curious but forcible reflections, which reveal the chain of 
 causes. When he comes to the epochs of the Reformation 
 T
 
 290 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 and the Thirty Years' "War, the historian -king characterizes 
 those great events in, a few words, by their general traits 
 and in their real principles ; he never fails to distinguish 
 the essential things from the accessories. When he re- 
 counts the horrors and the devastations which signalized 
 those sad periods of history, he shows sentiments of 
 humanity and order, sentiments of good administration 
 which are perfectly unaffected, and which he will justify. 
 I have said that the type which he proposes for imitation, 
 the man from whom he justly dates the greatness of his 
 house, is Frederic- William, called the Great Elector, he 
 who began to rule Brandenburg at the end of that dis- 
 astrous Thirty Years' War " which had made of the Elec- 
 torate a frightful desert, in which one recognised the 
 villages only by the heaps of ashes which prevented the 
 grass from growing in them." He enlarges upon this reign 
 with complacency ; he goes so far even as to dare establish 
 a parallel between that little northern prince and Lewis 
 XIV. in his glory : saving two or three passages, which are 
 a little flowery and too mythological, saving a slight 
 oratorical accent which betrays itself here and there, this 
 comparison forms a fine page of history, and one that is 
 really noble in tone. It is to be noted that Frederic, in 
 writing, while he is severe in style, is less sober than Caesar 
 and even than Napoleon ; he does not refuse the use of art, 
 especially in that first history of which Gibbon. could say 
 that it was well written. Having to narrate the campaign 
 of 1679, in which the Great Elector, in mid-winter, drove 
 out the Swiss, who had invaded Prussia, he will say : 
 " The retreat resembled a rout ; of sixteen thousand Swedes, 
 which they numbered, hardly three thousand returned to 
 Livonia. They had entered Prussia like Romans ; they 
 left it like Tartars." 
 
 He has sayings which sum up a complete judgment upon 
 men and upon nations. In the portraits of his grandfather, 
 the first Frederic, son of the Great Elector, who was so 
 little like his father, he will say to mark the pomp of 
 that king, who had no less than a hundred chamberlains :
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 291 
 
 " His ambassadors were as magnificent as those of the 
 Portuguese. " 
 
 His judgments of men are profound and decisive. To 
 heroes he has a visible attraction ; he speaks only with 
 respect, and with a deep fraternal instinct, of the Gus- 
 tavus-Adolphuses, of the Marlboroughs, of the Eugenes ; 
 but he is not deceived in regard to greatness, and does not 
 waste words upon it : Queen Christiana and her capricious 
 abdication appear to him only whimsical ; the duel between 
 Charles XII. and Peter the Great at Pultowa appears to 
 him a duel of two of the most singular men of their century. 
 Foreigner though he is, he knows how to choose his ex- 
 pressions like a just mind that fits or bends language to 
 its thought. Of that same Peter the Great he will say 
 elsewhere with energy: "Peter I., to govern his nation, 
 worked upon it like aquafortis upon iron." 
 
 For pointing statesmen and ministers he has those well- 
 chosen and authoritative words which are historical in 
 advance, and which grave themselves on the memory. 
 Wishing to characterize the too vast and too restless genius 
 of Cardinal Alberoni, and his too fiery imagination, he says : 
 " If one had given Alberoni two worlds like ours to turn 
 topsy-turvy, he would still have demanded a third." The 
 portraits of the eminent persons whom he knew and 
 managed are thrown olf witli the hand of a master, and, as 
 it were, by a man who was clever at this business, and 
 endowed with a natural aptitude for seining upon vices or 
 ridiculous traits. To give an idea of General Seckendorff, 
 who served at the Sctme time both the Emperor and Saxony, 
 he says : " He was sordid-minded ; his manners were coarse 
 and rustic ; lying was so habitual to him, that he had lost 
 the use of truth.* It was the soul of a usurer, which passed 
 sometimes into the body of a soldier, and sometimes into 
 that of a negotiator." And observe that all this is not 
 
 * This trait recalls the portrait which Xenophon, in his "Retreat of 
 the Ten Thousand," has traced of Meno, who had come, in the way of 
 lying, even to look upon truthful persons as ill-bred persona, without 
 education.
 
 292 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 after the portrait style, as in histories more or less literary, 
 where the historian stations himself before his model : it is 
 said on the spur of the moment, as if by a business man 
 who thinks aloud and talks. 
 
 When he enters upon the affairs of his own time, those 
 which he has directed and in which he has co-operated, 
 Frederic keeps the same tone, or rather he speaks with even 
 more simplicity than in his "History of Brandenburg." 
 In speaking of himself, he is neither haughty nor modest ; 
 he is true. In speaking of others, even of his greatest 
 enemies, he is just. At the beginning of his reign, narrat- 
 ing that conquest of Silesia which roused the anger of so 
 many persons, and which succeeded at once to his wishes, 
 he discloses his motives nakedly ; he indicates his faults 
 and his schools in war. Along with measures and calcula- 
 tions dictated by a far-sighted boldness, he recognises what 
 he owes to "opportunity, that mother of great events," and 
 he is careful to make allowance in every alfair for the part 
 which fortune plays : 
 
 "That which contributed the most to that conquest," he says, 
 " was an anny which had been formed during twenty-two years by an 
 admirable discipline, and which was superior to the rest of the soldiery 
 of Europe (note the homage to his father) ; some true citizen generals, 
 some wise and incorruptible ministers ; and finally, a certain good 
 fortune which often waits upon youth and denies itself to advanced age. 
 If that great enterprise had failed, the king would have passed fora rash 
 prince, who had undertaken what he had not strength to accomplish ; 
 success caused him to be regarded as clever as well as lucky. Really 
 it is only fortune which determines reputation ; he whom she favours 
 is applauded ; he whom she disdains is blamed." 
 
 The "History of the Seven Years' War" is admirable for 
 its simplicity and truth. The author does not limit him- 
 self to strategic operations, he depicts the Courts of Europe 
 during that time. In reciting the events of the war, he is 
 sober, rapid, not entering into personal details, except in a 
 few cases, where he cannot help paying a tribute of gratitude 
 to his brave troops or to some valiant companion in arms. I 
 recommend the reading of the sixth chapter, which treats of 
 the compnign of 1757, that campaign so fall of vicissitudes
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 293 
 
 and reverses, in which Frederic, reduced to despair, won 
 his easy and brilliant victory of Rossbach, and his masterly 
 and classic victory of Leuthen. If we join to this narrative, 
 so noble and so simple, the letters which he wrote to 
 Voltaire during the same period, we shall see Frederic at 
 the most brilliant time, at the crisis from which he came 
 forth with the most heroic and glorious perseverance. It 
 is here that we truly recognise the philosopher and the Stoic 
 in the warrior. The gravest reproach which he makes 
 against the Austrian court is that "it follows the brute 
 instincts of nature ; puifed up in prosperity and cringing 
 in adversity, it never has been able to attain to that wise 
 moderation which renders men impassive to the blessings 
 and the ills which chance dispenses." For himself, he is 
 resolved, in the greatest extremities, never to yield to 
 chance or to brute nature, but to persevere so well in the 
 path of great souls that he will finally make Fortune blush 
 with shame. 
 
 On coming out of this war, in which so much blood was 
 spilled, and after which everything was placed upon its 
 former footing, saving the devastations and the ruins, 
 Frederic loves to dwell upon the futility and emptiness of 
 human schemes : " Does it not seem astonishing," he says, 
 "that all that is most refined in human prudence, joined 
 to force, is often the dupe of unexpected events or of 
 sudden chances ? and is it not plain that there is a certain 
 I know not what, which sports contemptuously with the 
 projects of men ? " One recognises here a recollection of 
 Lucretius in some of his finest verses : Usque adeo res 
 humanas vis abdita qucedam. . . . Napoleon, undertaking 
 the campaign of 1812, wrote to the Emperor Alexander : 
 " I understood that its lot was cast, and that that invisible 
 Providence, whose rights and empire I recognise, had 
 decided upon this matter as upon so many others." It is 
 the same thought ; but there is in Napoleon's reflection a 
 flash more of inspiration, there is, so to speak, a mysterious 
 reflection brought back from Tabor, which the thought of 
 Frederic lacks. That accomplished king needed to mount
 
 294 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 one step more upon the height to receive on his brow the 
 ray that gilds and that also which dazzles. 
 
 Frederic, nevertheless, reuds the human heart rightly, 
 and shows himself to be a just moral observer and a practical 
 prophet when he adds : 
 
 "Time, which heals and effaces all ills, will soon, no doubt, give 
 back to the Prussians their abundance, their prosperity and their 
 first splendour ; the other Powers will likewise re-establish them- 
 selves ; then other ambitious men will stir up new wars, and cause 
 new disasters ; for that is the peculiarity of the human mind, that 
 examples correct nobody ; the follies of fathers are lost upon their 
 children ; every generation must commit its own." 
 
 Perhaps at another day I shall speak of Frederic as a 
 dilettante, a lover of the Fine Arts and of Belles-Lettres. 
 I have also some unpublished details thereupon, which, on 
 occasion, will serve me as a pretext. 
 
 II. 
 
 I HAVE tried in the preceding essay to set forth Frederic, 
 as king and politician, iii his highest and truest character, 
 the historic, not the anecdotal Frederic. It is thus that 
 he himself thought that great men should be finally judged, 
 without amusing ourselves with the accessories, by 
 rising to the point which governs their contradictious and 
 their caprices. The inner and private life of Frederic, how- 
 ever, is fully known ; every part of his character has been 
 revealed ; we have his letters, his verses, his pamphlets, 
 his whims and facetiae, his secret disclosures of every kind ; 
 he did nothing to suppress them ; and it is impossible not 
 to recognise in him another very essential person, which is 
 at the man's very heart. One may say that if, in Frederic, 
 the great king was duplicated by a philosopher, he was also 
 complicated with a man of letters. 
 
 The great Cardinal Richelieu was so too ; to have com- 
 posed a fine tragedy would have been a thing almost as 
 sweet to his heart, and would have appeared to him a work
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 295 
 
 almost as glorious as to triumph over the Spaniards, and 
 to maintain the allies of France in Germany ; the laurels of 
 the Cid would not let him sleep. At the close of the Seven 
 Years' War, when D'Alembert went to visit Frederic at 
 Potsdam, and spoke to him of his glory, "He told me 
 with the greatest simplicity," writes D'Alembert, "that 
 there was a fearful deduction to be made from that glory ; 
 that chance counted in it almost for all ; and that he would 
 much rather have composed ' Athalie ' than have waged all 
 that war." There is certainly something of the philosopher 
 in this way of judging :nilitary triumphs; but there is 
 always something of the man of letters in the preference 
 thus given to "Athalie." I know not whether Frederic would 
 not have contradicted himself, in case an evil genius had 
 taken him at his word, and he had really had to choose 
 between the Seven Years' War and "Athalie ; " or rather I am 
 very sure that the king, in the end, would have won the 
 day ; but the poet's heart would have bled within him, and 
 it suffices for us, to qualify him as we do, that he could 
 have hesitated for a single instant. 
 
 When we study Frederic in his writings, in his Corre : 
 spondence, especially that which he had with Voltaire, wo 
 recognise, it seems to me, an evident fact : there was a 
 man of letters pre-existing in him before all, before even the 
 king. What he was before everything else, naturally, and 
 so to speak, most unaffectedly and primitively, was still a 
 man of letters, a dilettante, a virtuoso, with a lively taste 
 for the arts, with especially a passionate worship of genius. 
 He had only to abandon himself to his inclinations to over- 
 flow in that direction. His position as king, his love of 
 honourable glory, and the great capacity with which he was 
 endowed, directed him to other employments, which had 
 for their aim social utility and the greatness of the nation : 
 he thought that "a good mind is susceptible of all sorts of 
 forms, and that it brings the proper aptitudes to everything 
 it would undertake. It is like a Proteus which changes its 
 form without difficulty, and which appears really to be the 
 object it represents." Thus he appeared to have been born
 
 296 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 for everything he had to do as king ; he was up to the 
 height of his task. "The strength of States," he thought, 
 " consists in the great men to whom nature seasonably gives 
 birth in them." He wished to be, and he was one of those 
 great men ; he worthily fulfilled his function as a hero. 
 The nation which the Great Elector had sketched before 
 him, he formed and completed by giving it a body and by 
 impressing it with unity of spirit ; Prussia did not really 
 exist till it went out from his hands. Such is the part of 
 the great Frederic in history ; but, at heart, his secret, or 
 even slightly secret tastes, his real delights, were to reason 
 upon every subject, to follow out his thoughts as a philo- 
 sopher, and also to cast them upon paper, whether seriously 
 or in jest, as a rhymer and a writer. 
 
 He had been educated bj r a Frenchman named Duhan, a 
 man of merit, who had inspired him with love for our 
 language and literature. He had been initiated, after a 
 kind of tradition which was yet correct enough, by the 
 French refugees in Berlin. That desire of glory which 
 nourished the young soul of Frederic, and which sought also 
 its object, made him naturally turn his eyes toward France. 
 The age of Lewis XIV., now completed, gradually extended 
 its influence over all Europe. Brandenburg was slower 
 than the other nations ; there was nothing astonishing in 
 that ; but Frederic felt humiliated by it, and he believed 
 that it was for him to inaugurate that new era of Renais- 
 sance in the North. "While his father lived, this purely 
 literary desire of Frederic prevailed over his other thoughts, 
 and engaged him in some proceedings, some advances, in 
 which the future king forgot himself a little. He was prince- 
 royal and twenty-four years old when he began the Corre- 
 spondence with Voltaire (1736). Voltaire was living then 
 at Cirey with Madame du Chdtelet. He received from the 
 young prince of Prussia, not a complimentary letter, but a 
 real passionate declaration. One may smile to-day at that 
 tirst letter, so awkward and more than half Teutonic, in 
 winch Frederic mingles his admiration for Wolff with his 
 admiration for Voltaire, and in which he speaks to the
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 297 
 
 latter in the name of human kindness, and talks of the 
 "support which you offer," says he, "to all those who 
 devote themselves to the arts and sciences." Through this 
 singular style of Frederic's first letters the noblest thought 
 finds its way. Looking at Voltaire from afar, and judging 
 of him by his works alone, embracing him with that youth- 
 ful enthusiasm which it is honourable to have felt at least 
 once in one's life, Frederic proclaims him the only heir of 
 the great age which has just ended, "the greatest man in 
 France, and a mortal who does honour to speech." He 
 admires him and salutes him, as Vauvenargucs will soon 
 likewise salute him, without getting a glimpse of the faults 
 of the man, simply on account of the beauties of his mind 
 and the graces of his language. He declares himself, con- 
 sequently, to be his disciple, his disciple not only in his 
 writings but in his actions ; for, deceived by the distance 
 and by the gilded mists of youth, he sees in him almost a 
 Lycurgus or a Solon, a legislator and a sage. 
 
 Do riot, however, be too ready to smile at this. Never 
 has one more clearly perceived than that young prince 
 what literature might be in its highest inspiration, how 
 much it contains that is elevated and useful, and how much 
 of its glory is durable and immortal. " I count it as one of 
 the greatest blessings of my life that I was born a contem- 
 porary of a man who has so distinguished a merit as yours." 
 This sentiment breaks out in all this phase of the Corre- 
 spondence. Voltaire is charmed ; Voltaire is compliment- 
 ary ; he thanks, he praises, he enchants ; we should not 
 say truly that he is secretly laughing, and doubtless he did 
 not then laugh much, at certain solecisms and swelling 
 tones which often accompanied these northern praises. 
 According to him, that young prince makes verses like 
 Catullus in the time of Csesar ; he plays upon the flute like 
 Telemachus; he is Augustus-Frederic Virgil. Enough, 
 replies Frederic, who has the advantnge here in respect to 
 good sense and good taste, morally speaking: "I am, I 
 assure you, neither a species of great man nor a candidate 
 for greatness. I ain but a simple individual who is known
 
 298 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 only to a small part of the Continent, and whose name, 
 according to all appearances, will serve only to decorate 
 some genealogical tree, to fall afterward into obscurity and 
 oblivion." Such is his self-judgment, and he was right at 
 that date ; this man of twenty-live feels that he is nothing 
 yet, and that he has not even made a beginning. ''When 
 persons of a certain rank," he remarks, "complete half of a 
 career, people award them the prize which others do not 
 receive till they have finished it." He is indignant at this 
 difference in standards, as if one deemed princes to be of an 
 inferior nature to other men, and less capable of an entire 
 action. 
 
 One day Voltaire has the impudence to say to him that 
 he, Frederic, writes better French than Lewis XIV., that 
 Lewis XIV. was ignorant of orthography, and other 
 wretched things of that kind ; as if Lewis XIV. was not 
 one of the men in his kingdom who spoke the best, and 
 as if one of the greatest praises that could be given to that 
 excellent writer, Pellisson, was not his having been on 
 more than one occasion the worthy secretary of Lewis XIV. 
 Here, again, Frederic checks Voltaire, and gives him a 
 lesson in tact: "Lewis XIV.," says he, "was a prince 
 great in an infinity of ways ; a solecism, an orthographical 
 error, could not sully in the least his reputation, established 
 by so many deeds which have immortalized him. He had 
 the right in every sense to say : Caesar est supra graminat- 
 icam. I am not great in any way. It is only my applica- 
 tion which may one day, perhaps, make me useful to my 
 country ; and that is all the glory to which I aspire." One 
 loves to meet, amid the insipidities and occasional ridiculous 
 extravagances in this beginning of the Correspondence, 
 more than one of these passages in which the future king 
 already peeps out, the superior man, who, although he 
 has the rage for rhyming and for producing his first works, 
 will know how to triumph over it by a higher passion, and 
 who will never be a rhetorician on the throne. In every- 
 thing, even in these plays of the mind, Frederic always 
 ends by laying the greatest stress on action, on social
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 299 
 
 utility, anil the country's good ; lie is a genius who amuses 
 himself while waiting for something better, who will con- 
 tinue to amuse himself and to make merry in the intervals 
 of the roughest toils, hut who will always aspire, by force 
 of a firm will, to reach a practical and useful greatness. 
 There is a time for him to laugh, to play the flute, to make 
 verses, and a time to reign. The man of letters may some- 
 times balance the king, and frolic before him, but it is only 
 to give way to him, when it is necessary, at the precise 
 hour. One may say of him that never did one of his 
 talents, never did one of his passions or even of his manias, 
 interfere with one of his duties. 
 
 Considered as matters of taste, there were many things 
 to be noticed. The rude and slightly coarse nature of 
 the Vandal betrayed itself in Frederic even athwart the 
 intellectual man and the dilettante eager to learn and to 
 please. It is not merely language and expression which 
 fail him here and refuse to obey ; it is often delicate tact 
 which is wanting. Every time he speaks to Voltaire of 
 Madame du Chatelet, he finds it very hard to avoid being 
 ridiculous : "I respect the ties of friendship too much," he 
 writes to Cirey, ' ' to wish to tear you away from the arms 
 of Emily." When he wishes to be polite, it is with this 
 levity. Frederic can think of nothing more graceful than 
 to send as a present to Voltaire a bust of Socrates, the sage 
 who was pre-eminently patient ; which would have looked 
 like an epigram, if at that time he had better known his 
 poet. But that Socrates recalls to Frederic Alcibiades, and 
 hence more than one equivocal and dangerous allusion, in 
 which, however, Voltaire does not disdain to participate. 
 All this savours of the Goth ami the Horule, who have 
 great minds, but minds whose polish is only superficial, 
 arid in which more than one corner is not polished at all. 
 That rough diamond will require some time to disengage 
 itself from its matrix. 
 
 Nevertheless Frederic improved rapidly ; he improves 
 visibly in this Correspondence, and there comes a time 
 when he masters and manages his French prose in a way to
 
 300 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 challenge the criticism of Voltaire. As to his verses, we 
 must despair of him ; for this form of expression his throat 
 will always remains hoarse and hard, and he will never 
 correct himself. He will say, for example, without 
 difficulty : 
 
 " Les myrtes, les lauriers, soignes dans ces cantons 
 Attendent que, cueillis par les mains d'Emilie, . . ." 
 
 or, again : 
 
 " Que vous dirai-je, O tendre Ovide? 
 Vous dediates 1'Art d'aimer." 
 
 These are his smallest faults. Let us end this chapter 
 on Frederic's verses. He knew very well that this madness 
 was in him a weakness and an object of ridicule ; that 
 people praised him to his face, only to call him Cotin behind 
 his back. "That man," said Voltaire one day, showing a 
 pile of papers from the king, "do you see? is Caesar and 
 the Abbe" Cotin." An eminent English historian, Mr. 
 Macaulay, improving upon this, called Frederic a compound 
 of Mithridates and Tiissotin. Frederic knew or had a 
 misgiving of all that, yet yielded, nevertheless, to his rage 
 for rhyming. Being very amorous in his early youth of a 
 young girl who loved verse, he had been bitten by the 
 tarantula, but though entirely cured of one ill (that of loving 
 young girls) he was never cured of the other. One could 
 say nothing to him upon this subject, in the way of objec- 
 tion or expostulation, which he had not said a hundred 
 times to himself: "I have the misfortune;" said he, "to 
 love verse, and often to make very bad verse. That which 
 should disgust me, and repel every reasonable person, is 
 precisely the spur which most pricks mo on. I say to 
 myself. ' Unhappy little poet ! thou hast hitherto been 
 unable to succeed ; courage !'..." He will say to him- 
 self also : " Whoever is not a poet at twenty will not 
 become such while he lives. . . . No man who was not 
 born a Frenchman, or who has not lived a long time at 
 Paris, can possess the language in the degree of perfection 
 which is necessary for writing good verse or elegant prose."
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 301 
 
 Ho will compare himself to vines "which always have a 
 flavour of the soil in which they have been planted." But, 
 finally, this occupation amuses him ; it diverts and rests 
 him in the intervals of great affairs, and, even to the last, 
 he will rhyme. He also composed some music after the 
 Italian taste, solos by hundreds, and lie played on the flute, 
 we are told, to perfection, which did not hinder Diderot 
 from saying: "It is a great pity that the mouthpiece of 
 that beautiful flute should be spoiled by some grains of 
 Brandenburg sand." 
 
 In Germany, where they write dissertations on everything, 
 1hey have discoursed on the books and the libraries of 
 Frederic, upon the authors whom he preferred, and they 
 have drawn conclusions concerning the nature and quality 
 of his tastes. From the fact that he calls D'Alembert, in 
 his letters, my dear Anaxagoras, one has gone so far as to 
 suppose, for example, that he had a certain predilection for 
 the philosophy of Anaxagoras. These are the refinements 
 and subtleties of commentators. In order to be informed 
 of the real intellectual tastes of Frederic, it is sufficient to 
 hear him himself, as he describes himself to the life, in his 
 Correspondence. He knew antiquity only by translations, 
 and by French translations ; he did not therefore judge 
 well, except in the gross, those things which resist that 
 kind of transport from one language into another. The 
 poetic beauty of the ancients escaped him altogether ; he 
 did not even suspect it. He judged some historians well, 
 who were proper subjects for his study and meditation ; 
 and yet when we see him lavish the title of Thucydides on 
 Rollin or even on Voltaire, we are forced to confess that he 
 docs not appear to have any notion of the peculiar manner 
 which constitutes the originality of that great historian. 
 He would judge better of Polybius, in whom the subject- 
 matter is most important ; a really meritorious critic 
 (M. Egger) calls my attention to the fact that Frederic as 
 historian and Folybius have some real and very striking 
 correspondences. The reflections with which Frederic 
 terminates his recital of the Seven Years' War, closely
 
 302 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 resemble a page of Polybius : " At a distance of two thou- 
 sand years, there is the same way of judging of human 
 vicissitudes, and of explaining them by tricks of cleverness 
 mingled with tricks of fortune," only the historian-king 
 is more sparing of reflections. Frederic judged certain 
 ancient moralists and philosophers well also, and even 
 some philosophic poets in whom thought predominated, 
 like Lucretius: "When I am afflicted," said he, "I read 
 the third book of Lucretius, and that comforts me." Yet 
 even into that which was the subject of his familiar read- 
 ings, he was so far from looking closely, as regards erudi- 
 tion, that he chanced inadvertently to class Epictetus and 
 Marcus Aurelius in the list of Latin authors. Among the 
 moderns, he esteemed Locke and Bayle most highly, those 
 breast-high philosophers, whom he was tempted to place a 
 little too near or even above the great, imaginative authors, 
 like Leibnitz or Descartes, whose errors offended him. He 
 did not hesitate to ridicule the transcendental geometry as 
 useless, and he went so far in this matter as to be called 
 to order by D'Alembert. His studies were directed most 
 willingly to practical morality and social science ; in that 
 he resembled Voltaire, who was himself as practical as a 
 writer can be, and he might have said like him : " I go to 
 the fact ; that is my motto." 
 
 Touching German literature, Frederic is hardly in doubt ; 
 he is very sensible of its faults, which were without com- 
 pensation down to that date, heaviness, diffuseness, the 
 division of dialects, and he indicates some of the remedies. 
 He has, however, a presentiment of some fine clays at hand 
 for this national literature, and he predicts them : " I 
 announce them to you, they are going to appear I " He 
 docs not seem to suspect that they have, in fact, begun to 
 shine at the end of his life, and that Goethe has already 
 come. But can one be astonished that Frederic has not 
 noticed Werther ? 
 
 To sum up : everything like manly and firm thought 
 went straight to his sensitive and vigorous mind. In all 
 other things, it is too clear that he was more or less out of
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 303 
 
 his element ; in all that one may call invention or poetry, 
 he made only rough attempts, native sallies, which burst 
 forth especially in his conversation, but which under his 
 pen became feeble or turned heavily to imitation. In his 
 admiration for Voltaire there was a certain amount of truth 
 and justice, and there was also a certain amount of error 
 and illusion. He was marvellously sensible of the gaiety 
 of that brilliant imagination. He enjoyed that lively, 
 familiar, sportive genius. "It is not given to everybody," 
 said he, "to make the mind laugh." No one can better 
 describe that species of attraction, of luminous and flashing 
 talent peculiar to Voltaire. Toward the end, while wish- 
 ing him pleasanter sentiments, he saluted him still as 
 "the finest organ of reason and of truth." All this is as 
 well felt as it is justly expressed. But when Frederic 
 admired in Voltaire the pre-eminently great poet, when he 
 saw in the " Henriade " the ne plus ultra of epics, and when 
 he put it above the Iliads and the ^Eneids, he showed 
 simply his lack of an ideal, and at what point, on that side, 
 his horizons were limited. The great objects of comparison 
 had kept out of his range and out of his sight ; he spoke 
 upon that matter precisely like a man who had neither 
 seen nor conceived, at any day, the supreme and real 
 beauty. 
 
 "What pleasures surpass those of the mind?" cried 
 Frederic at twenty-five, mind, that is to say, the brilliant 
 reason, reason sportive and lively. He thought always 
 thus, and the whole secret of his passion for Voltaire 
 is there. That passion (this is truly the word for it) was, 
 moreover, reciprocal : Voltaire cannot dissemble it ; he him- 
 self, the great coquet, was smitten with Frederic, and in 
 the witty but miserable libel, so unworthy of confidence, 
 which he wrote after his flight from Berlin, to avenge him- 
 self upon the king, he cannot help saying, in speaking of 
 the Potsdam suppers: "The suppers were very agreeable. 
 I know not whether I am deceived ; it seems to me that 
 there was much wit there ; the king had it, and made 
 others have it." Note well the attraction, even in his
 
 304 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 anger. Sec the irresistible fascination which they exercised 
 upon each other, and which survived even friendship ! In 
 the second part of the Correspondence, when they renew 
 it after the quarrel, we find they have assumed entirely 
 different characters. Every illusion has vanished, and 
 nothing more remains but that lively relish of talent, which 
 manifests itself still. Moreover, the primitive and youth- 
 fully enthusiastic Frederic has disappeared ; he has given 
 place to the philosopher, to the superior and worldly-wise 
 man, who no longer gropes his way anywhere. The king 
 also makes himself oftener felt. They speak truths on both 
 sides, and (rare thing) they bear them. Voltaire tells some 
 to the king, and Frederic pays him back: "You have 
 behaved very badly to me," writes he to Voltaire. . . . 
 "I have pardoned you all, and I even wish to forget all. 
 But if you had not had to do with a fool who was in love 
 with your fine genius, you would not have got off so well 
 at every other. ..." 
 
 Nevertheless, after these severe words, too strong not to 
 be just, after these words, the king, as the fool in love 
 with the brilliant mind, easily betrays himself again when 
 lie adds : "Do you need some sweet things ? In good time ; 
 I will tell you some truths. I regard you as the finest 
 genius whom the ages have produced ; I admire your verses, 
 I love your prose, especially those little detached pieces of 
 your literary Miscellanies. Never has any author before 
 you had a tact so fine, a taste so sure, so delicate, as you 
 Lave. You are charming in conversation ; you know how 
 to instruct and to amuse at the same time. You are the 
 most bewitching creature that I know, and capable of 
 making yourself loved by everybody when you will. You 
 have so many graces of mind that you can offend and at 
 the same time merit the indulgence of those who know 
 you. Finally, you would be perfect if you were not a 
 man." 
 
 Let any one say now whether he who had such a liking 
 for Voltaire, and who found these French ways of insinuat- 
 ing sweet things after the bitterness, was not the man of
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 305 
 
 his time who showed the most ability when confronted 
 with Voltaire. 
 
 When one has read a certain portrait of Voltaire by 
 Frederic (1756), a portrait traced with the hand of a master, 
 with unerring penetration and without embellishment, one 
 understands still better the meaning of the language which 
 he has just used, that that seductive genius has such 
 graces that he speedily lays hold again of the very persons 
 whom he has offended, and who know him.* 
 
 I believe that I have kept within the bounds of truth 
 in saying that the intellectual attraction of these men for 
 each other survived even their friendship ; for it is evident, 
 when we read in good faith the whole series and the end 
 of that Correspondence, that their friendship itself has 
 not died, that it has revived with some of the old charm 
 mingled with reason, and that it is founded, not simply on 
 amusement, but on their serious and higher qualities. At 
 the same time that he combats the always irascible and 
 choleric instincts of the now aged Voltaire, Frederic exalts 
 and favours, as far as possible, his beneficent and humane 
 tendencies. He takes pleasure in praising, in encouraging 
 as a defender of humanity and toleration, the man who 
 clears and repeoples the almost abandoned soil of Ferney, 
 as he himself has peopled the sands of Brandenburg ; in 
 a word, he recognises and he embraces the great practical 
 poet as his fellow-labourer in social work and in civilisa- 
 tion. With a remnant of veneration, and, if one will, of 
 yet touching idolatry, Frederic, in all the comparisons he 
 makes of the two, always gives the advantage to Voltaire, 
 and that, too, in a heartfelt tone whose sincerity is above 
 suspicion. Speaking of that future of perfected reason of 
 which he perceived hardly the dawn, and of which, 
 thoroughly sceptical as he was, he did not utterly despair 
 as regards the future of humanity, he says : "Everything 
 
 * It appears to be proved to-day that that remarkable portrait of 
 Voltaire, found among Frederic's papers, was not his composition : in 
 copying it with his own hand, he limited himself to ratifying its 
 truth. 
 
 U
 
 306 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 with man depends upon tlie time wlien lie comes into the 
 world. Although I have come too late, I do not regret it : 
 I have seen Voltaire ; and if I see him no more, I read him 
 and he writes to me." From such accents one might divine, 
 though he did not tell it, the passion which was still the pro- 
 foundest and the most radical in Frederic, that which Vol- 
 taire while living personified in his eyes : " My last passion 
 will be that for letters ! " It had been the first also. 
 
 The intercourse of Frederic with D'Alembert was of quite 
 a different nature from his intimacy with Voltaire ; it was 
 never as lively, but it was long and enduring. It was not 
 simply a natural liking which drew Frederic to D'Alembert : 
 "We princes have all selfish souls, and we never make 
 acquaintances except when we have some private views, 
 which look directly to our profit." Frederic had early 
 thought of drawing D'Alembert to Berlin to make him 
 President of his Academy. That purpose became quite 
 serious after the death of Maupertuis, and when Frederic 
 had come out of the Seven Years' War. I have before me 
 the manuscript and unpublished Collection of Letters, 
 written by D'Alembert to Mademoiselle de Lespinasso 
 during his sojourn with the king of Prussia. In June 
 1763, D'Alembert went after Frederic, who was then in his 
 Westphalian States ; joining him at Gueldres, he travelled 
 as one of his suite as far as Potsdam. D'Alembert had 
 already seen Frederic several years before ; on seeing him 
 again, he was surprised to find him greater than his reputa- 
 tion. Frederic had the characteristic peculiar to great men, 
 of surpassing expectation even at the first sight. He begins 
 by chatting four hours in succession with D'Alcmbert ; he 
 speaks to him with simplicity, with modesty, of philosophy, 
 of letters, of peace, of war, of everything. At that date, 
 that is to say, three months only after peace was concluded, 
 Frederic had already rebuilt 4500 houses in the ruined 
 villages ; two years after (October 1765), he will have 
 rebuilt not less than 14,500. We observe, at the very 
 outset, with D'Alembert, this organizing and even pacific 
 side of the warrior. The amiable, familiar, and seductive
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 307 
 
 side of Frederic is perfectly indicated in the recital of our 
 traveller ; the prudent and modest guest has not had time 
 or a desire to perceive some faults which often impaired that 
 groundwork of wisdom and of agreeableness. 
 
 Honours do not turn the head of D'Alembert : he is 
 touched, but not intoxicated. While on his way to the 
 Brunswick States, he has dined at the table of the ducal 
 family, and has been styled marquis : he has submitted to 
 the title after a slight protest. Apparently, he says, that 
 was etiquette. With Frederic there is no etiquette, and all 
 passes as with a private man, a man of genius. D'Alembert 
 would have little to do to become necessary to Frederic by 
 his conversation, as Frederic would be to D'Alembert. It 
 was no longer the time of brilliant suppers at Potsdam, of 
 which Voltaire had seen and contributed to the last live 
 days : the familiar guests of that time, the friends of the 
 king's youth, at that second epoch, were dead or grown 
 old. The king was not merely the pleasantest man in his 
 kingdom ; if we except the Lord Marshal, he was the only 
 one. " He is almost the only person in his kingdom," 
 says D'Alembert, "with whom one can converse, at least 
 can have that kind of conversation of which one knows but 
 little out of France, and which becomes a necessity when 
 one has known it once." D'Alembert is inexhaustible upon 
 the king's affability and gaiety, the lights which he brings 
 to bear upon every subject, his good administration, his 
 care for the welfare of his people, the justice and the just- 
 ness which mark all his judgments. Touching Jean Jacques, 
 he says : " The king talks, it seems to me, very well about 
 the works of Rousseau ; he finds heat and force in them, 
 but very little logic and truth ; he professes to read only 
 for self-instruction, and the works of Rousseau teach him 
 little or nothing." 
 
 To D'Alemberr, whose estimable character he appreciated 
 at the outset, Frederic shows himself purely as a philo- 
 sopher ; one sees him as he would have liked to be seen in 
 the second half of his life, if gout and ill-humour had not 
 irritated him too much, and if he had had about him some
 
 3o8 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 worthy person to sympathize with and listen to him : 
 "His conversation runs sometimes upon literature, some- 
 times upon philosophy, very often even upon war and 
 politics, and sometimes upon contempt of life, of glory, and 
 of honours." This is the circle of human subjects which 
 ho loved to treat habitually, sincerely, and always in a 
 moralizing way ; but literature and philosophy were still 
 the topics of which he loved to chat above all others, in 
 order to unbend, after ho had done his duties as king. All 
 the good qualities of Frederic are set in relief in this recital ; 
 and D'Alembert, elsewhere circumspect, cares not to see 
 any others during these three months of his visit. He 
 knows, however, how to resist the caresses and the delicate 
 offers of the king. One day when he was walking with him 
 in the gardens of Sans-Souci, Frederic gathers a rose and 
 presents it to him, saying : " I should very much like 
 to give you something better." That better was the 
 Presidency of his Academy. It is singular to see thus 
 connected the Presidency of an Academy and a rose. 
 D'Alembert remains wise ; he remains a philosopher and a 
 friend to the end, and faithful to Mademoiselle de Lespin- 
 asse. He returns to France grateful, with his heart for ever 
 won to Frederic, but not vanquished. 
 
 All must be told. Some years after, Frederic communi- 
 cated, one evening, some of his verses to Professor Thie'bault, 
 a good grammarian and academician, whom D'Alembert 
 had procured for him, and inadvertently suffered himself to 
 go so far as to show a very biting epigram which he had 
 composed against D'Alembert himself; that caustic king 
 could not deny himself the malicious pleasure of noting 
 something ridiculous which he had hit upon in that honour- 
 able character. It was a capital fault of Frederic ; he did 
 not easily deny himself the pleasure of saying disobliging 
 tilings to people or of writing pungent things about them. 
 In the present case he soon repented having shown his 
 epigram to Thie'bault, and he enjoined secrecy ; the good 
 D'Alembert never knew anything of it. But surrounded, 
 as he was, at home with courtly wits, and all more or
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 309 
 
 less dull, Frederic was less scrupulous with them. As soon 
 as he had discovered their weak side, he pricked them 
 pitilessly in their vulnerable points ; he made them his 
 butts ; he took pains to show his contempt for humanity in 
 their persons, and he thus acquired the reputation of a bad 
 man, when he was really only a terrible satirist of society. 
 The wittiest of these dull courtiers and of these false friends, 
 such as the able Bastiani, secretly avenged themselves on 
 the king by reviling him to strangers. M. de Guibert has 
 reported to us in his "Journal of Travel" one of these 
 confidential disclosures full of baseness and of perfidy, 
 regarding which he shows himself too credulous. The mis- 
 fortune of Frederic was to be surrounded at all times, and 
 especially towards the end of his life, only by second-rate 
 people of letters, whose not very elevated character afforded 
 too ready facilities to his princely sports. Worthy men, 
 who had respect for themselves, like D'Alembert, would have 
 compelled him in his turn to respect them. The estimable 
 Thiebault, in his modest way, knew how to do this. 
 
 Returned to France, D'Alembert continued to correspond 
 with Frederic ; and (if one forgets the epigram which was 
 never known), the Correspondence gives evidence on both 
 sides of much reason, of genuine philosophy, and even cf 
 friendship, so far as it could then exist between a private 
 person and a monarch. Let us not forget that D'Alembert 
 also had his weaknesses ; we know already that the philo- 
 sophers of the eighteenth century had not much love for the 
 liberty of the press, except when it promoted their own 
 interest ; one day D'Alembert was insulted by some gazetteer 
 who edited the ' ' Lower Rhine Courier, " in the States of 
 Frederic ; he denounces him to the king. Here it is Frederic 
 who is the true philosopher, the true citizen of modern 
 society, and lie replies : 
 
 " I know that a Frenchman, a countryman of yonrs, daubs regularly 
 two sheets of paper a week at Cloves ; I know that people buy his 
 sheets, and that a fool always finds a greater fool to read him ; but I 
 find it very difficult to persuade myself that a writer of that temper 
 can prejudice your reputation. Ah 1 my good D'Alembert, if you were 
 king of England, you would encounter many other lampoons, with
 
 310 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 which your very faithful subjects would furnish you to try your 
 patience. If you knew what a number of infamous writings your dear 
 countrymen have published against me during the war, you would 
 laugh at this miserable scribbler. I have not deigned to read all these 
 works which are the offspring of the hate and envy of my enemies, 
 and I have recollected that beautiful ode of Horace : ' The wise man 
 continues unmoved.' . . ." 
 
 He continues to paraphrase the Justum et te.nac.tm. , . . 
 We recognise in this admirable lesson the disciple of Baylo 
 on the throne. At another day it will be the disciple of 
 Lucretius. D'Alembert is plunged in sorrow, a deep and 
 very legitimate sorrow : he has lost Mademoiselle de Lespin- 
 asse ; he is going to lose Madame Geoffrin. That geometer's 
 heart, so sensitive to friendship, does not fear to overflow 
 into the soul of Frederic, to pour into it its grief, and 
 almost its sobs ; and the king replies to him as a friend and 
 as a sage, by two or three letters of philosophical consola- 
 tion, which should be quoted in full. A lofty and tender 
 epicureanism breathes through them, that of a Lucretius 
 speaking to his friend : 
 
 "I compassionate the misfortune which has happened to you, in 
 losing a person to whom you were attached. The wounds of the heart 
 are the most painful of all, and, in spite of the fine maxims of the 
 philosophers, it is only time that can heal them. Man is an animal 
 that has more feeling than reason. It has been my misfortune to have 
 had too bitter an experience of what one suffers from such losses. The 
 best remedy is to do violence to one's feelings, to divert one's attention 
 from a painful thought which is too deeply rooted in the mind. Some 
 geometrical occupation should be chosen which demands much 
 application, to dispel as well as one can the fatal ideas which are 
 incessantly renewed, and which it is necessary to banish as far as 
 possible. I would propose to you better remedies, if I knew of any. 
 Cicero, to console himself for the death of his dear Tullia, threw himself 
 into literary composition, and wrote several treatises, some of which 
 have reached us. Our reason is too weak to vanquish the pain of a 
 mortal wound ; we must yield something to nature, and confess to 
 ourselves that at your age, as at mine, one must console himself with 
 the thought that lie will not be long in rejoiuing the objects of his 
 regrets." 
 
 He then engages to come and pass some months with 
 him : "We will philosophize together on the nothingness 
 of life, on human philosophy, upon the vanity of stoicism
 
 FREDERIC THE GREAT. 311 
 
 and of our whole existence." And he adds, with that mix- 
 ture of the warrior-king and the philosopher which would 
 seem contradictory if it were not touching here, that "he 
 will feel as much joy in tranquillizing him as if he had won 
 a battle." Such letters well atone for some blunt expres- 
 sions which one might find in the same collection, and 
 which recall at times the presence of the master ; they are 
 a reply to those who, judging Frederic only by his harsh 
 words and by his epigrams, deny that he had, even at the 
 close of his career, sentiments of affection, of humanity, 
 and, I dare say, of goodness, even that he had had real and 
 lively sentiments of friendship in his youth. For myself, 
 on whatever side I regard him, even in the years when his 
 faults were most marked, I can, on the whole, but come to 
 a favourable couclusion, and say, as Bolingbroke said, of 
 Marlborongh : " He was so great a man that I have for- 
 gotten his faults." In the present case, the great man 
 had, in spite of all, some goodness and some humanity, and 
 a basis of heart. 
 
 In a select edition of Frederic's works, which should be 
 made for the use of people of intellect and taste, in order to 
 avoid the trash whose proximity always spoils the best 
 things, I would have admitted only his Histories, two or 
 three of his Dissertations at most, and his Correspondence ; 
 there would be already quite enough of his verses, which 
 are scattered through his Letters, without adding others.' 
 We should thus have in all a dozen volumes of strong, 
 sound, agreeable, and entirely instructive reading. Let us 
 drop those names, so often applied to Frederic, and which 
 would be injurious or flattering, the too debateable names 
 of the Emperor Julian and Marcus Aurelius ; let us not 
 employ, on the other side, the name of Lucian, of whom ho 
 would only furnish parodies and strange travesties ; but, if 
 we would give him a classic designation, let us define him 
 in his best productions as a writer of the most marked 
 character, whose temper is wholly his own, but who, in the 
 habit and turn of his thought, resembles at once Polybius, 
 Lucretius, and Bayle.
 
 THE ABB GALIANI. 
 
 IN speaking some time ago of Madame d'Epinay, I had 
 occasiou to notice the Abbe Galiani, with whom that lady 
 carried on a correspondence during the last twelve years of 
 her life. The Abbe Galiani is one of the liveliest, the most 
 original, and the gayest figures of the eighteenth century ; 
 he wrote a good number of his works in French ; he belongs 
 to our literature as truly as any stranger naturalized among 
 us, almost as truly as Hamilton himself. But at the same 
 time that he entered so well into the ideas and tastes of 
 French society, he knew how to preserve his own manner, 
 physiognomy, and gesture, and also an independence of 
 thought which prevented him from abounding in any of 
 the commonplaces of the time. He prided himself on 
 having a way of looking at things which was peculiar to 
 him ; and such was the fact, for he did not see like anybody 
 else. The eighteenth century, judged in the person of the 
 Abbe" Galiani, reappears to us in entirely new aspects. 
 
 The Abbe Ferdinand Galiani, born in the kingdom of 
 Naples on the tenth day of December 1728, and brought 
 up in the city of Naples by an uncle who was an archbishop, 
 manifested the most precocious talents for letters and for 
 every kind of science; but, physically, he was never able 
 to rise above four feet and a half in stature. In that little 
 body, so well formed and so handsome, dwelt nothing but 
 talent, grace, lively fancy, and pure wit ; the gaiety of the 
 mask covered much good sense and many profound ideas. 
 In 1748, Galiani, at the age of twenty, became celebrated in 
 his country by a poetic pleasantry, a funeral Oration on the 
 
 public executioner, who had just died j it was a burlesque 
 811
 
 THE ABBE G A LI A NT. 313 
 
 parody on the Academical Eulogiums, which were far more 
 bombastic in Italy than elsewhere. The academicians of 
 Naples, turned into ridicule, made an uproar which in- 
 creased the success of the ingenious satire. Galiani, about 
 that time, gave himself up to the gravest studies ; he 
 published at the age of twenty-one a book upon money ; he 
 rendered to an illustrious savant, then very old and almost 
 blind, the Abbe* Intieri, the service of describing in his 
 name, in a small, substantial, and very practical treatise, a 
 new way of preserving grain. He gave his attention also 
 to antiquities and to natural history. Having made a col- 
 lection of volcanic stones and other things thrown up by 
 Vesuvius, he added to it a learned dissertation, and pre- 
 sented it to Pope Benedict XIV., who was not ungrateful. 
 Upon one of the boxes sent to the address of the Most 
 Holy Saint Peter, Galiani took care to write these wordg 
 from the Gospel: "Make these stones to become bread." 
 The amiable Benedict XIV. took the hint, and, in ex- 
 change for the stones, gave Galiani a benefice. That little 
 four-foot-and-a-half man, so gay, so foolish, so sensible, 
 and so learned, was now a mitred abbe, and had the title of 
 My Lord. 
 
 He came to Paris in 1759 as secretary of the Italian 
 embassy, and, with the exception of certain brief absences, 
 he resided there till 1769, that is to say, for ten years : ho 
 considered that he had lived a true life only during that 
 time. Distinguished from the very first day by the singu- 
 larity of his stature, he at once disconcerted jeering curiosity 
 and changed it to friendliness by the vivacity and piquancy 
 of his repartees. He was the delight of the social circles 
 which appropriated him to themselves ; his private friends, 
 especially Grimm and Diderot, deeply appreciated the 
 novelty and reach of his views and his lights. "That little 
 being, born at the foot of Mount Vesuvius," cried Grimm, 
 "is a true phenomenon. He joins to a luminous and 
 profound coup d'ail a vast and solid erudition, to the 
 views of a man of genius the playfulness and charm of a 
 man who seeks only to be amused and pleased. It is Plato
 
 3M SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 with the animation and gestures of harlequin." Marmontel 
 likewise said of him : " The Abbe Galiani was personally 
 the prettiest little harlequin that Italy had produced ; but 
 upou the shoulders of that harlequin was the head of 
 Machiavelli." That name, harlequin, winch is repeated 
 here, is characteristic of Galiani. French-like as he was, 
 and as he wished to be, ho did not cease to be an Italian, a 
 Neapolitan, a fact which must never be forgotten in judging 
 of him ; he had the peculiar genius of the soil, facetiousness, 
 pleasantry, a taste for parody. In an article of his upon 
 Punchinello, he represents him as being born in the 
 country, not far from the place where the Atellan farces of 
 antiquity had their origin. He seems to think that the 
 Bpirit of those ancient farces may have been perpetuated in 
 the modern original, and the little abbe himself had 
 inherited something of their buffoonery and licence. He 
 had great, lofty, sublime thoughts, worthy of Vico if not 
 of Plato, worthy of Magna Graecia, and suddenly these 
 thoughts were put to flight by buffooneries, jests, fooleries, 
 or something worse. " You see," said he pleasantly, "that 
 I am two different men kneaded together, who, neverthe- 
 less, do not entirely occupy the room of one." 
 
 To-day the Abbe 1 Galiani loses much ; we should have 
 heard him. He did not tell his stories ; he played them ; 
 he had some of the qualities of the mime. Apropos to 
 every serious theme, in politics, in morality, and in reli- 
 gion, he had some apologue, some good story to tell, a 
 lively, foolish, unexpected story, which made you laugh 
 yourself to tears, as he said, and which often concealed a 
 profound moral reflection. He made a little play of it, an 
 acting show, bustling about, throwing himself to and fro, 
 carrying on a dialogue in each scene with the most artless 
 gracefulness, making the spectators, even Madame Necker 
 and Madame Geoilrin, put up with liberties and even 
 indecencies. He painted himself to admiration in a letter 
 to the latter person, written at Naples. In writing it he 
 mentally sees himself again at Madame Geoffnn's, and he 
 depicts himself to us as he was wheu there in times past :
 
 THE ABBE GALIANL 315 
 
 "See me then as ever, the abbe", the little abbe", your little 
 thing. I am seated in the comfortable arm-chair, moving 
 my feet and arms like a demoniac, my wig awry, talking 
 much, and saying things which one deems sublime and 
 attributes to me. Ah, madame, what a mistake ! It was 
 not I who said so many beautiful things ; your arm-chairs 
 are so many tripods of Apollo, and I was the Sibyl. Be 
 assured that upon chairs of Neapolitan straw I utter only 
 stupid things. " No, he did not utter stupid things; but, 
 at Naples, the kind of talent which he had in the highest 
 degree was more common than at Paris ; one took less 
 notice in Naples of the play, the action, because it was 
 a more customary thing, and one did not know how to 
 separate from it all the excellent and unique ideas which 
 Galiani veils under this guise. This gesticulating petulance 
 which appeared so curious at first at Paris, was vulgar in 
 Toledo street and its neighbourhood ; Galiani lacked 
 listeners and the circle for himself alone. "Paris," he 
 often cried, in accents of despair, after having quitted that 
 city, "Paris is the only place where I arn listened to." 
 Having once retired to his own country, that country 
 which he nevertheless loves, and of which he is one of the 
 living curiosities, he dies of words returned to him unheard. 
 Galiani is a true Neapolitan virtuoso, but one who cannot 
 do without a Parisian auditory. 
 
 And how he was relished there ! Let one be in La 
 Chevrette at Madame d'Epinay's, at Grand Val with Baron 
 D'Holbach ; if one feels a little sad, and the day lowers, 
 if the conversation languishes, if the rain falls, the Abbe 
 Galiani enters, "and with the pleasant abbe", gaiety, 
 imagination, wit, sportiveness, everything that causes the 
 pains of life to be forgotten. The abbe* has an exhaustless 
 fund of sayings and pleasant sallies," adds Diderot; "he 
 is a treasure on a rainy day. I said to Madame d'Epinay, 
 that if they made such persons at the toy-shops, everybody 
 living in the country would want to have one." Of these 
 happy sayings and sallies of the abbe", he has preserved a 
 lurge number. Some one was speaking of the trees in the
 
 316 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 park at Versailles, and it was remarked that they were tall, 
 straight, and slender. "Like the courtesans," added the 
 Abbe" Galiani. Fond of music, and of exquisite music, as 
 the Neapolitans are, as the friend of Paisiello should he, 
 he disliked the French opera of the time, which made too 
 much noise ; and when, after the burning of the hall of 
 the Palace Royal, the opera had been transferred to the 
 Tuileries, and some one complained that the hall was bad 
 for hearing, "How happy it must be!" cried Galiani. 
 But many people, or at least more persons than one, have 
 these sallies which spring out of the occasion, which last 
 but for a moment and are followed by a long silence ; but 
 with the Abbe" Galiani there was no silence ; he sustained 
 the conversation almost alone; he enlivened it with the 
 maddest, merriest fancies, which were yet replete with fine 
 good sense. In this he had no parallel in his class. 
 Diderot, in his letters to Mademoiselle Voland, has pre- 
 served some of the abbess good stories, that of the porco 
 sacro, the apologue of the tall and fat monk in the mail- 
 coach, the story of the archbishop counterfeiting a duchess 
 in bed before a cardinal who visits her, and the colics of the 
 false duchess and what follows, in fine, a thousand un- 
 translateable fooleries, which, narrated by Diderot himself, 
 have remained in the state of mere rough sketches. All 
 this is spoken, is played and improvised, but it cannot be 
 written. The ancients had the mimes (little dramatic 
 pieces) of Sophron, which have been lost ; we have lost 
 the mimes of Galiani. Diderot, however, has very well 
 reported the apologue of the Cuckoo, the Nightingale, and 
 the Ass, and one may read it in his works ; but of the 
 apologues of Galiani I prefer to repeat the one I find re- 
 ported in the Memoirs of the Abbe Morellet, and which is 
 quite famous : 
 
 One day at Baron D'Holbach's, after dinner, the as- 
 sembled philosophers had talked of God at the top of their 
 voices, and had said things fitted "to bring down thunder- 
 bolts upon the house a hundred times, if they ever fell for 
 such a reason." Galitini had listened patiently to all this
 
 THE ABBE GALIANL 317 
 
 intrepid dissertation ; finally, tired of seeing the whole 
 company taking but one side of the question, he said : 
 
 " ' Gentlemen philosophers, you travel very fast ; I begin by telling 
 you that, if I were the pope, I would hand you over to the Inquisition, 
 and if I were king of France, to the Bastille ; but as I have the happi- 
 ness to be neither the one nor the other, I will come back to dinner 
 next Thursday, and you shall hear me as I have had the patience to 
 hear you, and I will refute you,' " 
 
 " On Thursday ! " they all cried with one voice, and the 
 challenge was accepted. Morellet continues : 
 
 "Thursday arrives. After dinner, the coffee having been taken, the 
 abbe seats himself in an arm-chair, with his legs crossed like a tailor's, 
 as usual ; and, as it is warm, he takes his wig with one hand, and 
 gesticulating with the other, he begins nearly thus : 
 
 '"I will suppose, gentlemen, the person among you who is most 
 thoroughly convinced that the world is the work of chance, to be 
 playing with three dice, I do not say in a gambling-house, but in the 
 best house in Paris, and his antagonist throwing double-sixes once, 
 twice, three times, lour times, in fine, continually. 
 
 '"However short the game, my friend Diderot, if he should thus 
 lose his money, would say without hesitation, without a moment's 
 doubt, " The dice are loaded, I am in a den of thieves." 
 
 " ' Ah, philosopher ! how is this? Because in ten or twelve throws 
 the dice have fallen from the box in such a way as to make j ou lose 
 six francs, you firmly believe that it is in consequence of an adroit 
 contrivance, of an artificial combination, of a well-planned trick ; and 
 yet, when you see in this universe so prodigious a number of combina- 
 tions, a thousand and thousand times more difficult, and more com- 
 plicated, and more constant, and more useful, etc., you never suspect 
 that nature's dice are also loaded, and that there is, up above there, a 
 great knave who makes a sport of overreaching you.' " 
 
 Morellet gives only the outline of this exposition, which 
 from the lips of Galiani was assuredly (and one will believe 
 it without difficulty) the most piquant thing in the world, 
 and as good as the most amusing piny. 
 
 Here are our philosophers painted from life ; here we 
 have them, like all the epicureans in the world, making 
 a play of the gravest questions of destiny and human 
 morality, a pure joust or game of their leisure hours, in 
 which the for and the against are treated with equal levity, 
 and yet utterly astonished afterward (I speak of those who
 
 318 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 survived, like the Abbe" Morellet), if one day all these 
 doctrines burst forth, and, falling upon the street, are re- 
 capitulated in Revolution Place at the festivals of lieason 
 and the other goddesses. The people, however, only trans- 
 lated there the reasoning of the subtlest thinkers ; they 
 translated it coarsely, after the usual way of translators, 
 but without much misconstruction. 
 
 Galiani, in this dispute, has the appearance of playing a 
 noble part : he seems to plead in favour of order and tho 
 supreme Ordainer, against the dogmatic and excessively 
 brutal atheism of his friends. Let us not, however, after 
 this facetious sermon, form too edifying an idea of his per- 
 formances. He had too much acuteness and good sense 
 not to be shocked by the absolute theories of D'Holbach : 
 "In reality," he thought, "we do not know enough of 
 nature to form a system of it." He accused those pre- 
 tended systems of nature of destroying all the illusions 
 that are natural and dear to man ; and as D'Holbach's book 
 appeared about the time when the Abbe" Terray issued a 
 decree of bankruptcy, he said: "That JVI. Mirabaud 
 (D'Holbach's pseudonym) is a true Abbe" Terray of meta- 
 physics. He makes reductions and suspensions, and causes 
 the bankruptcy of knowledge, of pleasure, and of the 
 human mind." 
 
 In philosophy the true system of the Abbe" Galiani is 
 this : he believes that man, when his mind is not too much 
 subtilized by metaphysics and excessive reflection, lives in 
 illusion, and was made to live in it. " Man," he tells us, 
 "was made to enjoy effects without the ability to divine 
 causes ; man has live organs framed expressly to indicate 
 to him pleasure and pain ; he has not a single organ to 
 apprise him of the truth or falsehood of anything." Galiani 
 does not believe, then, in absolute truth for man, in truth 
 worthy of the name : relative truth, which is only an 
 optical illusion, is the only kind, according to him, for 
 which man should seek. According to him, also, there is 
 an illusion in morality as in physics ; it produces results 
 which, relatively to society and man, may be beautiful and
 
 THE ABBE GALIANL 319 
 
 good. It is because the human eye was fashioned so as to 
 see the heavens round and vaulted, that man afterward 
 invented the cupola, the dome of the temple, sustained by 
 columns, which is a beautiful thing to see. So in morality, 
 our internal illusions regarding liberty and the first cause 
 have given birth to religion, morality, and law, all of which 
 are useful things, natural to man, and even true if you 
 please, but their truth is purely relative and wholly de- 
 pendent on the configuration, on the first illusion. 
 
 We see to what such a way of looking at things leads 
 him, in religion and morality. But if he prides himself upon 
 being himself unaffected by illusory views and relative im- 
 pressions, he is not furious to destroy those of other persons, 
 a characteristic in which ho differs essentially from his 
 friends, the French philosophers of the eighteenth century. 
 He would quite agree with any one who should say: "I 
 seem to be, in life, in an apartment between the cellar and 
 the attic. There is a flooring which conceals the girders, 
 and, if one has means, he also puts a carpet under his feet. 
 One tries also to adorn his ceiling, to hide the laths. If 
 one could have upon that ceiling a beautiful fresco, a sky 
 painted by Raphael, it would be so much the better. So 
 with the illusions of life and its deceitful perspectives ; it 
 is necessary to respect them, and at times to be pleased 
 with them, even when we know too well what there is 
 beyond them." 
 
 This, in all its reality, is the theology of the Abbe 
 Galiani, and I do not give it, even when viewed from the 
 illusory standpoint, of which he made so much, as very 
 beautiful or consoling ; the sum total, he admits, is equal 
 to zero. But in his scepticism there is none of the arro- 
 gance and intrepidity of doctrine which offends us in his 
 friends. When Madame Geoffrin fell sick, in 1776, after 
 some devotional excesses which she had committed during 
 the Jubilee exercises, Galiani wrote to Madame d'Epinay : 
 
 " I have mused over that strange metamorphosis (of Madame 
 Geofl'rin), arid I have found that it was the most natural tiling in the 
 world. Incredulity is the greatest effort which the mind of man can
 
 320 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 make against its own instinct and its taste. He strives to deprive 
 himself for ever of all the pleasures of the imagination, of all taste for 
 the wonderful ; he tries to empty the whole sack of knowledge (and 
 man would know all), to deny or to doubt always and to doubt every- 
 thing, and to remain in an utter impoverishment of all sublime ideas, 
 knowledge, and information. What a frightful void ! what nothing- 
 ness! what an effort! It is, then, demonstrated that the great 
 majority of men, and especially of women (whose imagination is double 
 that of man), could not be incredulous, and those who could be so 
 would be able to sustain the effort only while enjoying the greatest 
 strength and youth fulness of soul. If the soul should grow old, a 
 certain degree of credulity would reappear." 
 
 He adds also that the sceptic, he who persists in being 
 so at all seasons, "performs a real feat ; that he resembles 
 a rope-dancer, who performs the most incredible feats in 
 the air, vaulting about his cord ; he astonishes and 
 frightens all the spectators, and nobody is tempted to 
 follow or imitate him." He concludes that we should 
 never persecute true unbelievers, quiet and sincere unbe- 
 lievers ; wait, and do not regard them, and there is every 
 chance that a moment will come when the effort against 
 nature will begin to be relaxed, and the unbeliever will 
 be such no longer. 
 
 "When one heard him talk politics, one said that he was 
 equally luminous and charming. When we read to-day 
 the observations upon political themes that drop from his 
 pen in his Correspondence, allowance must be made for 
 the bold ideas, the paradoxes, the necessity of amusing 
 himself, which always tormented him, his mania for pre- 
 dicting and prophesying, and finally for the perpetual 
 buffooneries which are mingled with all that he writes. 
 With him a piece of grave and profound reasoning turns 
 suddenly into a joke. Nevertheless, amid all these fault?, 
 which to-day are very perceptible, there is much good 
 sense, many ideas, horizons of wide extent, and vistas at 
 every instant. 
 
 The two contemporaries with whom he was the most 
 intimate, and with whom he had the most affinity in heart 
 and mind, Grimm and Diderot, were his enthusiastic 
 admirers, and sprkc of him as a true genius. Galiaui
 
 THE ABBE GALIANI. 321 
 
 himself seems to have no aversion to that way of looking at 
 him, and he does not fear to say offhand, without guarding 
 his language : Montesquieu and I. Other contemporaries 
 seem to have been more struck with his faults. The wise 
 and shrewd David Hume writes to the Abbe" Morellet : 
 
 " The Abbe Galiani returns to Naples ; he does well to quit Paris 
 before I go there, for I should certainly have put him to death for all 
 the ill things he has said of England. But it has turned out as his 
 friend Caraccioli had predicted, who said that the abbe would remain 
 two months in that country, that nobody would have a chance to 
 speak but he, that he would not suffer an Englishman to edge in a 
 syllable, and that on his return he would pronounce upon the cha- 
 racter of the nation, and would continue to do so for the rest of his 
 days, as if he had known and studied that character exclusively." 
 
 Galiani had at a certain moment a great success and, 
 a real triumph. "About the year 1750," says Voltaire, 
 "the nation, satiated with verses, tragedies, comedies, 
 operas, romances, romantic histories, moral reflections 
 more romantic still, and theological disputes about Grace, 
 and convulsions, set itself at last to reasoning about grain. 
 People forgot even the vines, to talk only of wheat and 
 rye. . . ." Grain, and all that is connected with that 
 trade, was then very fashionable during the sojourn of the 
 Abb4 Galiaui in France. Was it necessary to grant it a free 
 exportation ? Should the exportation be regulated or for- 
 bidden? The economic sect was then established, and 
 enlightened men gave great attention and respect to these 
 systematic views. Galiani, who was very much at home 
 in such discussions, and who had studied these questions 
 before coming to France, was horrified by absolute ideas 
 upon such subjects, and, above all, by the dogmatic, 
 trenchant, mysterious, and wearisome way in which the 
 economists presented theirs. He set himself to reasoning 
 and jesting on the matter. It appears that it was to some 
 pleasantry in which he allowed himself to indulge upon this 
 subject, pleasantries of which M. Choiseul was the victim, 
 and which related to the concessions which that minister 
 had made to the new ideas, that the abbs' owed his recall' 
 from France, which had been requested of the Neapolitan 
 x
 
 322 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 court by Choiscul himself. Be that as it may, Galiani, on 
 leaving, shot his arrow ; he left in manuscript his 
 "Dialogues upon the Grain Trade," which appeared in 
 1770, and of which Diderot revised the proofs. That was 
 the fireworks and the bouquet with which the witty abbe" 
 brilliantly crowned the period of his Parisian life. We can 
 form no idea to-day of the success of those Dialogues ; the 
 women doted upon them ; they thought they understood 
 them ; they were then economists, as they were afterward 
 electricians, as they had previously been believers in Grace, 
 as they are to-day to some extent Socialists ; they arc 
 always following the fashion of the day or of the morrow. 
 These Dialogues of Galiani have been compared to the 
 "Brief Letters" of Pascal; that is saying a good deal. 
 They are less easy to read to-day than the " Provincial 
 Letters," which are themselves a little wearisome in some 
 passages. Galiani chose the dialogue form of composition, 
 as being the most French-like style. " That is the natural 
 style," said he. "The language of the most social people 
 in the world, the language of a nation which speaks more 
 than it thinks, of a nation which needs to speak in order to 
 think, and which thinks only in order to speak, should 
 be the language best fitted for dialogue. " With regard to 
 the subject-matter, in combating the absolute ideas and 
 reasonings of the economists, Galiani aimed to give a 
 glimpse of the political ideas which should rule and even 
 dominate in these matters. When he said of a man, " He 
 is an economist and nothing more," he believed that he 
 had pronounced sentence upon him, and excluded him from 
 the sphere of statesmen. ' ' He is a good man to compose 
 memoirs, journals, or dictionaries," added he, "to give 
 occupation to printers and booksellers, to amuse the idle ; 
 but as to governing the State, he is good for nothing." A 
 statesman, according to hirn, should not only have a 
 thorough knowledge of special subjects, but he should also 
 know the matter par excellence iipon which he has to 
 operate, that is to say, the human heart. "You are a 
 delicate anatomist of man," says the marquis of tlie
 
 THE ABBE GALIANL 323 
 
 Dialogues to the chevalier. The latter replies, "That is 
 what one should be, when one would speak of men. They 
 must be well understood by him who presumes to govern 
 them." He denied that Turgot himself had that know- 
 ledge and that art, and with far more reason he affirmed 
 the same of the men of the economic school. Galiani did 
 not have to wait for the alarm and trumpet-peal of the 
 French Revolution, in order to distrust the optimist and 
 rationalistic statesmen, the honest people so well known in 
 the time of Lewis XIV. and afterward, who too often forget 
 the true, real, and always perilous circumstances of every 
 political society. "Believe me," said he, "do not fear the 
 rogues, nor the wicked men, for sooner or later they are 
 unmasked. Fear the honest man who is deceived : he acts 
 in good faith, he means well, and everybody trusts him ; 
 but unhappily he is deceived concerning the means of doing 
 good to his fellow-men." Galiani's friends, and the abbe* 
 himself, were accustomed to say of his work on grain, " It 
 is not so much a work on the Grain-Trade as a work on the 
 Science of Government : one should know how to read the 
 white in it, and between the lines." The French Govern- 
 ment charged the Abbe" Morellet with the task of replying to 
 Galiani, and the former abbe 1 , who was as tall as the other 
 was short, as didactic and heavy with the pen as the other 
 was light and sparkling, replied in such a way as to win no 
 readers. He has none of the waggeries which the malicious 
 Neapolitan, during that dispute, addressed from afar to 
 his patient and slow adversary. Turgot, whose economic 
 principles were very much concerned in the discussion, has 
 given his opinion of Galiani's book, and, without despising 
 its agreeable qualities, has written some words which clearly 
 mark the opposite nature of their views, inspirations, and 
 doctrines. "I do not like any better," says he, after some 
 criticisms upon Galiani's hop-and-skip method, designed to 
 puzzle tho reader, "I do not like to see him always so 
 prudent, so hostile to enthusiasm, so very much in sym- 
 pathy with all the Ne. quid nimis, and with all those people 
 who enjoy the present, who are very much at ease, who let
 
 324 SA1NTE-BEUVE. 
 
 the world wag, because it goes very well with them, 
 people who, having their bed well made, are unwilling that 
 any one should disturb it." Turgot touches here on one of 
 the weaknesses of the little mitred and beneficed abbe". 
 
 Galiani believed in a secret doctrine in everything, in a 
 secret intention which few people are called upon to pene- 
 trate, and which even men of great talent do not suspect. 
 He pretended, in his half-serious, half-jesting way, in which 
 the thought is duplicated with the joke, that there are three 
 kinds of reasonings or resoundings : (1) The reasoning of 
 dunces ; they are, as he believed, the most ordinary kind, 
 those of the mass of men. (2) The reasonings or resoundings 
 of bells ; these are the kind employed by many poets and 
 orators, by people of high talents, but who, according to 
 the abbe 1 , are influenced too much by appearances, by the 
 majestic and resounding forms of the human illusion. He 
 dared to range in this class of reasonings those of Bossuet 
 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (3) Finally, there are, accord- 
 ing to him, again, the reasonings of men, of the true sages, 
 of those who have cracked the nut (like the Abbe Galiani), 
 and who have found that it contains nothing. I think that 
 in his most serious moments he would have defined the 
 sage as "he who, in the hours of reflection, disengages 
 and divests himself completely of all relative impressions, 
 and who accounts for his own proper accident, his own 
 nothing, amidst the universality of things." 
 
 The Abbe" Galiani quitted Paris, no more to return, in 
 the summer of 1769, and it is at this date that his Corre- 
 spondence with Madame d'Epinay begins ; it is by means of 
 her that he is reattached to his Parisian friends, and he will 
 very often have occasion to repeat to her: "I am lost if 
 you fail me. " 
 
 This little Machiavelli, who affected a lack of feeling, 
 who boasted that he never wept in his life, and that he 
 had seen with dry eyes his father, mother, sister, all his 
 friends, pass away (he calumniated himself), wept and 
 sobbed on quitting Paris, on quitting, as he said, "that 
 amiable nation which has loved me so much." It was
 
 THE ABBE GALIANI. 325 
 
 necessary to tear him away from it, since of himself he 
 never would have had strength to leave it. His entire 
 Correspondence is but one long regret. The city of Naples, 
 which has so many) attractions for one who has seen it 
 but once, and in which one would like to die, appeared 
 to him but a place of exile. "Life there has a killing 
 uniformity. "What can one do with himself in a country 
 where they dispute about nothing, not even about religion ? " 
 He finds occupation there, nevertheless, and of a more 
 serious kind than he pretends. A servant of the king, 
 Counsellor-Secretary of Commerce, he judges, or professes 
 to judge, difficult cases ; he applies himself in the intervals 
 of duty to letters and study ; he revises, corrects, and pre- 
 pares new editions of his early writings : "they are all in 
 Italian ; there are dissertations, verses, prose, antiquarian 
 researches, detached thoughts : all this writing is, indeed, 
 very youthful, still it is mine." He artlessly reveals to us, 
 in these things of the mind, his parental tenderness. He 
 also applies himself to new tasks ; he pushes still farther 
 his studies on Horace, upon whom he had already com- 
 mented with a rare taste, sharpened with paradox ; he 
 thinks of drawing from his favourite poet a complete moral 
 philosophy. He gives himself up, with a passion which 
 one loves to recognise, to his Neapolitan dialect, maintain- 
 ing its superiority and priority to the other Italian dialects ; 
 he compares it to the Doric of the Greeks. Among the 
 celebrated poets and prose writers in that patois, one would 
 find, I imagine, more than one type of Galiani remaining in 
 the pure state, and not cut out after the French fashion. 
 Having become a Neapolitan again, the abbe, that he may 
 not lose the habit, begins again to make fun of fools, the 
 literary pedants of the town, and, under the title of " The 
 Imaginary Socrates," he constructs a theatrical piece, an 
 opera bouffe", the verses of which are composed by another 
 person, and the music by the illustrious Paisiello. The 
 piece causes a /wrore,and it is thought that its representa- 
 tion must be forbidden. Amidst these mental diversions, 
 and sports with his cat which furnishes him with a thou-
 
 326 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 sand occasions for philosophic and playful observations, 
 Galiana punctiliously performs his duties as a public man 
 and as head of a family. He has three nieces whom he does 
 not spare in his Correspondence (" My nieces are stupid, and 
 a cat is all the company I have"), three nieces who are 
 demanding with a hue-and-cry to be married, and of whom 
 he is, as he says, the jockey. While he seems thus to be 
 laughing at them, he marries them in a very fatherly way. 
 Meanwhile the poor abbe* grows old, and sooner than other 
 persons, as if in his case, owing to his extreme vivacity of 
 spirit, everything was more rapid, as if the scantier stuff 
 must be more quickly consumed. He loses his teeth, he, 
 the epicure, can no longer eat ; and, woe above all 
 others! he can no longer talk, he stammers. "But 
 imagine what that means, the abbe* dumb ! " 
 
 By a contradiction which is not rare, this epicurean, who 
 will allow to men no generous springs of action, and who 
 dissects and decomposes all that appear such, shows in his 
 own affairs a noble, elevated soul, and all the pride of an 
 honourable man. The ministers are successively changed ; 
 his fortune, which is good certainly, but not on a level 
 with his talents, is impaired at the same moment. What 
 matters it to him that his friend Sambucca becomes minister 
 in place of Tanucci ? "A minister is attached only to 
 people who are devoted to him, and I cannot devote myself 
 to any one ; I cannot even give myself to the devil, I am 
 my own 1 " 
 
 In the same way this man who affects insensibility 
 experiences all the inquietudes of friendship ; he feels its 
 cruel pains in the losses which are his lot. It is true that 
 the number of his genuine friends, of those to whom he is 
 really attached and bound by secret fibres, lessens with the 
 years. Learning through Madame d'Epinay the death of 
 one of his Parisian friends, the Marquis of Croismare, he is 
 astonished that he is affected less than he would have 
 believed. "This phenomenon has astonished me, has 
 almost made me horrified at myself, and I have desired to 
 investigate its cause. It is not absence ; it is not that my
 
 THE ABBE GALIANI. 327 
 
 heart has changed or hardened ; it is because one is attached 
 to the life of another person only in the degree that he is 
 attached to his own, and one is attached to life only in 
 proportion to the pleasures it yields him. I understand 
 now why peasants die tranquilly, and so stupidly see others 
 die. A man sent to Bicetre, to remain there for ever, would 
 hear of all the deaths in the universe without regret." 
 This theory, which is perhaps very true, is found to be at 
 fault in respect to him, as soon as he is confronted with a 
 great loss, which really takes hold of the heart : he has not 
 yet reached the state of insensibility which he imagines. 
 "Time," he remarks, "effaces the little furrows, but the 
 deep impressions remain. I know now who are the persons 
 that interested me most at Paris ; during my first years 
 there I did not distinguish them." The day when he loses 
 Madame d'Epinay, on that day only does his heart break, 
 and his Parisian life close ; Galiani the Parisian dies with 
 her, Galiani the Neapolitan continues to vegetate. A 
 Parisian woman, Madame du Bocage, proposed to replace 
 Madame d'Epinay as his correspondent, in order to keep 
 him apprised of things and persons ; he refuses this diver- 
 sion and alleviation, and with an accent which one cannot 
 disregard, cries : 
 
 " There is no more happiness for me ; I have lived, I have given wise 
 counsels, I have served the State and my master, I have held the place 
 of father to a numerous family, I have written to make my fellow-men 
 happy ; and now, at that age when friendship becomes most necessary, 
 I have lost all my friends ! I have lost all 1 One does uot survive his 
 friends." 
 
 Bravo ! amiable abbe", it is thus that you nobly disagree 
 with your avowed principles, with your pretence of dryuess, 
 and it is for this that one loves you I 
 
 The Abbe" Galiani died according to the forms and the 
 proprieties of his cloth and his country, not without having 
 perpetrated, even at the last hour, some pleasantry in the 
 style of Rabelais. We might add his name to the list of 
 celebrated men who have died jesting. He was less than 
 fifty-nine years old when he expired, October 30, 1787.
 
 328 SAINTE-BEUVE. 
 
 His Correspondence with Madame d'Epinay, his true 
 ground of recognition by us to-day, has been published in 
 two volumes. In these letters he speaks too much of his 
 money matters and his postages. He wishes incessantly to 
 appear amusing, sparkling, and he is not every day in the 
 vein. "I am stupid this evening. ... I have nothing 
 droll to send you from here. ... I am not gay to-day, 
 and my letter will not be suitable to repeat." These 
 expressions drop perpetually from his pen, and hurt the 
 naturalness of his letters. There are days, we perceive, 
 when he pinches himself to make his reader laugh. Add 
 to this the inconvenience of frequent, incredible indecencies, 
 even for the age of Diderot and Voltaire, and which have 
 no precedent out of Rabelais. "Let us not yield to the 
 delicate people," Galiani used to repeat; "I wish to be 
 what I am, I wish to assume the tone that pleases me." 
 He used and abused that licence. 
 
 No one has ever spoken better of France, no one has ever 
 judged it better than the Abbe* Galiani ; one should hear 
 him explain why Paris is the capital of curiosity ; how "at 
 Paris there is only V Apropos ; " how we speak so well of the 
 arts and everything else, while often only half succeeding 
 in them. On the occasion of an Exhibition at the Louvre, 
 and I know not what criticism that had been made upon it, 
 he said : "I remark that the ruling character of the French 
 peeps out always. They are essentially talkers, reasoners, 
 jesters ; a bad picture brings forth a good book ; thus you 
 will speak of the arts better than you will ever practise 
 them. It will be found at the end of the account, some 
 ages hence, that you will have reasoned the best, and dis- 
 cussed the best, concerning that which all the other nations 
 will have done best. Cherish printing, then ; it is your lot 
 in this lower world. " This, however, docs not prevent him, 
 at another day, from speaking very severely of the liberty 
 of the press, which M. Turgot, it was said, thought of 
 granting by an edict, and from wishing it very much 
 restricted, even in the interest of the French mind, which 
 has better play and success when under constraint. " There
 
 THE ABBE GALIANL 329 
 
 are empires which are handsome only in their decay," h 
 again says of us. Finally he understands us, he loves us, 
 he is one of our citizens ; and we indeed owe to this charm- 
 ing abbe an honourable, choice, purely delicate burial, urna 
 brevis, a little elegant urn, which should not be larger 
 than he. 
 
 Upon it should be engraved, as an emblem, a Silenus, a 
 head of Plato, a Punchinello, and one of the Graces.
 
 NOTE. 
 
 THE foregoing translations arc by William Matthews, 
 LL.D., and Miss Harriet W. Preston. Dr. Matthews' essay 
 upon Sainte-Beuve may be mentioned along with that of 
 Matthew Arnold in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the 
 admirable anonymous article in the Westminster Revicio for 
 1871 : though D'Hanssonville's biography is, it may be 
 added, the chief source of information. The first five and 
 the two last essays in this volume are from Dr. Matthews' 
 interesting selection, " Monday Chats," published in America 
 some years ago. The other essays are from a series of 
 Sainte-Beuve's " Portraits of Women," which Miss Harriet 
 W. Preston translated and issued in volume form. 
 
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