to him by the printer who brought him the proofs saying: 'My very compositors cannot set it up without being, as it were, elevated and transported; the printing-house is all en air.' It was an eloquent diatribe against priestcraft and kingcraft, strong enough to satisfy the philosopher who longed for the day when the last king would be strangled with the entrails of the last priest. It left the friends of Lamennais no alternative but to separate from him, and Sainte-Beuve had ample ground for remonstrance and reproach when he wrote: Nothing, be assured, is worse than to invite souls to the faith and then leave them without warning in the lurch. . . . How many hopeful souls have I known that you held and carried with you in your pilgrim scrip, and who, the scrip thrown down, are left strewed along the ditches?' or, when in conversation, he employed another of the strong homely metaphors in which he excelled: 'Lamennais has upset the coach into the ditch; then he has planted us there, after taking good care to blow out the lamp before he took to his heels.'* Giving an account of a chance meeting between himself and Sainte-Beuve in the streets of Paris, Lamennais is reported to have said: 'He at first stammered out I know not what, then, completely taken aback, looked down.' Sainte-Beuve sharply retorted: 'I know not how may have looked, for one does not see oneself; but if I really appeared embarrassed, as is quite possible, it must have been for him and not for myself.' I 'It was towards the end of 1837 that, having long meditated a book on Port Royal, I went to Switzerland, to Lausanne, to execute it in the form of courses of lectures in the academy or little university of the place. I there became acquainted with very distinguished men, of whom M. Vinet was the first. I returned to Paris in the summer of 1838, having only to give the lectures the form of a book, and strengthen my work by an exact version and the finishing touches. I spared neither reflection nor leisure; the resulting five volumes were not less than twenty years in appearing.' He tells a different story in a private letter, May 8th, 1837, from which it may be collected that he was leaving Paris without any fixed plan: 'I go straight to Geneva, but beyond-I know nothing more. There are moments, in truth, when I think that I may haply never return; and that if I had the means of subsisting elsewhere, I would plunge into the austere sadness of exile and regret. .. Read, talk, visit beautiful places, associate them with regretted or hoped-for senti . * A full account of Lamennais' breach with the Papacy, and its consequences, is given in the Quarterly Review' for April, 1873, Art. v., 'Charles, Comte de Montalembert.' ments: It, moreover, silenced and put to shame the profane detractors of the Holy Mother and her flock. Whoever wishes to understand Pascal in his weakness and his strength, should read this third volume, which is almost exclusively devoted to him. It may be regarded as the chefd'œuvre of Sainte-Beuve; and it was composed under circumstances which materially added to the inherent difficulties of the undertaking. The domain which he deemed his by priority of occupation had been unceremoniously invaded by M. Cousin, who broke ground in it by a Report to the Academy on the text of Pascal in 1843, which he followed up by his Études de Pascal,' and other works relating to Port Royal, without taking the smallest notice of his contemporary. This was damaging to Sainte-Beuve's literary interests, as well as wounding to his self-love. What embittered the blow was that, in 1840, he had accepted the nomination to the conservatorship of the Mazarine Library from M. Cousin. After expressing a regret that he lay under an obligation which prevented him from speaking his mind freely, he says: 'M. Cousin does not like competition. I found myself, without wishing it and by the simple fact of priority, a competitor and a neighbour for certain subjects. Instead of according me (what would have been so simple and in such good taste in a man of his superiority) a frank and honourable mention, he found it simpler to pass over in silence and to consider as non avenu what vexed him. . . . One day when I was complaining orally to him he made me this singular and characteristic reply: "My dear friend, I believe, I am as delicate as another at bottom; but I own I am rude in the form.” M. Cousin's notion of delicacy seems to have resembled Mr. Peter Pounce's theory of charity, as consisting rather in the disposition than in the act. To Sainte-Beuve's Swiss expedition may be traced not only his Port Royal,' but the last of his published collections of poems, Pensées d'Août,' which appeared towards the end of 1837. Its reception was unfavourable, absolutely savage' (to use his own expression), which he attributes to his separation from the batch of romantic poets and the bad blood he had stirred up by his criticisms in the Revue des Deux Mondes':— I had, I believe, already criticised Balzac, or I had not praised him sufficiently for one of his novels, and in one of those accesses of self-love which were common with him, he exclaimed: “I will run my pen through his body." Balzac said of his style that it was not French but SainteBeuve. It It did not strike Sainte-Beuve that, if the bad reception of this collection was owing to the coldness or alienation of friends, the favourable reception of the former collections may have been equally owing to their support. The title, referring to the autumn of life, was meant to intimate that he had arrived at that stage when the feelings are faded or grown tame; but he had yet an evanescent hope, or fugitive glimpse, of a home consecrated by love : 'A heaven less brilliant than that of Italy was witness of this short illusion: it took birth in the society of two sisters, Frederica and Elisa Wilhelmine: if these are not imaginary names. He believed for a moment that he had found (avoir trouvé). It was, perhaps, one evening when, whilst he suffered a distracted and ignorant hand to stray over the keys of a piano still trembling with the notes she had first been drawing from it, the eldest approached and said with a smile : "Try, who knows? The poets know a great deal by instinct. Perhaps you know how to play without having learned." "Oh, I will take good care to do nothing of the kind," I replied; "I like better to fancy that I know, and I like still better to be able to say to myself still, perhaps." 'She was there, she heard and added, with that fine and charming naïveté: "It is thus with many things, is it not? It is best not to try to be sure." "Oh, do not say so, I know it too well," I replied, with a tender expression and a long look. "I know it too well, and for things of which one dares to say: peut-être." 'She understood at once, and drew back, and took refuge blushing all over beside her father.' This is a charming scene, more poetic than his choicest poetry, and it might have ended differently had he remembered Montrose's sonnet: 'He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who dares not put it to the touch When, not far from his meridian, Sainte-Beuve said that the critic was not yet born in him, he mistook his vocation. The critic was not only born but rapidly growing into ripeness and maturity. His contributions to the Revue des Deux Mondes' are the proof. 'It was there,' says M. d'Haussonville,' that, dating from 1831, he has published his finest and broadest studies. It is there that he inaugurated this kind (genre) in some sort created by him of Portraits Littéraires, and that he has traced the principal figures of this long 0 2 gallery gallery-where the Abbé Prévost and M. Jouffroy, Francis I. and General Lafayette, Mademoiselle Aïsse and Madame Roland, must be somewhat surprised to find themselves in company.' The article on Rochefoucauld, in the 'Revue' of January 15th, 1840, has been specified by him as 'making a date and a point in his intellectual life, and the decisive return to sounder ideas, which time and reflection have only helped to confirm.' The more obvious allusion is to the ideas or dreams of romance and mysticism which he had at length succeeded in dispelling-on the principle indicated by St. Evremond, who boasted of having conquered his passions by indulging them. But M. d'Haussonville thinks that Sainte-Beuve saw something more than the cynic moralist in the author of the 'Maxims' : 'May he not have been attracted by the destiny of the man, who, after having been at the opening of his life the lover of one of the most brilliant heroines of the Fronde, had, towards the close, contracted bonds of close affection with the incomparable friend whose divine reason Madame de Sévigné was incessantly praising. In painting this respectful and constant liaison which united M. de la Rochefoucauld to Madame de La Fayette, and which had embellished with a last ray the old age of the one and the sufferings of the other, was he not thinking of himself whilst still caressing the hope of a last dream? Obliging communications permit me here to lift the corner of the veil behind which nothing but that which is pure and delicate has lain hidden.' The features disclosed by the lifting of the veil are those of Madame d'Arbouville-the author of some sentimental novels of merit-who is described as having received from her ancestress, Madame d'Houtetot, 'the inheritance of a cultivated mind and a loving heart, enhanced and tempered by the severity of a Christian's conscience.' Sainte-Beuve had lent her the 'Poésies of Joseph Delorme,' then well-nigh forgotten, without naming the author, on whom she wrote some severe remarks, which she requested Sainte-Beuve to transmit to him. He replied by a long letter of justification, which did more than satisfy her scruples. During ten years,' he wrote, on her death in 1850, 'she has been my best friend, and I have been her best friend.' He refused to write the customary tribute to her memory, which he called erecting her tomb with his own hands; and the only notice of her in his published writings is: Madame d'Arbouville, a woman whom the future will know too.' This lady exercised a marked and an improving influence upon his character in more ways than one. She gave him, so far as it could be given to a man of middle-age, that education of the drawing-room of which we have already spoken; and the effect may may be traced in the female portraits (Mademoiselle Aïsse, Madame de Krüdner, &c.) which he drew after the formation of the tie. In reference to this newly-acquired tenderness and delicacy of treatment, he said: 'I have introduced the elegy into criticism.' There is a wide range of subjects-indeed, all more or less affecting one-half of the species-of or on which criticism, without what he calls elegy, is incomplete. Introduced by her, he gradually became an assiduous guest in the too rare salons where the old legitimist society of the Restoration mingled with that which the Government of July had wafted to power.' Even the doctrinaire element did not repel him; and he played the literary tame cat in them with complacency. Besides writing sonnets to the Duchesse de Rauzan, and complimentary verses on the 'orgueil et cher appui' of another antique maison,' he took a small house in the village, to be near the Château du Marais (the residence of Madame de la Briche, mother-in-law of the Comte Molé), where he dined daily. He had been one of the first to recognise (in the Globe') the brilliant and original genius of Georges Sand, and he had received from her, in the midst of her troubles, letters pouring all the bitterness of her heart into the bosom of a friend she believed discreet. These letters were seen circulating from boudoir to boudoir in the noble Faubourg or the Chaussée d'Antin, inclosed in a large envelope, on the back of which-half-effaced, but legible-were the names of the ladies to whom they had successively been sent. The tone of his writings at this time was perceptibly modified by his social position. He spoke of the literary contemporaries with whom he had the fewest sympathies without bitterness; and M. d'Haussonville cites his articles on M. de Barante, M. Mignet, M. de Remusat, M. Guizot, M. Villemain, and M. Cousin even, as models of urbanity. He refused the Cross of the Legion of Honour in 1837 when offered by M. de Salvandy, and again in 1843 at the hands of M. Villemain; but he accepted a place (that already mentioned) from M. Cousin in 1840; and he was mainly indebted to his new friends for his election to the Academy in 1843: when Chateaubriand and Comte Molé steadily supported him, and Victor Hugo (as he believed) voted eleven times against him. I was received (he says) by Victor Hugo: this piquant circumstance added to the interest of the sitting. The reception was brilliant, but the slave in the chariot was not wanting in the triumph :'How happens it,' asked Madame de Girardin, in her Causeries," 'that M. Sainte-Beuve, whose incontestable talents we fully appreciate, but whom all the world has formerly known as republican and |