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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 I 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.'

'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

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* 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.'

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ments: this is the true life, the rest is mechanical (du métier) and hateful to him who has comprehended the other.'

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Speculating on the motives that could have induced this acclimatised Parisian, who in four years had never passed three weeks out of the city, to encounter such an exile, M. d'Haussonville suggests the desire of extrication by absence from a situation like that in which Amaury found himself between the rival ladies in Volupté.' Be this as it may, the expedition was so far successful that it led to the production of an original work, which may be commended without reserve as the masterly treatment of a difficult, delicate, and vitally important subject. The historical portions, in particular, merit the highest praise. The first two volumes appeared in 1840; the third in 1846; the concluding three in 1859; his mode of thinking having undergone the usual, or more than the usual, amount of change in the intervals. Although the lectures were delivered before a Protestant audience, and his own faith was on the wane, his glorification of the Port Royalists did not lack enthusiasm; and he discoursed with the requisite amount of unction on the mysteries which puzzled Milton's angels :

Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end in wand'ring mazes lost.'

He spoke thus of Grace, the hope, pride, and mainstay of the institution:

This state of Grace, in effect, changes the soul, regenerates and renews it. To employ a happy image which a clever man applied to another love which is but the inferior form of this divine love, Grace, so to speak, crystallises the soul, which before was vague, diverse, and flowing. . . . The soul here below and in the bosom of its shadow, enjoys this true life so long as it remains possessed (prise), according to the mysterious mode.'

He describes the Mere Angélique as possessed in the mysterious mode on the memorable Jour du Guichet,* and he employs all the colours of poetry to throw a halo round her in her hour of trial and triumph. She is the Esther of Racine, fainting at the approach of Assuerus. To her and her miraculous elation or inflation, we are indebted for the Polyeucte of Corneille and the Provinciales of Pascal!

In amusing and instructive contrast is his treatment (vol. iii.)

* The Jour du Guichet (Day of the Wicket) was the day when her father, M. Arnauld, who came to claim her, was barred out, whilst she fell into an ecstatic trance or fainting-fit within.

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of the miracle of the Holy Thorn, which he introduces by stating that it came at the most opportune moment, when the Port Royalists were at the lowest state of despondency, with hardly a hope or chance of being saved from their perse

cutors:

It was the very day when they sang these words of the Psalmist, "Show me a token for good; Lord, cause a prodigy to be performed in my favour that my enemies may see it and be confounded." It is this very day that God throws all secrecy aside, and there is heard, is heard all round on every side, this Holy and Terrible Voice. The miracle of the Holy Thorn was the thunderclap which suspended all.'

The miracle is succinctly told by the Mère Angélique in a letter to the Queen of Poland. The holy relic was the donation of a priest who, after having had it richly set, sent it to be seen and revered :

Our sisters of Paris received it with great reverence, and having placed it in the middle of the choir, adored it one after the other. When it came to the turn of the pensionnaires, their mistress, who led them, took the reliquary, for fear they might drop it, and as a little girl of ten years old approached (who had a lachrymal ulcer so bad that the bone of the nose had become carious), it occurred to this woman to say to this child: "My daughter, pray for your eye;" and, touching her with the relique at the same moment, she was cured, which no one thought of at the moment, each thinking only of devotion to the relic. Afterwards, this child said to one of her little sisters: "I think I am cured." Which turned out so to be, that it was no longer discernible which of her eyes had been diseased.'

'Whether we will or not,' observes Sainte-Beuve, we must discuss this affair, or at least throw a little light on it. The Jansenists saw in it the triumph of their cause. I see in it, above all, the humiliation of the human mind!' Reverting to his medical experience, he reduces the miracle to the bursting of a tumour, or the removal of an obstruction in the lachrymal duct, through the pressure of the relic, a spontaneous effort of nature, or a nervous movement of the child. The house-doctor, the principal witness, had not seen her for two months prior to the cure, and was not called in till seven days after. The medical men, who emulously attested that the cure (as described to them) surpassed the ordinary powers of nature, were turned into ridicule by Guy Patin. But the miracle was formally recognised by the Vicar-General in the name, the holy and venerable name, of the Cardinal de Retz, that unexceptionable champion of the Faith! and the belief in the Holy Thorn lasted long enough for eighty miraculous cures to be worked by it. Vol. 141.-No. 281.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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"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
To gain or lose it all.'

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

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