V.
A source of very much pleasure to me was my acquaintance with the old author and Collège de France Professor, Philarète Chasles. Grégoire introduced me to him and I gradually became at home, as it were, in his house, was always a welcome visitor, and was constantly invited there. In his old age he was not a man to be taken very seriously, being diffusive, vague and vain. But there was no one else so communicative, few so entertaining, and for the space of fifty years he had known everybody who had been of any mark in France. He was born in 1798; his father, who was a Jacobin and had been a member of the Convention, did not have him baptised, but brought him up to believe in Truth, (hence the name Philarète,) and apprenticed him to a printer. At the Restoration of the Royal Family, he was imprisoned, together with his father, but released through the influence of Chateaubriand; he then went to England, where he remained for full seven years (1819-1826), working as a typographer, and made a careful study of English literature, then almost unknown in France. After having spent some further time in Germany, he returned to Paris and published a number of historical and critical writings.
Philarète Chasles, as librarian to the Mazarin Library, had his apartments in the building itself, that is, in the very centre of Paris; in the Summer he lived in the country at Meudon, where he had had his veranda decorated with pictures of Pompeian mosaic. He was having a handsome new house with a tower built near by. He needed room, for he had a library of 40,000 volumes.
His niece kept house for him; she was married to a German from Cologne, Schulz by name, who was a painter on glass. The pair lived apart. Madame Schulz was pretty, caustic, spiteful, and blunt. Her daughter, the fourteen-year-old Nanni, was enchantingly lovely, as developed and mischievous as a girl of eighteen. Everyone who came to the house was charmed with her, and it was always full of guests, young students from Alsace and Provence, young negroes from Hayti, young ladies from Jerusalem, and poetesses who would have liked to read their poems aloud and would have liked still better to induce Chasles to make them known by an article.
Chasles chatted with everyone, frequently addressing his conversation to me, talking incessantly about the very men and women that I most cared to hear about, of those still living whom I most admired, such as George Sand, and Mérimée, and, in fact, of all the many celebrities he had known. As a young man, he had been taken to the house of Madame Récamier, and had there seen Chateaubriand, an honoured and adored old man, and Sainte-Beuve an eager and attentive listener, somewhat overlooked on account of his ugliness, in whom there was developing that lurking envy of the great, and of those women clustered round, which he ought to have combatted, to produce just criticism.
Chasles had known personally Michelet and Guizot, the elder Dumas and Beyle, Cousin and Villemain, Musset and Balzac; he knew the Comtesse d'Agoult, for so many years the friend of Liszt, and Madame Colet, the mistress, first of Cousin, then of Musset, and finally of Flaubert, of whom my French uncle, who had met her on his travels, had drawn me a very unattractive picture. Chasles was on terms of daily intimacy with Jules Sandeau; even as an old man he could not forget George Sand, who had filched the greater part of his name and made it more illustrious than the whole became. Sandeau loved her still, forty years after she had left him.
Chasles was able, in a few words, to conjure up very vividly the images of the persons he was describing to his listener, and his anecdotes about them were inexhaustible. He took me behind the scenes of literature and I saw the stage from all its sides. The personal history of his contemporaries was, it is quite true, more particularly its chronicle of scandals, but his information completed for me the severe and graceful restraint of all Taine said. And side by side with his inclination for gay and malicious gossip, Chasles had a way of sketching out great synopses of intellectual history, which made one realise, as one reflected,' the progress of development of the literatures with which one was familiar. Those were pleasant evenings, those moonlight Spring evenings in the open veranda out there at Meudon, when the old man with the sharp-pointed beard and the little skull-cap on one side of his head, was spokesman. He had the aptest and most amusing way of putting things. For instance, to my question as to whether Guizot had really been as austere by nature as he was in manner, he replied: "It is hard to say; when one wishes to impress, one cannot behave like a harlequin."
Although I had a keen enough eye for Philarète Chasles' weaknesses, I felt exceedingly happy in his house. There I could obtain without difficulty the information I wished for, and have the feeling of being thoroughly "in Paris." Paris was and still is the only city in the world that is and wishes to be the capital not only of its own country but of Europe; the only one that takes upon itself as a duty, not merely to meet the visitor half-way by opening museums, collections, buildings, to him, but the only one where people habitually, in conversation, initiate the foreigner in search of knowledge into the ancient, deep culture of the nation, so that its position with regard to that of other races and countries is made clear to one.