XIII.
Of course I witnessed all that was accessible to me of Parisian public life. I fairly often found my way, as I had done in 1866, to the Palais de Justice to hear the great advocates plead. The man I enjoyed listening to most was Jules Favre, whose name was soon to be on every one's lips. The younger generation admired in him the high-principled and steadfast opponent of the Empire in the Chamber, and he was regarded as well-nigh the most eloquent man in France. As an advocate, he was incomparable. His unusual handsomeness,--his beautiful face under a helmet of grey hair, and his upright carriage,--were great points in his favour. His eloquence was real, penetrating, convincing, inasmuch as he piled up fact upon fact, and was at the same time, as the French manner is, dramatic, with large gesticulations that made his gown flutter restlessly about him like the wings of a bat. It was a depressing fact that afterwards, as the Minister opposed to Bismarck, he was so unequal to his position.
I was present at the Théâtre Français on the occasion of the unveiling of Ponsard's bust. To the Romanticists, Ponsard was nothing less than the ass's jawbone with which the Philistines attempted to slay Hugo. But Émile Chasles, a son of my old friend, gave a lecture upon him, and afterwards Le lion amoureux was played, a very tolerable little piece from the Revolutionary period, in which, for one thing, Napoleon appears as a young man. There are some very fine revolutionary tirades in it, of which Princess Mathilde, after its first representation, said that they made her Republican heart palpitate. The ceremony in honor of this little anti-pope to Victor Hugo was quite a pretty one.
Once, too, I received a ticket for a reception at the French Academy. The poet Auguste Barbier was being inaugurated and Silvestre de Sacy welcomed him, in academic fashion, in a fairly indiscreet speech. Barbier's Jamber was one of the books of poems that I had loved for years, and I knew many of the strophes by heart, for instance, the celebrated ones on Freedom and on Napoleon; I had also noticed how Barbier's vigour had subsided in subsequent collections of poems; in reality, he was still living on his reputation from the year 1831, and without a doubt most people believed him to be dead. And now there he stood, a shrivelled old man in his Palm uniform, his speech revealing neither satiric power nor lofty intellect. It was undoubtedly owing to his detestation of Napoleon (vide his poem L'Idole) that the Academy, who were always agitating against the Empire, had now, so late in the day, cast their eyes upon him. Bald little Silvestre de Sacy, the tiny son of an important father, reproached him for his verses on Freedom, as the bold woman of the people who was not afraid to shed blood.
"That is not Freedom as I understand it," piped the little man,--and one believed him,--but could not refrain from murmuring with the poet:
C'est que la Liberté n'est pas une comtesse
Du noble Faubourg St. Germain,
Une femme qu'un cri fait tomber en faiblesse,
Qui met du blanc et du carmin;
C'est une forte femme.