The Man.
Champfleury—novelist, dramatist, archæologist, humourist, and literary historian—belonged to a later generation than that of Petrus Borel and Philothée O’Neddy; but he could remember the production of les Burgraves, and was able of his own personal knowledge to laugh at the melancholy speech of poor Célestin Nanteuil—the famous ‘Il n’y a plus de jeunesse’ of a man grown old and incredulous and apathetic before his time: the lament over a yesterday already a hundred years behind. He had lived in the Latin quarter; he had dined with Flicoteaux, and listened to the orchestras of Habeneck and Musard; he had heard the chimes at midnight with Baudelaire and Murger, hissed the tragedies of Ponsard, applauded Deburau and Rouvière, and seen the rise and fall of Courbet and Dupont. If he was not of the giants he was of their immediate successors, and he had seen them actually at work. He had hacked for Balzac, and read romantic prose at Victor Hugo’s; he had lived so near the red waistcoat of Théophile Gautier as to dare to go up and down in Paris (under
the inspiration of the artist of la Femme qui taille la Soupe) in ‘un habit en bouracan vert avec col à la Marat, un gilet de couleur bachique, et une culotte en drap d’un jaune assez malséant,’ together with ‘une triomphante cravate de soie jaune’—a vice of Baudelaire’s inventing—and ‘un feutre ras dans le goût de la coiffure de Camille Desmoulins.’ And having seen for himself, he could judge for himself as well. From first to last he showed himself to be out of sympathy with the ambitions and effects of romanticism. He was born a humourist and an observer, and he became a ‘realist’ as soon as he began to write.