The Revolution of 1830, that sent de Tocqueville on his voyage, and that started Guizot in political life, brought Alphonse-Marie-Louis de Lamartine to the public ear as an orator. He had filled the public eye as a poet since 1820, when his "Méditations Poétiques" appeared. In 1830, his "Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses" had made it sure that here was a soul filled with true harmony. And while he sang the consolations of religion, as Châteaubriand had sung its splendors, he gave proof of his devotion to the Church and throne. But he bore the Revolution of 1830, and the flight of the Bourbons, with the same equanimity he always summoned for the reverses of others, as well as for his own. When a literary genius is out of work, says Sainte-Beuve, he takes to politics and becomes an Illustrious Citizen, for want of something better to do. Lamartine was elected a Deputy soon after the upset of 1830, and sprang at once into the front rank of parliamentary orators. His speeches in the Chamber, and his "History of the Girondists"—enthralling and untrustworthy—helped to bring on the Revolution of 1848, quite without his knowing or wishing it. It was his superb outburst of rhetoric, as he stood alone on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, on February 25th, backed by no colleague and clad in no authority, that saved to France her Tricolor—"that has swept all around the world, carrying liberty and glory in its folds"—in place of the white flag of the Bourbons that had gone, and the red rag of the mob that was near coming. Between that month of February and June of that same year, Lamartine had been on the crest of his highest wave, and had sunk to his lowest level in the regard of his Parisians. Their faith was justified in his genius and his rectitude, but a volcano is not to be squirted cold by rose-water, and the new republic could not be built on phrases. After his amazing minority in the election for president, Lamartine sank out of sight, accepting without complaint his sudden obscurity, as he had accepted without intrigue his former lustre. The conspiracy of December, 1851, sent him into retirement, and he lived alone with his pen, his only weapon against want—a pathetically heroic figure during these last years. George Sand had seen a good deal of Lamartine in the days of 1848, and he struck her as "a sort of Lafayette without his shrewdness. He shows respect for all men and all ideas, while believing in no ideas and loving no man." A more just and complete judgment is that of Louis Blanc: "He is incessantly laboring under a self-exalting hallucination. He dreams about himself marvellous dreams, and believes in them. He sees what is not visible, he opens his inward ear to impossible sounds, and takes delight in narrating to others any tale his imagination narrates to him. Honest and sincere as he is, he would never deceive you, were he not himself deceived by the familiar demon who sweetly torments him."

For twenty years he had been a resident of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Indeed, when he came to Paris for a while, in 1820, to see to the publication of his first poems, he found rooms on Quai d'Orsay. From there he went to make that call on young Hugo, to be narrated later. From 1835 to 1855 his apartment was in the grand mansion, "between court and garden," No. 82 Rue de l'Université. His reception-room was decorated with portraits and busts of Alphonse de Lamartine, we are told by Frederick Locker-Lampson, who visited him there. His host was a handsome and picturesque figure, he says, albeit with an over-refinement of manner. No keener criticism of the poet and his poetry, at this period, has been made than that by Locker-Lampson, in one curt sentence. His sane humor is revolted by that "prurient chastity, then running, nay, galloping, to seed in an atmosphere of twaddle and toadyism."

The desolate fallen idol was rescued from oblivion and poverty by the Second Empire, whose few honorable acts may not be passed over. In 1867, in its and his dying years, that government gave him money, and the municipality gave him a house. These gifts came to him in Rue Cambacérès, in a small hotel now rebuilt into No. 7 of that street. Where it meets with Rue de Penthièvre, just above, you will find the attractive old mansion, with its ancient number 43 cut in the stone over the doorway, in which, during the years after leaving the Faubourg Saint-Germain, he carried on his courageous struggle with his pen against debt and poverty. He had but few months' enjoyment of his last home, the gift of the people of Paris, for he died there in 1869. It was at Passy, not far from the square in Avenue Henri-Martin, named for him and holding his statue. The chair in which he is seated might be a theatrical property, perhaps humorously and fittingly so suggested by the sculptor; who has, however, done injustice to his subject, in robbing him of his natural grace and suavity, and in giving him a pedantic angularity that was never his.

When Lamartine writes to Sainte-Beuve, "I have wept, I who never weep," we are amused by the poet's naïve ignorance of his persistent lachrymose notes. The "smiling critic" accepted them simply as a pardonable overflow of the winning melancholy of that nature, in which he recognized all that was genuine and laudable. This wide-minded tolerance is perhaps the secret of Sainte-Beuve's strength as a critic. With his acute discernment of the soul of a book and of its author, his subtle appreciation of all diverse qualities, he was splendidly impartial. He could read anything and everything, with a keenness of appraisement that did not prejudice his enjoyment of that which was alive, amid much that might be dead. "A pilgrim of ideas, but lacking the first essential of a pilgrim—faith"—he gave all that he was to literature through all his life, and when near its end, he had the right to say: "Devoted with all my heart to my profession of critic, I have tried to be, more and more, a good and—if possible—a skilful workman."

Alphonse de Lamartine.
(From a sketch by David d'Angers. "un soir chez Hugo.")

He devoted himself so entirely to his profession, that his life was like a mill, as he said, perpetually feeding and grinding. On the Monday morning, he would shut himself in with the new volumes, which he was to feed into himself and assimilate, during the twelve hours of each of the five following days; on Saturday he was ready to grind out the result. His Sunday holiday was given to the proof-reading of his next day's "Causerie du Lundi." On that evening he took his only relaxation, in the theatre. His work-room was bare of all superfluities, and his daily life went in a round, with simple diet, no wine, nor coffee, nor tobacco.

At the age of twenty-five, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve was living, with his mother, in a small apartment on the fourth floor of No. 19—now 37—Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He had given himself to letters instead of medicine, for which he had studied, and had become a regular contributor of critical papers to the press. His name was already spoken along with the names of Victor Cousin, Villemain, Guizot, Mérimée. He had produced his "Historical and Critical Pictures," his "French Poetry and French Theatre of the Sixteenth Century," and the "Poems of Joseph Delorme"—his selected pen-name. The poet in him had abdicated to the critic, handing down many choice gifts. In this apartment he received for review a volume of poems, "by a young barbarian," his editor wrote. This was the "Odes et Ballades" of Victor Hugo, with whom the critic soon made acquaintance, and at whose house, a few doors away in the same street, he became a constant visitor. From here Madame Sainte-Beuve removed, with her son, in 1834, to Rue du Mont-Parnasse, and in that street he had his home during his remaining years. His official residence, from 1840 to 1848, as a Keeper of the Mazarin Library, was in that building now occupied by the Institute. He found installed there, among the other Keepers, Octave Feuillet. The upheaval of February, 1848, drove Sainte-Beuve into Belgium. On his return in the following year, he settled in the house left him by his mother, and there he died in 1869. This two-storied, plaster-fronted, plain little No. 11 Rue du Mont-Parnasse, saw his thirty years of colossal work. From here, he went to take his chair of Latin poetry in the Collège de France, where he was hissed by the students, who meant to hiss, not the critic and lecturer, but the man who had accepted the Second Empire in accepting that chair. He was no zealous recruit, however, and preserved his entire independence; and when he consented to go to the Senate in 1865, it was for the sake of its dignity and its salary. He was always poor in money.

To his workroom in this house, came every French writer of those thirty years, anxious to plead with or to thank that Supreme Court of Criticism. Among those who bowed to its verdicts and who have owned to its influence, Edmond de Goncourt has given us the most vivid sketch of the critic in conversation: "When I hear him touch on a dead man, with his little phrases, I seem to see a swarm of ants invading a body; cleaning out all the glory, and in a few minutes leaving a very clean skull of the once illustrious one." And, in his written reviews, Sainte-Beuve had the supreme art of distilling a drop of venom in a phial of honey, so making the poison fragrant and the incense deadly. There is no more constant presence than his on this southern hill-side, where all his days and nights were spent. We seem to see there the short, stout figure, erect and active, the bald head covered with a skull-cap, the bushy red eyebrows, the smooth-shaven face, redeemed from ugliness by its alert intelligence. His walks were down this slope of Mont-Parnasse, which he thought of as the pleasure-ground of the mediæval students of the University, to the quays, where he hunted among the old-book stalls. And he loved to stroll in the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens. In the Poets' Corner, now made there, you will find his bust along with those of Henri Murger, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, and Paul Verlaine.