Crossing the street from Sainte-Beuve's last home to No. 32, we find a modest house set behind its garden-wall, in which is a tablet containing the name of Edgar Quinet. More than passing mention of his name is due to this fine intellect and this great soul. His mother thought that "an old gentleman named M. Voltaire"—whom she might have seen in her childhood, as her village crowded about his carriage on its way to Paris—was the cleverest man who ever lived. She brought up her boy to think for himself, after that philosopher's fashion, and the boy bettered her teachings. He spent his life in looking into the depths of beliefs and institutions, in getting at the essence of the real and the abiding, in letting slip that which was shallow and transitory; so that, towards the end, he could say: "I have passed my days in hearing men speak of their illusions, and I have never experienced a single one." He became, in Professor Dowden's apt phrase, "a part of the conscience of France," and as such, his influence was of higher value than that exerted by his busy pen in politics, history, poetry. Indeed, his enthusiasms for the freedom and progress of his fellow-beings carried his pen beyond due restraint. Of course he was honored by exile during the Second Empire, and when it tumbled to pieces, he returned to Paris, and soon went to Versailles as a Deputy. At his grave, in 1875, Hugo spoke of him as living and dying with the serene light of truth on his brow, and he can have no happier epitaph.
Quinet had outlived, by only a few months, his life-long friend Jules Michelet, who died in 1874. He, too, had his homes and did his work, private and public, on this same hill-side. His birth-place, far away on the northern bank, on the corner of Rues de Tracy and Saint-Denis, is now given over to business. It was a church, built about 1630 in the gardens of "Les Dames de Saint-Chaumont," and had been closed in 1789, along with so many other churches. Going fast to ruin, it was fit only for the poverty-stricken tenant, who came along in the person of the elder Michelet, a printer from Laon. He set up his presses in the nave and his household gods in the choir, where the boy Jules was born on August 22, 1798. The building is unchanged as to its outer aspect, with its squat columns supporting the heavy pediment of the façade, except that two stories have been placed above its main body. In these strange surroundings for a child, and in the shelters equally squalid, to and from which his father removed during many years, the boy grew up, haunted and nervous, cold, hungry and ill-clad, and always over his books when set free from type-setting.
He got lessons and took prizes at the Lycée Charlemagne, but the pleasantest lesson and the dearest prize of his youth did not come in school. They were his first sight, from his father's windows in Rue Buffon, of the sun setting over beyond the trees, tuneful with birds, of the Jardin du Roi. Grass and foliage, and a sky above an open space, had been unknown to his walled-in boyhood. When he became able to choose a home for himself, it had always its garden, or a sight of one. At an early age he went to tutoring; in 1821 he was appointed lecturer on history in the Collège Rollin, then in its old place on the University hill; soon after 1830 he succeeded to Guizot's chair in the Sorbonne, and in 1838 the Collège de France made him its professor of History and Moral Science. In that institution, he and his colleague Quinet caused immense commotion by their assaults on the Church intrenched in the State, and from their halls the hootings of the clericals, and the plaudits of the liberals, re-echoed throughout France. The priesthood complained that "the lecturer on history and morals gave no history and no morals," and it began to be believed—rightly or wrongly—that he was using his professor's platform as a band-stand, and was beating a big drum for the gratification of the groundlings. He was speedily dismissed, he was reinstated soon after 1848, and was finally thrown aside by the Second Empire.
At this period only, he disappears from the Scholars' Quarter for a while. His earliest residence there was, soon after his marriage in 1827, at 23 Rue de l'Arbalète, a street named from the "Chevaliers de l'Arbalète," who had made it their archery grounds in mediæval days. The site of Michelet's residence is fittingly covered by a large school, on the corner of that street and of the street named for Claude Bernard. After a short stay in Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor—that street nearly all gone now—he returned to this neighborhood, and settled in Rue des Postes, which, in 1867, received the name of the grammarian Lhomond. Otherwise, no change has come to this quiet street, lined with fifteenth and sixteenth century buildings, among which is the Hôtel Flavacourt, set in the midst of gardens. On its first floor Michelet lived from 1838 to 1850. At No. 10 is the arched gateway through which he went, in its keystone the carved head of a strong man with thick beard and curling locks. Above the long yellow-drab wall shows the new chapel of the priests, who, with unknowing irony, have taken his favorite dwelling for their schools.
Absent from this quarter during the early years of the Second Empire, and absent from Paris during part of that time, it was in 1856 that Michelet settled in his last abode. It was at 44 Rue de l'Ouest, and his garden here was the great Luxembourg Garden. In 1867, the street was renamed Rue d'Assas, and his house renumbered 76. After his death in the south of France in 1874, his widow lived there until her own death in 1899, and kept that modest home just as he had left it. She was his second wife, and had been of great help to him in his work, and had done her own work, aided by his hand, which sprinkled gold-dust over her manuscript, as she prettily said. That hand had not been idle for over fifty years. He gave forty years of labor, broken only by his other books, to his "History of France," which at his death was not yet done, as he had meant that it should be done. It is a series of pictures, glowing and colored by his sympathetic imagination, which let him see and touch the men of every period, and made him, for the moment, the contemporary of every epoch. And Taine assures us, contrary to the general belief, that we may trust its accuracy. His style has a magic all its own. He had said: "Augustin Thierry calls history a narration, Guizot calls it an analysis; I consider that history should be a resurrection." This idea is translated into durable marble on his striking tombstone in Père-Lachaise, done in high relief by the chisel of Mercié.
The life of Maximilien-Paul-Émile Littré, a few years longer than that of Michelet and equally full of strenuous labor, was passed on this same slope and ended in this same Street of Assas. Born on February 1, 1801, in the plain house of three stories and attic at No. 21 Rue des Grands-Augustins, he got his schooling at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where we have seen other famous scholars. He appears for a day and a night on the barricades of 1830, and then settles quietly at No. 11 Rue du Colombier, now Rue Jacob. On his marriage, in 1835, he removed to No. 21 Rue des Maçons, now Rue Champollion, once Racine's street, in the heart of the University. In 1838 he made his home in Rue de l'Ouest, and in that home he remained until his death on June 2, 1881. His apartment took up the entire second floor of present 44 Rue d'Assas—the new name of Rue de l'Ouest—at the corner of Rue de Fleurus, and its windows on the curve opened on ample light and air.
Like Sainte-Beuve, Littré gave up medicine, to which he had been trained, for journalistic work; some of which, in his early days, was done for the Gazette Médicale, and much of it all through life for the political press. He was an ardent Liberal, and after the fall of the Empire, was elected a Deputy, and later a Senator, of the Third Republic. Nothing in the domain of literature seemed alien to this catholic mind, equally at ease in science and philosophy, philology and history. The enduring achievement of his life is his Dictionary of the French Language. It was begun in 1844 and completed in 1872, and a supplement was added in 1877. In his fortieth year, he was attracted by the teachings of Comte, and became a leader of the Positivists and a copious contributor to their review. His career is that of an earnest and a self-denying student; a teacher of unfettered thinking in science, religion, politics; a modest and disinterested fellow-worker in letters.
His master in the cult that won him solely by its scientific fascinations, Auguste Comte, had lived for the last fifteen years of his life at No. 10 Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and there he died in 1857. We can but glance at the tablet in passing, and we cannot even glance at the altered residences, in this quarter, of the gifted Amédée Thierry and of his more gifted brother, Augustin, the historian "with the patience of a monk and the pen of a poet." He died, in 1856, in Rue du Mont-Parnasse, in the house that had been Quinet's, it is said. We look up, as we go, at the sunny windows, facing full south over the Luxembourg Gardens, of the home of Jules Janin, in his day "the prince of critics." They are on the first floor at the corner of Rues Rotrou and de Vaugirard, alongside the Odéon, the theatre in which he had his habitual seat. He died at Passy in 1874.
This faubourg has had no more striking figure than that of Prosper Mérimée, tight-buttoned in frock-coat, and of irreproachable starchedness; with a curiously round, cold eye behind glasses, a large nose with a square end, a forehead seamed with fine wrinkles. It was his pride to pass as an Englishman in his walk. In his work, in romance equally with archæology, the gentleman prevails over the author, so that he seems to stand aloof, reserved, sceptical, correct; never showing emotion, never giving way to his really infinite wit and frisky mockery. He began his working-life in 1825, as a painter with his father, alongside the École des Beaux-Arts, at No. 16 Rue des Petits-Augustins, now 12 Rue Bonaparte. In 1840 he moved around the corner to No. 10 Rue des Beaux-Arts, half way between the school and his other place of work in the Institute, as Inspector of the Historical and Artistic Monuments of France. From 1848 to 1851 he was to be found at 18 Rue Jacob, and close at hand he found "l'Inconnue," at 35 of the same street. In 1852 he removed to his last residence at 52 Rue de Lille, on the corner of Rue du Bac. The Commune burned that house along with others adjacent, and until rebuilding began, long after, there stood in the ruins a marble bust on its pedestal, unharmed except for the stain of the flames. It was all that was left of Mérimée's great art-collection, with which, and with his books and cats, he had lived alone since his mother's death. He had gone away to Cannes to die in 1870. So that he did not see the ruins of the Empire, to which he had rallied, altogether from devotion to the Empress, whom he had known in Spain when she was a child. He accepted nothing from the Emperor except the position of Librarian at Fontainebleau, and was as natural and sincere with the Empress, as he had been with Eugenie Montijo playing about his knee. In his other office he was a loyal servant of the State, and to his alert, artistic conscience France owes the preservation of many historic structures.
There are those who claim that the influence of Taine on modern thought has been deeper and will be more durable than that of Renan. They base their belief on the groundless notion that men are most profoundly impressed by pure reason, forgetful of that well-grounded experience, which proves that all men are touched and moved and persuaded rather by sentiment than by conviction. And the writer is irresistible, who, like Renan, appeals to our emotional as well as to our thinking capacities. We are captivated by those feminine qualities in his strain that are disapproved of by his detractors; his refined fancy and his undulating grace seduce us. We are convinced by his zest in the search for truth, by his courage in speaking it as he found it; we recognize his sincerity and sobriety that do not demand applause; we respect the magnanimity that looked on curses as oratorical ornaments of his enemies, and that took no return in kind. And so we stand in the peaceful court of homelike No. 23 Rue Cassette, on whose first floor Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine died in 1893, in respectful memory of the man who has helped us all by his dissections, his cataloguing, and his array of facts. The structure of the philosophy of history, that he raised, stands imposing and enduring on the bank of the stream of modern thought, and yet it may be that Edmond de Goncourt was not wholly wrong, in his characterization of Taine as "the incarnation of modern criticism; most learned, most ingenious, and most frequently unsound." We turn away and follow eagerly the steps of sympathetic Joseph-Ernest Renan.