We have already seen the country boy coming to school, at Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, in 1838. After four years' tuition there, he passed on to higher courses in the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice. That renowned school faces the place of the same name, which it entirely covered, when built in the early years of the seventeenth century. When the Revolution demolished the old structure, it destroyed the parloir where the young student, the Chevalier des Grieux, gave way before the beguilements of his visitor, Manon Lescaut. The fountain in this open space flashes with that adorable creation of the Abbé Prévost; the original of two creations as immortal, says Jules Janin: "For who is the Virginie of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre but Manon made pure; and who is Châteaubriand's Atala but Manon made Christian?"
Once a week, while at the seminary, young Renan took an outing with the other pupils to its succursale at Issy. It is a dreary walk, along the wearisome length of Rue de Vaugirard, to the village to which Isis gave her name, when that goddess, once worshipped in Lutetia, was banished to this far-away hamlet. There "Queen Margot" had a hunting-lodge and vast grounds, and when these were taken by the brothers of Saint-Sulpice, they saved the grounds and transformed the cupids on the walls of the lodge into cherubs, and the Venus into a Madonna. Now their new structures in Caen stone face the street named for Ernest Renan. In the gardens is a chapel built around the grotto, roofed with shells, wherein Bossuet and Fénelon used to meet, toward the end of the eighteenth century. There they doubtless began that controversy over the mystical writings of Madame Guyon, which ended in Fénelon's dismissal from the court through the influence of the imperious Bossuet. Under these trees that shaded them, walked Renan in his long and cruel conflict between his conscience and his traditions, most dreading the pain he would give his mother by the step he felt impelled to take. He took that step in October, 1845, when he laid aside the soutane—to be adorned and glorified by him, his teachers had hoped—and walked out from the seminary to a small hôtel-garni on the opposite side of Place Saint-Sulpice. Supported at first only by the savings of his devoted sister, Henriette, he started as a tutor, and began his life's pen-work, in a cheap pension, in one of the shabby houses just west of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas, in Rue des Deux-Églises, now renamed Rue de l'Abbé-de-l'Épée.
His future dwellings, befitting his modest gains, were all in quiet streets of this scholarly quarter. The site of that one occupied from 1862 to 1865, at 55 Rue Madame, is covered by Collége Bossuet, where priests teach their dogmas. Old Passage Sainte-Marie, where he lodged for a while in 1865, is now Rue Paul-Louis-Courier, and his lodging is gone. During the ten years from 1866 to 1876, he lived in the plain house numbered 29 of retired Rue Vaneau. Then for three years, he had an apartment at No. 16 Rue Guillaume; "a short street of provincial aspect," says Alphonse Daudet, "grass-grown, with never a wheel; of silent mansions and unopened gates, and of closed windows on the court; faded and wan after centuries of sleep." This mansion was built for Denis Talon, an advocate-general at the end of the seventeenth century, and described by Germain Brice, writing in 1684, as having "most agreeable apartments, with outlook on neighboring gardens, and a large court, and great expense in building." He did not mention the entrance-door, which is monumental, nor the knocker, worth a pilgrimage to see. In 1880 Renan removed to No. 4 Rue de Tournon, so finding himself between No. 6, once occupied by Laplace, and No. 2, once occupied by Balzac. In 1883 he was made Administrator of the Collége de France, and there took up his official residence. His appointment to the chair of Hebrew in that institution, on his return from the Orient in 1861, had so perturbed the Church behind the State that he was dismissed after he had given but one lecture.
The Second Empire gone, he came back, mainly through the action of Jules Simon, a wise and learned statesman and a most lovable man. Renan the administrator remained the lecturer as well, and has left ineffaceable memories with those who saw and heard him in his declining years; when, his body disabled by maladies, he still went singing on his way, as he manfully put it. It was a gross and clumsy body; to use Edmond de Goncourt's words, an ungraceful, almost disgraceful body, full of the moral grace of this apostle of doubt, this priest of science. His lectures were rather readings of the scriptures, interspersed with his own exegesis. On chairs about a large table, and against the wall, in a small room of the college, were seated the few intent listeners. Renan sat at one end of the table, his head—"an unchurched cathedral"—bent over a bulky copy of the scriptures as he read; then, as he talked, he would raise his head and throw back the long hair that had tumbled over his brow, the subtle humor of his mobile mouth and his dreamy eyes effacing the effect of his big nose and fat cheeks, his beardless face luminous with an exalted intellectual urbanity. His interpretations and illustrations were spoken with his perfect art of simple and limpid phrase, and in those tones that told of his dwelling with the saints and prophets of all the ages, and with the elusive spirits of mockery of our own day.
He died, on October 2, 1892, in his official residence in the Collége de France, an apartment on the second floor of the main structure facing the front court. The austere simplicity of this Breton interior was leavened by the books and the equipment of the scholar. The window of his death-chamber is just under the clock.
The "touch of earth" demanded by Tennyson's Guinevere was a need of the nature of George Sand. The three stages of her growth, shown in her work, reveal the three inspirations of her life, each most actual: the love of man, the love of humanity, the love of nature. The woman's heart in her made her, said Renan, "the Æolian harp of our time"; and Béranger's verse well fits her:
"Son cœur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu'on le touche il résonne."
It vibrated to the touch of outrages on woman and of injustice to man, and it pulsated with equal passion for her children and for the rural sights and scents of her birth-place. And we feel her heart in her phrases, that stir us, as Thackeray puts it, like distant country-bells. This half-poet, half-mystic, came fairly by her fantastic inheritance; for she was, in the admirable phrase of Mr. Henry James, "more sensibly the result of a series of love affairs than most of us." On the other side, we may accurately apply to her Voltaire's words concerning Queen Elizabeth: "And Europe counts you among her greatest men." There were masculine breadth and elevation in her complex, ample nature, with divine instincts and ideal purities, that left no room for vulgar ambitions and mean avidities. Balzac, of kindred qualities, wrote, after having learned to know her a little: "George Sand would speedily be my friend. She has no pettiness whatever in her soul; none of the low jealousies that obscure so many contemporary talents. Dumas resembles her in this."
When Madame Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dudevant, a young woman of twenty-six, came, in 1830, to Paris to stay—she had already, while a girl, been a pensionnaire in the convent of the "Augustines Anglaises," where, under its ancient name, we have met with Mlle. Phlipon—she found her only acquaintance in the capital, Jules Sandeau, living on Quai Saint-Michel. He had known M. Dudevant and his wife during his visit to Nohant, a year or so earlier. She rented a garret in the same house, one of the old row on the quay, just east of Place Saint-Michel. Here she discovered that she could use a pen; at first with scant success and for small pay in the columns of the "Figaro," and then, with not much greater power, in a romance, written conjointly with Sandeau. They named it "Rose et Blanche," and its authors' pseudonyme was Jules Sand. Here she assumed the male costume which enabled her to pass for a young student, unmolested in her walks in all weathers and with all sorts and conditions of men, whom she delighted to scrutinize. In a letter written in July, 1832, she says that she is tired of climbing five long flights so many times a day, and is seeking new quarters. She found them, with the same superb outlook over the Seine as that she had left, on a third floor of Quai Malaquais.