"I feel that the slightest emotions might send me mad or kill me. The evening of our parting I opened at random a volume of Madame de Staël and read the dream of Jean Paul. When I came to that terrible line, 'Christ, nous n'avons point de père,' a shudder seized me. An hour later I had a fever; it lasted a fortnight."

Another friend wrote to Ampère in 1824:

"All my ideas turn towards Africa.... Is it solitude that I seek in Africa? Yes, but it is not only that; it is the desert, the palm-tree, the musk-rose, the Arab! A romanesque and barbaresque future is what ravishes me."

In 1825 Ampère, then twenty-five years old, wrote to Madame Récamier:

"Return, for my life is no longer tolerable without you; my spirit is wholly employed in trying to support the emptiness of my days."

In these delirious passages are contained the most marked symptoms of the time, the satanic gloom that drew its inspiration from Byron, the nervous sensibility imitated from the heroes of Madame de Staël, Châteaubriand, and Sénancour, and the longing for a life of Oriental colour which found a later expression in Victor Hugo's poems. However, it would be unfair to put down this spiritual bouleversement to the influence of "René," "Obermann," "Werther's Leiden," or "Manfred." They became, indeed, the breviaries of the afflicted, but the cause of the affliction lay deeper in the reaction of the French nation after the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon's victorious campaigns drained France of its best blood and its best energies, leaving an inheritance of anæmia and neurasthenia to the next generation, without diminishing that feverish desire for glory, that determination to work one's will upon a passive world, which was the spirit of Napoleon's armies. Older and more settled people were content to reap the rewards of peace, but the young men, exalted by the exploits of their fathers, looked in vain for some channel in which to discharge their superfluous electricity. Under the restored Bourbons there was none. The fathers had had free play upon historic battlefields, the sons were cribbed and confined in the narrow bounds of everyday life. Moreover, the revolutionary wars had revealed vast, unexplored pastures to the French mind. New countries, languages, and literatures were brought into its view. The gorgeous East, in particular, seized upon the French imagination. The desert was vast and untrodden, the Arab was dignified and free, and under unclouded skies the primitive nobility of mankind revealed itself in splendour and space.

Here, then, is the root of le mal du siècle from which the divers symptoms sprang. Of these, perhaps, the most marked and most general was an exaggerated sensibility, a kind of melancholy madness. Young Henri Dubois, who at any other epoch would have been content to learn his trade behind the counter of Dubois and Dupont, cloth merchants, and to settle down into a peaceful home with Mademoiselle Dupont, now plied the yard measure with disgust and yearned for an existence more worthy of his "complicated state of mind." He was a perfect magazine of pent-up emotions, ready to expire in a delirium of joy or an ecstasy of despair after the manner of René and Werther. He was quite willing to love Mademoiselle Dupont on the condition that she would lend herself to a tempestuous passion, allow her hands to be bathed in tears for hours together by her prostrate cavalier, receive folios of hysterical ravings by the post, and dread the fatal dagger if she had smiled from her desk at a customer. She was urged daily to fly to a brighter destiny upon distant shores, and nightly trembled that the coming morning would find Henri transfixed by his own poniard. It was impossible to be reasonable; only a clod, dead to all beauty, could be so brutal. M. Louis Maigron, who in his book, "Le Romantisme et les Mœurs," gives some very remarkable instances of these aberrations in actual correspondence, says very truly: "Une foule de 'cratères' ont alors superbement fumé au nez des bourgeois." The Romantic ideal supposed a sensibility always stretched to its utmost, des âmes excessives, as M. Bourget says,[3] capable of constant renewal, and a consumption of emotional energy which is irreconcilable with the laws of any organism. If a young man failed for a moment to find food for melancholy broodings in the shortcomings of society, he could always fall back for a good groan upon his own insufficiencies of sensibility. Now, of course, the "feelings of malediction" which afflicted the Henri Dubois are of small moment in themselves. Time comfortably settled them down. It was the young men of real sensibility and imagination, the coming poets and artists, in whom the ravages of le mal du siècle were more than a passing phase. The boundless yearnings that found expression in such lines as these:

Amour, enthousiasme, étude, poésie!
C'est là qu'en votre extase, océan d'ambroisie
Se noîraient nos âmes de feu!
C'est là que je saurais, fort d'un génie étrange,
Dans la création d'un bonheur sans mélange
Être plus artiste que Dieu[4]—

could not but lead to a profound dissatisfaction with existence, which Maxime du Camp in his reminiscences very happily describes:

"It was not only a fashion [he says], as might be believed; it was a kind of general prostration which made our hearts sad, darkened our thoughts, and caused us to see a deliverance in the glimpse of death. You would have thought that life held in chains souls that had caught sight of something superior to terrestrial existence. We did not aspire to the felicities of paradise: we dreamed of taking possession of the infinite, and we were tortured by a vague pantheism of which the formula was never found.... The artistic and literary generation which preceded me and that to which I belonged had a youth of lamentable sadness, sadness without cause and without object, abstract sadness, inherent in the individual or in the period....