It happened a short time ago, when I was in Paris, that the ranks of those members of the Institute of France who are known as the Forty Immortals were incomplete, one of the Forty having but lately died. I do not now recall the name of this Immortal, which is not, I trust, an evidence of ignorance on my part so much as it is an illustration of the circumstance that when men choose to make sure of immortality while they are alive, in preference to waiting for it after death, they are apt to be considered, when they cease to live, as having had their share, and the world closes its account with them, and opens up one with some less impatient individual. It is only a matter of choice, and suggests that one cannot have one's cake and eat it too. And so, while we can but envy François Coppée in his green coat and his laurel wreath of the Immortals of France, we may remember the other sort of immortality that came to François Villon and François Millet, who were not members of the Institute, and whose coats were very ragged indeed. I do, however, remember the name of the gentleman who was elected to fill the vacancy in the ranks of the Forty, and in telling how he and other living men take on the robe of immortality I hope to report the proceedings of one of the most interesting functions of the French capital. He was the Vicomte de Bornier, and his name was especially impressed upon me by a paragraph which appeared in the Figaro on the day following his admittance to the Academy.
"M. Manel," the paragraph read, "the well-known journalist, has renounced his candidacy for the vacant chair among the Forty Immortals. M. Manel will be well remembered by Parisians as the author who has written so much and so charmingly under the nom de plume of 'Le Vicomte de Bornier.'" Whether this was or was not fair to the gentleman I had seen so highly honored I do not know, but it was calculated to make him a literary light of interest.
You are told in Paris that the title of Academician is the only one remaining under the republic which counts for anything; and, on the other hand, you hear the Academy called a pleasant club for old gentlemen, to which new members are elected not for any great work which they are doing in the world, but because their point of view is congenial to those who are already members. All that can be said against the Academy by a Frenchman has been printed by Alphonse Daudet in The Immortals. In that novel he charges that the Academy numbs the style of whosoever wears its green livery; he says that he who enters its door leaves originality behind, that he grows conservative and self-conscious, and that whatever freshness of thought or literary method may have been his before his admittance to its venerable portals is chilled by the severe classicism of his thirty-nine brethren.
This may or may not be true of some of the members, but it certainly cannot be true of all, as many of them were never distinguished as authors, but were elected, as were De Lesseps and Pasteur, for discoveries and research in science, medicine, or engineering.
Nor is it true of M. Paul Bourget, who is the last distinguished Frenchman to be received into the ranks of the Immortals. The same observations which he made to me while in this country, and when he was not an Academician, upon Americans and American institutions, he has repeated, since his accession to the rank of an Immortal, in Outre Mer. And the freedom with which he has spoken shows that the shadow of the palm-trees has not clouded his cosmopolitan point of view, nor the classicism of the Academy dulled his wonderful powers of analysis. In his election, representing as he does the most brilliant of the younger and progressive school of French writers, the Academy has not so much honored the man as the man has honored the Academy.
M. Daudet's opinion, however, is interesting as being that of one of the most distinguished of French writers, and it is a satire which costs something, for it shuts off M. Daudet forever from hope of election to the body at which he scoffs, and at the same time robs him of the possibility of ever enjoying the added money value which attaches to each book that bears the leaves of the Academy on its title-page. Since the days of Richelieu, Frenchmen have mocked at this institution, and Frenchmen have given up years of their lives in working, scheming, and praying to be admitted to its councils, and died disappointed, and bitterly cursing it in their hearts. We have on the one hand the familiar story of Alexis Piron, who had engraved on his tombstone,
"Ci-gît Piron, qui ne fut rien, Pas même Académicien."
And on the other there is the present picture of M. Zola knocking year after year at its portals, asking men in many ways his inferior to permit him a right to sit beside them. If you look over its lists from 1635 to the present day you will find as many great names among its members as those which are missing from its rolls; so that proves nothing.