There is in Paris, under the sole direction of an ecclesiastic, the Abbé Migne, an establishment embracing a printing office, stereotype foundry, and all other departments of book manufacture, which has in course of publication a complete series of the chief works of Catholic literature, amounting to 2000 volumes, and the prices are such that the mass of the clergy of that faith may possess the whole.
Lamartine has given us the third and fourth volumes of his Histoire de la Restauration; Barante, the third volume of his Histoire de la Convention, bringing the narrative down to 1793. Thierry announces a new edition of his works; and Alexandre Dumas has commenced his Mémoires in La Presse.
The most striking of French novels, or of any novels recently published, is the Revenants (“Ghosts”), of Alexandre Dumas the younger, which exceeds in cleverness, ingenuity, and absurdity all the novels put together of his prolific parent himself. The heroes and heroines of the Revenants are those of three of the most celebrated tales of last century, Goethe's Werther, Bernardin St. Pierre's Paul and Virginia, and the Abbé Prevost's Manon L'Escaut. The book opens with a description of a visit paid by Mustel, a German professor, to his old pupil Bernardin Saint-pierre, now living at Paris in the sunshine of the fame procured to him by the publication of Paul and Virginia.
It has been remarked that the name of Bonaparte is unlucky to literature, for they do not understand that, to flourish, literature requires freedom. No king or emperor, if he had all the gold of Peru, could nowadays do as much for literature as the public; and, to please the public, it must be completely free. “Now,” writes the Paris correspondent of the Literary Gazette, “if the illustrious Monsieur Bonaparte can make good his position in France, he must be a despot. On no other ground could he stand for a week—it is aut Cæsar aut nullus with him. And, unfortunately, unlike most despots, he has no taste whatever for literature—he never, it is said, read fifty lines of poetry in his life, and can not even now wade through half-a-dozen pages of prose without falling asleep.”
Silvio Pellico, so famous for his works, his imprisonments, and sufferings, is now in Paris.