French literature is beginning to show some activity. Thiers issues the eleventh volume of his History of the Consulate and the Empire; instead of the ten volumes originally proposed, the work is to extend to fourteen—an extension for which few will be grateful!
Adolphe Granier de Cassagnac, the lively, impertinent, paradoxical journalist, is writing a Histoire du Directoire in his own paper, and the Brussels edition of volume I. is already published. It is full of sarcasms and declamations against the Republican party and their great leaders; but it is sprightly, amusing, and has something of novelty in its tone: after so much wearisome laudation of every body in the Revolution, a spirited, reckless, and dashing onslaught makes the old subject piquant.
This is verily the age of cheapness. George Sand has consented to allow all her novels to be reprinted in Paris, for the small charge of four sous, a shade less than twopence, per part, which will make, it appears, about 1l. for the whole collection. This popular edition is to be profusely illustrated by eminent artists, and is to be printed and got up in good style.
During the last year or two an immense deal of business has been done by three or four publishing houses, in the production of esteemed works at four sous the sheet, of close yet legible type, excellent paper, and spirited illustrations. By this plan, the humblest working-man and the poorest grisette have been able to form a very respectable library. Naturally the works so brought out have been chiefly of the class of light literature, but not a few are of a graver character. Among the authors whose complete works have been published, are Lesage, Chateaubriand, Anquetil (the historian), Balzac, Sue, Paul de Kock; among those partially published, Rousseau, Lamennais, Voltaire, Diderot, Fénélon, Bernardin de Saint Pierre. Translations of foreign works have also been produced; in the batch are, complete or partial, Goldsmith, Sterne, Anne Radcliffe, Mrs. Inchbald, Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, Bulwer, Dickens, Marryatt, Goethe, Schiller, Silvio Pellico; and Boccacio.
An eminent critic has just revealed a fact which very few people knew—viz. that St. Just, one of the most terrible of the terrible heroes of the first French Revolution, wrote and published, before he gained his sanguinary celebrity, a long poem, entitled, "Orgaut." The opinion which M. Thiers and other historians have caused the public to form of this man was, that he was a fanatic—implacable, but sincere—a ruthless minister of the guillotine; but deeming wholesale slaughter indispensable for securing, what he conscientiously considered, the welfare of the people. He was, we may imagine, something like the gloomy inquisitors of old, who thought it was doing God service to burn heretics at the stake. To justify this opinion, one would have expected to have found in a poem written by him when the warm and generous sentiments of youth were in all their freshness, burning aspirations for what it was the fashion of his time to call vertu, and lavish protestations of devotedness to his country and the people. But instead of that, the work is, it appears, from beginning to end, full of the grossest obscenity—it is the delirium of a brain maddened with voluptuousness—it is coarser and more abominable than the "Pucelle" of Voltaire, and is not relieved, as that is, by sparkling wit and graces of style. In a moral point of view, it is atrocious—in a literary point of view, wretched.