The French papers state that Lord Brougham, in his retreat at Cannes, is preparing for publication a work entitled, “France and England before Europe in 1851.”
The extraordinary popularity of Walter Scott in France, is illustrated by the announcement of the publication of another volume of the twentieth edition of Defauconpret’s translation of his novels, and the announcement of the publication of an entirely new translation of the said novels. If Defauconpret had been the only translator, twenty editions would have been an immense success; but there are besides, at the very least, twenty different translations of the complete works (many of which have had two, three, or four editions) and innumerable translations of particular novels, especially of “Quentin Durward.” In fact, in France as in England, Scott dazzles every imagination and touches every heart—whatever be his reader’s degree of education, or whatever his social position. His popularity amongst the lower orders, in particular, is so extraordinarily great, that it forms one of the most striking literary events of the present century.
The Leader announces a new work from Guizot, with the promising title of Méditations et Etudes morales; a novel by the Countess D’Orsay, called L’Ombre du Bonheur; and an important work by Gioberti, Di rinovamento civile d’Italia, the first part being devoted to the Errors and Schemes of the day: the second to Remedies and Hopes. To those who love pure literature, we know not what more agreeable volume to recommend than the one just issued of Saint Beuve’s Causeries du Lundi. It contains some of the best portraits he has ever drawn; and a charming gallery they make. We pass from Rabelais to Vauvenargues, from the Duc de Saint Simon to Frederick the Great, from Diderot to the Duchesse de Maine, from Camille Desmoulins to Madame Emilie de Girardin. The necessity of limiting his articles to the exigencies of a newspaper, has forced Saint-Beuve into a concision both of style and exposition, which greatly improves his sketches; and we know not which to admire most, the variety of his attainments or the skill of his pencil.
In History and Biography, European Continental literature has not been doing very much lately. There is a new or newer volume, the eleventh, of Thiers’s Consulate and Empire, and a Paris journalist of high repute, M. de la Guerronniere commences a promised series of Portraits Politiques Contemporains (“Portraits of Political Contemporaries”), with a monograph of that “nephew of his uncle,” the Prince-President of the French Republic. A. M. Leonard Gallois publishes in four volumes, with illustrations, a Histoire de la Révolution de 1848 (“History of the Revolution of 1848”), written from a republican-of-the-morrow point of view. Saint-Beuve contributes to The Constitutionnel graceful sketches of the lately-deceased Duchess of Angouleme, and of Rivarol, the Royalist pamphleteer and man-of-all-work in the first revolution, famed for the plaintive epigram, “Mirabeau is paid, not sold; I am sold but not paid,” one of the saddest predicaments that poor humanity can find itself in. A. M. Coindet has compressed Warburton’s Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers into a handy Histoire de Prince Rupert (“History of Prince Rupert”). The Germans send us the Leben and Reden Sir Robert Peel’s (“Life and Speeches of Sir Robert Peel”), tolerably compiled by one Kunzel, and Italy has produced a new Life of Paganini. Worthy of more extensive notice is Edouard Fleury’s Saint-Just et la Terreur (“Saint Just and the Reign of Terror”), a biography of the “great Saint of the Mountain,” the fellow-triumvir of Robespierre, and partaker of his fate, though not five-and-twenty; the fanatic young man who, scarcely beginning life, declared, “for revolutionists there is no rest but in the tomb!” Fleury is a clever and active young journalist in the department of the Aisne, Saint-Just’s birth-country—the same who lately brought out the very interesting “Memoir of Camille Desmoulins,” and an equally interesting historical study, “Babæuf and Socialism in 1796.“ Fleury has gone about his biographical task in the proper way; roamed up and down the country side, sketching the scenery in which his subject spent “a sulky adolescence,” and collecting anecdotes and reminiscences. One of these is worth retailing. An old woman who knew Saint-Just well when a boy, pointed out “an alley of old trees” where he used to stalk and spout: when he came into the house, after one of these soliloquies, quoth the old woman, “he would say terrible things to us!”
First in the list of recent French novels is the far-famed Jules Janin’s Gaieties Champêtres (“Rural Gaieties”), which all Paris is eagerly devouring. The scene is laid in the era of Louis XV., and the story (alas!) is worthy of the period, and must not be recited here. More innocent are Les Derniers Paysans (“The Last Peasants”), by Emile Souvestre, a cycle of graphic, and, for the most part, gloomy stories, meant to embalm the superstitions, which still linger among the peasantry of Brittany, soon to be dispelled by the march of civilization. Armand Barthet’s Henriette, though a touching tale, is not to be recommended. Alphonse Karr, a writer scarcely so well known out of France as he deserves to be, promises Recits sur la Plage (“Stories from the Sea Shore”). Karr is the only living French novelist who reminds one at all of Thackeray, of whom he has some of the caustic bitterness, but none of the light playfulness. He first became known by his Guêpes (“Wasps”), a periodical consisting of little, sharp, sarcastic, and isolated sentences, aimed at the quacks and quackeries of the day. With all this, he has a true feeling for nature, which is sometimes, however, carried to an absurd length.