The extraordinary favor with which this play was received marked an epoch in a small way, a return to antique ideas and themes, to more elevated subjects and modes of dealing with them. Six weeks after its appearance Sainte-Beuve writes: "We have always been rather apish in France: the Grecian, Roman and biblical tragedies which every day now brings forth are innumerable. Who will deliver me from these Greeks and Romans? Here we are overrun by them again after forty years' insurrection, and by the Hebrews to boot." The high-water mark of the author's popularity was the publication of a trifle called the Anti-Lucrèce, which was sold in the purlieus of the Odéon: next day there was a rumor that a second Anti-Lucrèce was in preparation. But the tide had turned: six months later, when the theatre reopened after the summer vacation with the same tragedy, Sainte-Beuve records: "Lucrèce has reappeared only to die, not by the poignard, but of languor, coldness, premature old age. It is frightful how little and how fast we live in these times—works as well as men. We survive ourselves and our children: the generations are turned upside down. Here is a piece which scarcely six months ago all Paris ran to hear without being asked:... now they are tired of it already, and can find nothing in it: it is like last year's snow." The death-blow of the tragedy was given, Sainte-Beuve says, not by the dagger, but by a luckless blunder of the actor who played Lucretia's father, and who, instead of saying, L'assassin pâlissant ("The assassin turning pale,") said, L'assassin polisson ("The scamp of an assassin"); which set everybody laughing; and that was the end of it.
M. Ponsard might console himself, if he liked, by the reflection that his play, if not immortal, had killed his fair rival's Judith and swallowed up Victor Hugo's Burgraves, which had been acted at the Théâtre Français a month before Lucrèce was first produced. Regarding the former, Sainte-Beuve shows unwonted tenderness or policy. "Never let me be too epigrammatic about Madame de Girardin," he wrote to M. Olivier: "I would not seem to play the traitor to her smiles;" though in reference to a sharp encounter between her and Jules Janin he hints that she has claws of her own. He does not deny himself the pleasure of mentioning Victor Hugo's little weaknesses. At the first three representations of Les Burgraves the theatre was packed with the author's friends: on the fourth a less partial public hissed to that degree that the curtain was dropped, and thenceforward each night was stormier until the play was withdrawn. Hugo could not bring himself to allow that he had been hissed, and, being behind the scenes, said to the actors, with the fatal sibilation whistling through the house, "They are interrupting my play" (On trouble ma pièce); which became a byword with these wicked wits. Sainte-Beuve, with his infallible instinct of wherein dwelt the vital greatness or defect of a production, characterizes the piece as an exaggeration. He admits that it has talent, especially in the preface, but adds, "Hugo sees all things larger than life: they look black to him—in Ruy Blas they looked red. But there is grandeur in the Burgraves: he alone, or Chateaubriand, could have written the introduction.... The banks of the Rhine are not so lofty and thunder-riven as he makes out, nor is Thessaly so black, nor Notre Dame so enormous, but more elegant, as may be seen from the pavement. But this is the defect of his eye."
Amidst these theatrical diversions the chronicler alludes to the fashionable preaching which occupied the gay world at hours when playhouses and drawing-rooms were not open. There was a religious revival going on in Paris almost equal to that which Moody and Sankey have produced here. "During Passion Week" (1843) "the crowd in all the churches, but at Notre Dame particularly, was prodigious. M. de Ravignan preached three times a day—at one o'clock for the women of the gay world, in the evening for the men, at other hours for the workingmen. He adapted his sermons to the different classes: to the women of the world he spoke as a man who knows the world and has belonged to it. They rushed, they crowded, they wept. I do not know how many communicants there were at Easter, but I believe the figure has not been so high for fifty years." At Advent of the same year the same scenes were repeated, with the Abbé Lacordaire in the pulpit. This excitement, and the debates in the Chamber on the subject of the theological lectures at the Sorbonne and College of France, call forth some excellent pages regarding the condition of Catholicism in France and the Gallican Church, and a brief, rapid review of the causes of the decline of the latter, which Sainte-Beuve asserts (more than thirty years ago) to be defunct. "Gallicanism, the noblest child of Catholicism, is dead before his father, who in his dotage remains obstinately faithful to his principles.... Gallicanism in its dissolution left a vast patrimony: the Jesuits may grab a huge bit of it, but the bulk will be diminished and disseminated.... At the rate things are going, Catholicism is tending to become a sect." The insight of this is as remarkable as the expression. Some years afterward, marking the progress of liberal ideas in religion, he says: "Men's conceptions of God are constantly changing. What was the atheism of yesterday will be the deism of to-morrow."
There are few Frenchman of any calling who are indifferent to politics, and the men of letters almost without exception are interested spectators when not actors in public affairs. From 1843 to 1845, the period of the Chroniques, was a dead calm in the political horizon of France, undisturbed by the little distant cloud of warfare in Algiers: the Legitimists worked up farcical fermentations which had no more body or head than those of the present day, although the chances of the party were rather better. The duke of Bordeaux (as the Comte de Chambord was then called) made an excursion to England one Christmas, which was seized as an occasion, or more probably was a preconcerted signal, for a dreary little demonstration of loyalty on the part of his adherents, who crossed over to pay their respects to him in London: by great arithmetical efforts their number was added up and made to amount to four hundred, though whether so many really went was doubted. There were a few old noblemen of great family: Berryer the eminent lawyer and Chateaubriand were the only names of individual distinction in the list, and the chief results were that Queen Victoria was annoyed (some of the Orleans family being on a visit to her at the time) and intimated her annoyance, and that the superb Chateaubriand was spoken of in the English newspapers as "the good old man;" which Sainte-Beuve enjoyed extremely.
The Cahiers extend from 1847 to 1869, including the vicissitudes which brought about the Second Empire, whose annihilation Sainte-Beuve died half a year too soon to witness. In January, 1848, he felt the storm brewing in the air, though he little guessed from what quarter it would come nor on whose head it would burst. On the revolution of the 24th of February he writes: "What events! what a dream! I was prepared for much, but not so soon, nor for this.... I am tempted to believe in the nullity of every judgment, my own in particular—I who make it a business to judge others, and am so short-sighted.... The future will disclose what no one can foresee. There is no use in talking of ordinary wisdom and prudence: they have been utterly at fault. Guizot, the historian-philosopher, has turned out more stupid than a Polignac: Utopia and the poet's dream, on the contrary, have become facts and reality. I forgive Lamartine everything: he has been great during these days, and done honor to the poetic nature." But afterward, in looking back to the poet's reign, he grew satirical: "It was in the time of the good provisional government, which did so many things and left so many undone. The fortunes of France crumbled to pieces in a fortnight, but it was under the invocation of equality and fraternity. As to liberty, it only existed for madmen, and the wise took good care to make no use of it. 'The great folk are terribly scared,' said my portress, but the small fry triumphed: it was their turn. So much had never been said about work before, and so little was never done. People walked about all day, planted liberty-trees at every street-corner, illuminated willy-nilly, and perorated in the clubs and squares until midnight. The Exchange rang with disasters in the morning: in the evening it sparkled with lanterns and fireworks. It was the gayest anarchy for the lower classes of Paris, who had no police and looked after themselves. The street-boys ran about with flags; workmen without work, but paid nevertheless, walked in perpetual procession; the demireps had kicked over the traces, and on the sidewalks the most virtuous fellow-citizenesses were hugged without ceremony: it must be added that they did not resent it too much. The grisettes, having nothing to eat, gave themselves away for nothing or next to nothing, as during the Fronde. The chorus of the Girondists was sung on every open lot, and there was a feast of addresses. Lamartine wrought marvels such as Ulysses might have done, and he was the siren of the hour. Yet they laughed and joked, and the true French wit revived. There was general good-humor and amiability in those first days of a most licentious spring sunshine. There was an admixture of bad taste, as there always is in the people of Paris when they grow sentimental. They made grotesque little gardens round the liberty-trees, which they watered assiduously.... The small fry adored their provisional government, as they formerly did their good king Louis XII., and more than one simple person said with emotion, 'It must be admitted that we are well governed, they talk so well!'" Before three months had elapsed the provisional government was at an end: "their feet slipped in blood—literally, in torrents of blood." "The politicians of late years have been playing a game of chess, intent wholly upon the board, but never giving a thought to the table under the board. But the table was alive, the back of a people which began to move, and in the twinkling of an eye chessboard and men went to the devil."
Among the entries of the next ten or twelve years are sketches of the leading statesmen and scraps of their conversation: those of Thiers are very animated. Sainte-Beuve says that he has a happiness of verbal expression which eludes his pen; "yet raise him upon a pinnacle of works of art" (of which M. Thiers has always been a patron publicly and privately), "of historical monuments and flatterers, and he will never be aught but the cleverest of marmosets." If he had lived another twelvemonth, Sainte-Beuve might have had some other word for the Great Citizen. On Guizot he is still more severe, making him out a mere humbug, and of the poorest sort. When the poet Auguste Barbier became a candidate for the French Academy, M. Guizot had never heard of him, and had to be told all about him and his verses—there was surely no disgrace in this ignorance on the part of a man engrossed in studies and pursuits of a more serious nature—but before a week was over he was heard expressing amazement that another person knew nothing of Barbier, and talking of his poems as if he had always been familiar with them. The Duchesse de Broglie said: "What M. Guizot has known since morning he pretends to have known from all eternity."
This paper might be prolonged almost to the length of the volumes themselves by quoting all the keen, sagacious or brilliant sayings which they contain. Two more, merely to exemplify Sainte-Beuve's command of words in very different lines of thought: "The old fragments of cases in φι and θεν, the ancient remains of verbs in μι the second aorists, which alone survive the other submerged tenses, always produce the same effect upon me, in view of the regular declensions and conjugations, as the multitude of the isles and Cyclades in relation to the Peloponnesus and the rest of the mainland on the map of Greece: there was a time when they were all one. The rocks and peaks still stand to attest it."—"Never is a word which has always brought bad luck to him who used it from the tribune."
M. Troubat speaks of the correspondence of Sainte-Beuve as destined for publication: the Chroniques and Cahiers are like anchovies to whet the appetite for a longer and more continuous reading.
Sarah B. Wister.