"Summoned then, about a month after these events, by M. Reynaud, and having entered his office and approached him with my ordinary air, I saw in his countenance a look of consternation. He informed me that something very grave had taken place, and that this something concerned me; that certain lists specifying the sums distributed by the late government, with the names of the recipients, had been seized at the Tuileries; that my name had been found in them; that it occurred several times, with a sum—with sums—of a considerable amount attached to it. At first I began to laugh; but perceiving that M. Reynaud did not laugh, and receiving from him repeated appeals to my recollection, I began to ply him with questions in return. He was unable to enter into any exact details; but he assured me that the fact was certain,—that he had verified it with his own eyes; and as his alarm evidently proceeded from his friendship, I could not doubt the reality of what he had told me.
"I believe that, by my manner of replying on the instant, I convinced him of the existence of some error or some fraud. But I perceived that there were others, near him, behind him, who would be less easily convinced. As soon, therefore, as I had returned home, I addressed to the Journal des Débats a letter of denial, a defiance to calumny, in the tone natural to honorable persons and such as feel secure in their own innocence. This letter furnished M. Reynaud with a weapon against my accusers behind the scene. As a proof that he accepted both the sentiment and the terms, he caused it to be inserted in the Moniteur.
"However, I was not entirely satisfied; I wished to bring the affair fully to light. I made attempts to procure the lists in question. I went to see M. Taschereau, who was publishing them in his Revue rétrospective; I saw M. Landrin, the Attorney-General of the Republic; I even caused inquiries to be made of the former Ministers, then in London, with whom I had had the honor of being personally acquainted. No result; nobody understood to what my questions had reference. Wearied out at last, I discontinued the pursuit, though without dismissing the subject from my thoughts.
"I will get to the bottom of this affair. There was in the department of Public Instruction a man newly elevated to power, who honored me with an enmity already of long standing. I have never in my life met M. Génin; I have never once seen his face; but the fact is that he has always detested me, has often in his writings made me the object of his satire, and in his critical articles especially has ridiculed me to the extent of his powers. I did not suit this writer, whom all his friends pronounced a man of intellect; I appeared to him affected and full of mannerisms; and to me, on the other hand, he perhaps appeared neither so subtile, nor so refined, nor so original, as he seemed to others. Now M. Génin, who had been intrusted, after the 24th of February, 1848, with the distribution of the papers in the Bureau of Public Instruction, was undoubtedly the person who had availed himself of the list in which my name was said to figure, for the purpose of bringing an accusation against my honor. He was himself a man of probity, but one who, in the violence of his prejudices and the acerbity of his disposition, could hardly stop short of actions positively bad.
"If M. Génin had lived in the world, in society, during the fifteen years previous to 1848 which I had passed in it, he would have comprehended how a man of letters, without fortune, without ambition, of retiring manners, and keeping strictly to his own place, may yet—by his intellect perhaps, by his character, by his tact, and by his general conduct—obtain an honorable and agreeable position, and live with persons of every rank, the most distinguished in their several walks,—persons not precisely of his own class,—on that insensible footing of equality which is, or which was, the charm and honor of social life in France. For my own part, during those years,—happy ones I may call them,—I had endeavored, not without a fair degree of success, to arrange an existence combining dignity with ease. To write from time to time things which it might be agreeable to read; to read what was not only agreeable but instructive; above all, not to write too much, to cultivate friendships, to keep the mind at liberty for the intercourse of each day and be able to draw upon it without fear of exhausting it; giving more to one's intimates than to the public, and reserving the finest and tenderest thoughts, the flower of one's nature, for the inner sanctuary;—such was the mode of life I had conceived as suitable to a literary knight, who should not allow has professional pursuits and associations to domineer over and repress the essential elements of his heart and soul. Since then necessity has seized upon me and constrained me to renounce what I considered the only happiness. It is gone, it has forever vanished, that better time, adorned with study and leisure, passed in a chosen circle, where I once received, from a fair friend whose loss has been irreparable, this charming counsel insinuated in the form of praise: 'If you think yourself dependent on the approbation of certain people, believe me, that others are dependent upon yours. And what better, sweeter bond can there be between persons who esteem each other, than this mutual dependence on moral approbation, balancing, so to speak, one's own sentiment of freedom. To desire to please and at the same time to remain free,—this is the rule we ought to follow.' I accepted the motto; I promised myself to be faithful to it in all that I might write; my productions at that period will show perhaps the degree in which I was influenced by it. But I perceive that I have strayed from my text.
"I had forgotten to mention that, on the same day on which I wrote the letter inserted first in the Journal des Débats, and afterwards in the Moniteur, I forwarded to Messieurs Reynaud and Carnot the resignation of my place at the Mazarine. I did not wish to expose myself to interrogatories and explanations where I could be less sure of being questioned in a friendly spirit and listened to with confidence. From the moment of taking this step there was no longer much choice for me. I had to live by my pen; and during the year 1848, literature in my understanding of that term—and indeed literature of every kind—formed one of those branches of industry, devoted to the production of luxuries, which were struck with a sudden interdict, a temporary death. I was asked in conversation if I knew any man of letters who would accept a place in Belgium as professor of French literature. Learning that the vacancy was at the University of Liége, I offered myself. I went to Brussels to confer on the project with M. Charles Rogier, Minister of the Interior, whom I had known a long time, and I accepted with gratitude the propositions that were made to me.
"I left France in October, 1848. The press of Paris noticed my departure only with raillery. When a man of letters has no party, no followers, at his back, when he takes his way alone and independently, the least that can be expected is that the world should give itself the pleasure of insulting him a little on his passage. In Belgium I met with unexpected difficulties, thrown in my way by hostile compatriots. Pamphlets containing incredible calumnies were published against me. I have reason to speak with praise of the youth of Belgium, who decided to wait, and to judge me only by my acts and words. In spite of obstacles I succeeded. The present book, which was entirely composed and was to have been published before the end of 1849, represents one of the two courses which I delivered.
"P.S. I had almost forgotten to recur to the famous lists. The one containing my name appeared at last in the Revue rétrospective. 'M. Sainte-Beuve, 100 francs,'—this was what was to be read there. The fabulous ciphers had vanished. On seeing this entry a ray of light dawned upon my memory. I recollected my smoky chimney of 1847, the repair of which was to have cost about that sum. But for this incident, I should never have been led to deliver the course now submitted to the reader, and the one circumstance has occasioned my mention of the other."
It must be confessed that the chimney that drove M. Sainte-Beuve into temporary exile, and led to the production of a work in which his views on many important topics were enunciated with a clearness and force he had hitherto held in reserve, had smoked to some purpose. We may be permitted to believe that his integrity had never been seriously questioned; that the pretext for a brief abandonment of his beloved Paris while she was in a state of excitement and dishabille had not been altogether unwelcome. Though no admirer of the government of Louis Philippe, he had, as he still acknowledges, appreciated "the mildness of that régime, its humanity, and the facilities it afforded for intellectual culture and the development of pacific interests of every kind." The sudden overthrow, the turmoil, the vagaries that ensued, were little to his taste. He was content to stand aside, availing himself of the general dislocation to look around and choose for himself a new field, a more independent position.
Here then begins the third, and, as we must suppose, the final stage of his career. In September, 1849, he returned to Paris, feeling "a great need of activity," as if his mind had been "refreshed by a year of study and solitude." What was he to undertake? No sooner did the question arise, than an answer presented itself in the form of an offer from one whose coadjutor he had become on a previous and similar occasion. M. le docteur Véron, now the proprietor of the Constitutionnel, and as sagacious as ever in catering for the public taste, proposed to him to furnish every Monday an article on some literary topic. The notion of writing for the masses, of adapting his style to the requirements of a newspaper, gave him a momentary shock. Hitherto he had addressed only the most select audiences. But, after all, he was conscious of an almost boundless versatility, and no plan could better satisfy the desire which he had long felt of becoming "a critic in the full sense of the word, with the advantages of ripeness and perhaps of boldness." Such a change would be suited also to the new aspect of society. In literature it was no longer the time for training, tending, and watering, but the season of gathering the fruit, selecting the good and rejecting the unsound. Romanticism as a school had done its work and was now extinct. Every one went his separate way. Questions of form were no longer mooted; the public tolerated everything. Whoever had an idea on any subject wrote about it, and whoever chose to write was a littérateur. "With such a noise in the streets it was necessary to raise one's voice in order to be heard. Accordingly," says M. Sainte-Beuve, "I set to work for the first time on that kind of criticism, frank and outspoken, which belongs to the open country and the broad day."