A bookseller in Paris announces: "Reflections upon my conversations with the Duke de la Vauguyon, by Louis-Augustus Dauphin, (Louis XVI.,) accompanied by a fac simile of the MS., and with an introduction by M. Falloux, formerly Minister of Public Instruction." Falloux is a churchman of the stamp of Montalembert. We are apt to doubt the genuineness of these luckily discovered MSS. of eminent persons. We have no more faith in this case than we had in that of the Napoleon novels, mentioned in the last International.
The late M. De Balzac, who, besides being one of the cleverest writers of the age, was a brilliant man of society, and a very notorious roué, left, it appears, voluminous memoirs, to be printed without erasure or addition, and his friends are much alarmed by the prospect of their appearance. It is said that his custom of extorting letters from his friends upon any subject at issue, under pretence of possessing an imperfect memory, and his method of classing them, will render his memoirs one of the completest scandalous tableaux of the nineteenth century that could ever be presented to the contemplation of another age. Opposition to the publication has already been offered, but without success, and the princess-widow is busily engaged with the preparations for printing, intending to have the memoirs before the world early in June. They extend minutely over more than twenty years.
M. E. Quinet, who was long associated with Michelet, in the College of France, and who is known as a writer by his Alemagne et Italie, Ultramontanisme, Vacances en Espagne, etc. has published in Paris L'Enseignement du Peuple. "On the 24th day of February, 1848," he says, "a social miracle places in the hands of France the control of its destiny. France, openly consulted, replies by taking up a position in the scale of nations between Portugal and Naples. There must be a cause of this voluntary servitude; the object of these pages is to discover this cause, and, if possible, to protect futurity against the effects of its operation." This is the problem he proposes to solve, and he concludes that the important secret is in the fact, that the "national religion is in direct contradiction with the national revolution." "Chained by the circumstance of its religion to the middle ages, France believes that it can march onward to the end of a career opened to it solely because of its protest against every great principle of government which those ages held sacred." He has worked ten years, he tells us, to demonstrate two things: The first, that catholic states are all perishing; the second, that no political liberty can be realized in those states. "I have shown," he continues, "Italy the slave of all Europe, Spain a slave within, Portugal a slave within and without, Ireland a slave to England, Poland a slave to Russia, Bohemia, Hungary, slaves of Austria—Austria herself, the mother of all slavery, a slave to Russia. Looking for similar proofs out of Europe, I have shown in America, on the one hand, the increasing greatness of the heretical United States; on the other hand, the slavery of the catholic democracies and monarchies of the south: in the former a Washington, in the second a Rosas." M. Quinet considers that the only remedy applicable to an evil of this magnitude is the utter separation of church and state. Leave but the slightest connection between the two, and the former will inevitably overpower the latter. The one is a compact, organized, single-minded body; the other is scattered, loosely put together, swayed to and fro by every change in the political atmosphere, and can offer no resistance that is sufficient to oppose the steady, unremittent attacks of its enemy. The two, therefore, must not be placed in collision. The very indifference manifested towards the national religion by the great bulk of the French people is the cause why so much danger is to be apprehended from the efforts of the church. Because a religion is dead, says M. Quinet, there is the danger. A living religion, like that of the puritans, may certainly mould the government into a despotic form, but it communicates to it, at least, a portion of its own power and energy, whilst a dead religion infallibly occasions death to the state and to the people with which it is politically and organically united. He argues the whole subject with eloquent force, and with not a little of the earnestness which reminds the reader of his personal controversies with the Roman Catholic Church.
A history of Marie Stuart, by I. M. Dargaud, has just been published in Paris, and for its brilliancy, completeness, clearness, and impartiality, attracts much attention. Queen Mary of Scotland was one of the famously beautiful women whose history is romance. She must be named with the heroines of history and the figures of poetry, with Helen, and Aspasia, and Cleopatra. Certainly, we trace no more sparkling and sorrowful career than hers upon the confused page of history, and our admiration, condemnation, surprise, sorrow and delight, fall, summed in a tear, upon her grave. In this work it appears that she was undoubtedly privy to the death of Darnley. During his assassination, she was dancing at Holyrood. The fearful fascination of a brigand like Bothwell, for so proud and passionate a nature as Mary's, is well explained by M. Dargaud. He is just, also, to her own tragedy, the long and bitter suffering, the betrayal of friends; the final despair, and the laying aside two crowns to mount the scaffold. She died nobly, and as most of the illustrious victims of history have died; as if nature, unwilling that they should live, would yet compassionately show the world in their ending, that heroism and nobility were not altogether unknown to them.
Apropos of this history of Queen Mary, Lamartine has written a letter to Beranger, which praises the work exceedingly, but much more glorifies himself. The letter is a perfect specimen of that vanity, wherein only Lamartine is sublime: "Ah! if you or I had had such a heroine at twenty years, what epic poems and what songs would have been the result!"
The Count Montalembert, the fervid champion of Catholicism in the French chamber, has just published a work, entitled The higher and lower Radicalism: in its enmity to Religion, Right, Freedom and Justice, in France, Switzerland and Italy.