BOOK FIFTEENTH. Revival of literature, of philosophy, of history, of the press-Madaine de Staël-M. de Chateaubriand-M. de Bonald-M. de Fontanes-M. de Maistre-M. de Lamennais-M. Cousin-The saloons of ParisThe King's cabinet-M. de Talleyrand-Madame de Staël-Madame de Duras-Madame de la Trémouille-Madame de Broglie-Madame de Saint-Aulaire-Madame de Montcalm-M. Casimir PérierM. Laffitte-Béranger-The Journals-Queen Hortense-Carnot's pamphlet Letter of Fouché-Intercourse of Louis XVIII. with Barras. I. FRANCE was so exhausted with twenty years' war, and so overwhelmed with unknown problems to solve by the forced reconciliation of the Revolution and the Restoration, that the peace, although so recent, began already to reanimate thought, genius, and the arts, stifled by the long despotism, and reviving with the same breath that gave life to liberty. This epoch was an awaking of the human mind. At this period of the Restoration, many men, of whom we are about to speak, had not yet written their works, and gained their fame. We shall not, however, limit ourselves to the literary history of this moment; we shall follow it through the lapse of time to give all possible scope to this revival of thought. The eighteenth century had been interrupted in its thoughts, in its works, and in its arts, by a catastrophe which had dispersed its philosophers, its poets, its orators, and its writers. The emigration, the Reign of Terror, and the scaffold had decimated the intelligence of the country. Condorcet and Champfort had put themselves to death; André Chénier and Roucher had fallen under the axe. Mirabeau had died of fatigue of the Revolution, and perhaps of anguish at the perspective before him, which could not escape his penetrating genius. Verguiaud had disappeared in the tempest, happy to escape from the Despotism of Napoleon over the human mind. spectacle of crime by the martyrdom of eloquence to which he aspired. Delille flew far away from his country, and had sung for the exiles in Poland and in England. The Abbé Raynal had grown old in repentance, and in the disappointment of his hopes. Parny had travestied his loves into cynicism, and had taken the wages of the extortioners. Philosophy and literature in France, at the end of Napoleon's reign, had been condemned to silence, or disciplined and drilled as paid battalions under the sabre. Nature had exhausted herself of great men at the beginning of the century, to prepare and accomplish the Revo lution. The Revolution being accomplished, thought, which had made it, seemed to have been frightened at herself, on seeing that she would be annihilated in the child. Bonaparte, who was aspiring to the tyranny, and who hated thought, because it is the liberty of the soul, had availed himself of this exhaustion and of this lassitude of the human mind, to muzzle, or to enervate all literature. He had only favoured the mathematical sciences, because figures ineasure, count, and do not think. Of the human faculties he only honoured those of which he could make docile instruments. Geometricians were the men for him; but writers made him tremble. It was the age of the compass. He only tolerated that light and futile literature which amuses the people and offers incense to tyranny. He would have swept away, by his police, every voice, the manly accent of which might have touched one of the grave chords of the human heart. He permitted those rhymes which stunned the ear, but not the poetry which exalts the soul. Young Charles Nodier having written, on the mountains of the Jura, an ode which breathed too high a tone for the servility of the time, the poet was obliged to proscribe himself, to forestall the proscription that was on the watch for him. II. The tyranny of Napoleon must have been bitter indeed, since the return of the old regime was necessary to restore liberty and breath to the soul. Of this there is no doubt, for scarcely was the Empire overturned, when people began to Revival of literature, philosophy, and the press. think, to write, and to sing again in France. The Bourbons, contemporaries of our literature, made it their glory to bring it back with them. The constitutional regime gave liberty of speech to two houses of parliament; and, in spite of some preventive or repressive laws, the liberty of the press gave respiration to letters. All that had hitherto been silent now began to speak. The mind humbled by compression, society famished for ideas, youth impatient for intellectual glory, avenged themselves for their long silence by a sudden and almost a continuous explosion of philosophy, history, poetry, polemics, memoirs, dramas, and works of art and imagination. The age of Francis I. is full of originality, and that of Louis XIV. is full of glory; but neither the one nor the other had more of enthusiasm and animation than the first years of the Restoration. Servitude had been accumulating in the souls of all during twenty years; and they now overflowed in their fulness. History owes its pages to them; and they are not merely the annals of wars and of courts, but of the human mind. III. Great minds were ripening during these years of oppression; and they now re-appeared in all their liberty and splendour. Madame de Staël and M. de Chateaubriand had partaken during twenty years of the admiration of Europe and the persecution of Napoleon. Madame de Staël, daughter of M. Necker, a precocious genius, nurtured in the saloon of her father by reading and by the conversation of the orators, philosophers, and poets of the eighteenth century, had inhaled the Revolution even in her cradle. A daughter of Helvetia, transplanted into courts, her soul and her style participated in this double origin. She was republican in imagination, and an aristocrat in manners, partaking of the nature of Rousseau and Mirabeau, fanciful as the one, and eloquent as the other. Her real party in politics was that of the Girondists. Greater in talent and more generous in soul than Madame Roland, she may be compared to an illustrious man with the passions of a woman. But these passions, Madame de Staël. powerful and tender, imparted to her talent the qualities of her soul, the accent, the warmth, and the heroism of sentiment. Napoleon considered her more dangerous to his tyranny than La Fayette, and had banished her far from Paris. This ostracism had made her house, situated on the shores of the lake of Geneva, the last focus of liberty. The writings of Madame de Staël, sometimes poetical, sometimes political, although proscribed or mutilated by the police, had aided in diffusing, through France and Europe, during the reign of the Empire, the hidden fires of the heart, the enthusiasm of the spirit, the aspirations of liberty, and the holy hatred of brutish stupidity and of servitude. This woman would have been the last of the Romans under the modern Cæsar, who dared not strike, and could not abuse her. Faithful and generous friends of both sexes-Matthew de Montmorency, Madame Récamier, the German philosophers, the poets of Italy, and the liberal statesmen of England-continued attached to her. During the last years of Napoleon's reign, in which his accelerated fall had made him more implacable, Madame de Staël had fled to the North, where she roused the insurrection of courts and of people against the oppressor of the human mind. On his fall she re-appeared in Paris, triumphant on the ruins of her enemy. The armed world had avenged her without wishing for it. She herself desired that this victory of nations over conquest should also be the victory of liberty over despotism. Matured by years and by the experience of human affairs, she had lost the ruggedness of those republican ideas which had inflamed her youth in 1791 and 1792. She had benevolent reminiscences for the Bourbons; and she formed the highest expectations from a Restoration, tested, as it had been, by the scaffold and by exile, and which around the throne would reconcile representative liberty with the traditions of national feeling. Her saloon at Paris was one of the geniuses of the Restoration. Her eloquence converted the old republicans, the young liberals, and the souls that were wavering, to a constitutional system, copied from that of England, which would give independence to opinions, a scope to parliamentary eloquence, and consign the government to intellect. Louis Madame de Staël. XVIII., by the elevation of his mind, by his literary taste, and by the grace of his admiration for her, consoled her for the disdain and the brutalities of Napoleon. He treated Madame de Staël as an ally of his crown, because she was the representative of European opinion. 66 66 IV. She was then as happy in her heart, as she was glorious in her genius. She had two children: a son who did not display the eclat of his mother, but who promised to have all the solid and modest qualities of a patriot and a good man; and also a daughter, since married to the Duke de Broglie, who resembled the purest and most beautiful thought of her mother, incarnate in an angelic form, to elevate the mind to heaven, and to represent holiness in beauty. While scarcely yet in the middle age of life, and blooming with that second youth which renews the imagination, that essence of love, Madame de Staël had married the dearest idol of her sensibility. She loved, and she was beloved. She prepared herself to publish her Considerations on the Revolution," which she had so closely observed; and the personal and impassioned narrative of her "Ten Years of Exile." Finally, a book on the genius of Germany (in which she had poured out, and, as it were, filtered drop by drop all the springs of her soul, of her imagination, and of her religion), appeared at the same time in France and England, and excited the attention of all Europe. Her style, especially in the work on Germany, without lacking the splendour of her youth, seemed to be imbued with lights more lofty and more eternal, in approaching the evening of life and the mysterious shrine of thought. It was no longer painting, nor merely poetry: it was perfect adoration; the incense of a soul was inhaled from its pages; it was "Corinne become a priestess, and catching a glimpse from the verge of life of the unknown Deity, in the remotest horizon of humanity. About this period she died in Paris, leaving a bright resplendence in the heart of her age. She was the Jean-Jaques Rousseau of women, but more tender, more sensitive, and more capable of |