Many years ago, a gentleman with whom I was driving in a
distant quarter of Paris took me to a house on the rue
Montparnasse, where we remained an hour or more, he chatting with
its owner, and I listening to their conversation, and wondering
at the confusion of books in the big room. As we drove
away, my companion turned to me and said, “Don’t
forget this afternoon. You have seen one of the greatest
writers our century has produced, although the world does not yet
realize it. You will learn to love his works when you are
older, and it will be a satisfaction to remember that you saw and
spoke with him in the flesh! “
When I returned later to Paris the little house had changed
hands, and a marble tablet stating that Sainte-Beuve had lived
and died there adorned its façade. My student
footsteps took me many times through that quiet street, but never
without a vision of the poet-critic flashing back, as I glanced
up at the window where he had stood and talked with us; as my
friend predicted, Sainte-Beuve’s writings had become a
precious part of my small library, the memory of his genial face
adding a vivid interest to their perusal.
I made a little Pilgrimage recently to the quiet old garden
where, after many years’ delay, a bust of this writer has
been unveiled, with the same companion, now very old, who thirty
years ago presented me to the original.
There is, perhaps, in all Paris no more exquisite corner than
the Garden of the Luxembourg. At every season it is
beautiful. The winter sunlight seems to linger on its
stately Italian terraces after it has ceased to shine
elsewhere. The first lilacs bloom here in the spring, and
when midsummer has turned all the rest of Paris into a blazing,
white wilderness, these gardens remain cool and tranquil in the
heart of turbulent “Bohemia,” a bit of fragrant
nature filled with the song of birds and the voices of
children. Surely it was a gracious inspiration that
selected this shady park as the “Poets’ Corner”
of great, new Paris. Henri Murger, Leconte de Lisle,
Théodore de Banville, Paul Verlaine, are here, and now
Sainte-Beuve has come back to his favorite haunt. Like
François Coppée and Victor Hugo, he loved these
historic allées, and knew the stone in them as he
knew the “Latin Quater,” for his life was passed
between the bookstalls of the quays and the outlying street where
he lived.
As we sat resting in the shade, my companion, who had been one
of Sainte-Beuve’s pupils, fell to talking of his master,
his memory refreshed by the familiar surroundings.
“Can anything be sadder,” he said, “than
finding a face one has loved turned into stone, or names that
were the watchwords of one’s youth serving as signs at
street corners—la rue Flaubert or Théodore de
Banville? How far away they make the past seem! Poor
Sainte-Beuve, that bust yonder is but a poor reward for a life of
toil, a modest tribute to his encyclopædic brain! His
works, however, are his best monument; he would be the last to
repine or cavil.
“The literary world of my day had two poles, between
which it vibrated. The little house in the rue Montparnasse
was one, the rock of Guernsey the other. We spoke with awe
of ‘Father Hugo’ and mentioned ‘Uncle
Beuve’ with tenderness. The Goncourt brothers
accepted Sainte-Beuve’s judgment on their work as the
verdict of a ‘Supreme Court.’ Not a poet or
author of that day but climbed with a beating heart the narrow
staircase that led to the great writer’s library.
Paul Verlaine regarded as his literary diploma a letter from this
‘Balzac de la critique.’ ”
“At the entrance of the quaint Passage du Commerce,
under the arch that leads into the rue
Saint-André-des-Arts, stands a hotel, where for years
Sainte-Beuve came daily to work (away from the importunate who
besieged his dwelling) in a room hired under the assumed name of
Delorme. It was there that we sent him a basket of fruit
one morning addressed to Mr. Delorme, né
Sainte-Beuve. It was there that most of his enormous labor
was accomplished.
“A curious corner of old Paris that Cour du
Commerce! Just opposite his window was the apartment where
Danton lived. If one chose to seek for them it would not be
hard to discover on the pavement of this same passage the marks
made by a young doctor in decapitating sheep with his newly
invented machine. The doctor’s name was
Guillotin.
“The great critic loved these old quarters filled with
history. He was fond of explaining that Montparnasse had
been a hill where the students of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries came to amuse themselves. In 1761 the slope was
levelled and the boulevard laid out, but the name was
predestined, he would declare, for the habitation of the
‘Parnassiens.’
“His enemies pretended that you had but to mention
Michelet, Balzac, and Victor Hugo to see Sainte-Beuve in three
degrees of rage. He had, it is true, distinct expressions
on hearing those authors discussed. The phrase then much
used in speaking of an original personality, ‘He is like a
character out of Balzac,’ always threw my master into a
temper. I cannot remember, however, having seen him in one
of those famous rages which made Barbey d’Aurévilly
say that ‘Sainte-Beuve was a clever man with the temper of
a turkey!’ The former was much nearer the truth when
he called the author of Les Lundis a French Wordsworth, or
compared him to a lay bénédictin. He
had a way of reading a newly acquired volume as he walked through
the streets that was typical of his life. My master was
always studying and always advancing.
“He never entirely recovered from his mortification at
being hissed by the students on the occasion of his first lecture
at the Collège de France. Returning home he loaded
two pistols, one for the first student who should again insult
him, and the other to blow out his own brains. It was no
idle threat. The man Guizot had nicknamed
‘Werther’ was capable of executing his plan, for this
causeless unpopularity was anguish to him. After his death,
I found those two pistols loaded in his bedroom, but justice had
been done another way. All opposition had vanished.
Every student in the ‘Quarter’ followed the modest
funeral of their Senator, who had become the champion of literary
liberty in an epoch when poetry was held in chains.
“The Empire which made him Senator gained, however, but
an indocile recruit. On his one visit to Compiègne
in 1863, the Emperor, wishing to be particularly gracious, said
to him, ‘I always read the Moniteur on Monday, when
your article appears.’ Unfortunately for this
compliment, it was the Constitutionnel that had been
publishing the Nouveaux Lundis for more than four
years. In spite of the united efforts of his friends,
Sainte-Beuve could not be brought to the point of complimenting
Napoleon III. on his Life of Cæsar.
The author of Les Consolations remained through life
the proudest and most independent of men, a bourgeois, enemy of
all tyranny, asking protection of no one. And what a
worker! Reading, sifting, studying, analyzing his subject
before composing one of his famous Lundis, a literary
portrait which he aimed at making complete and final. One
of these articles cost him as much labor as other authors give to
the composition of a volume.
“By way of amusement on Sunday evenings, when work was
temporarily laid aside, he loved the theatre, delighting in every
kind of play, from the broad farces of the Palais Royal to the
tragedies of Racine, and entertaining comedians in order, as he
said, ‘to keep young’! One evening
Théophile Gautier brought a pretty actress to
dinner. Sainte-Beuve, who was past-master in the difficult
art of conversation, and on whom a fair woman acted as an
inspiration, surpassed himself on this occasion, surprising even
the Goncourts with his knowledge of the Eighteenth century and
the women of that time, Mme. de Boufflers, Mlle. de Lespinasse,
la Maréchale de Luxembourg. The hours flew by
unheeded by all of his guests but one. The
débutante was overheard confiding, later in the
evening, to a friend at the Gymnase, where she performed in the
last act, ‘Ouf! I’m glad to get here.
I‘ve been dining with a stupid old Senator. They told
me he would be amusing, but I’ve been bored to
death.’ Which reminded me of my one visit to England,
when I heard a young nobleman declare that he had been to
‘such a dull dinner to meet a duffer called
“Renan!” ’
“Sainte-Beuve’s Larmes de Racine was given
at the Théâtre Français during its
author’s last illness. His disappointment at not
seeing the performance was so keen that M. Thierry, then
administrateur of La Comédie, took Mlle. Favart to
the rue Montparnasse, that she might recite his verses to the
dying writer. When the actress, then in the zenith of her
fame and beauty, came to the lines—
Jean Racine, le grand poête,
Le poête aimant et pieux,
Après que sa lyre muette
Se fut voilèe à tous les yeux,
Renonçant à la gloire humaine,
S’il sentait en son âme pleine
Le flot contenu murmurer,
Ne savait que fondre en prière,
Pencher l’urne dans la poussière
Aux pieds du Seigneur, et pleurer!
Le poête aimant et pieux,
Après que sa lyre muette
Se fut voilèe à tous les yeux,
Renonçant à la gloire humaine,
S’il sentait en son âme pleine
Le flot contenu murmurer,
Ne savait que fondre en prière,
Pencher l’urne dans la poussière
Aux pieds du Seigneur, et pleurer!
the tears of Sainte-Beuve accompanied those of
Racine!”
There were tears also in the eyes my companion turned toward
me as he concluded. The sun had set while he had been
speaking. The marble of the statues gleamed white against
the shadows of the sombre old garden. The guardians were
closing the gates and warning the lingering visitors as we
strolled toward the entrance.
It seemed as if we had been for an hour in the presence of the
portly critic; and the circle of brilliant men and witty women
who surrounded him—Flaubert, Tourguéneff,
Théophile Gautier, Renan, George Sand—were realities
at that moment, not abstractions with great names. It was
like returning from another age, to step out again into the glare
and bustle of the Boulevard St. Michel.
