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He did not listen to her. That is all. My opinion on it, if you wish to know it, is this. The first wrong was done by the princess, who was hasty; but the second and the worst was by pere Beuve, who did not behave as a courteous man. If one has a friend, a rather good fellow, and that friend has given one thirty thousand francs a year income, one owes him some consideration.
The main narrative followed here is Commines, whose memoirs remain, as Ste.-Beuve says, the definitive history of the times. There are the errors inevitable to any contemporary statement. Meyer, to be sure, says, apropos of an incident incorrectly reported, Falsus in hoc ut in pluribus historicus. Kervyn de Lettenhove three centuries later is also severe.
"In this way," says Sainte Beuve, "he learned Hebrew by himself, and, as everything was connected in his mind, he was led to the study of comparative philology.
In an important work, which his habitual readers certainly have not forgotten, although death did not allow him to finish it, Sainte Beuve thus judges the correspondence of the great publicist:
If he is of those who talk about "this age of shams," "this age without ideals," "this hysterical age," and this heaven-knows-what-age Then that man, though he reads undisputed classics for twenty hours a day, though he has a memory of steel, though he rivals Porson in scholarship and Sainte Beuve in judgment, is not receiving from literature what literature has to give.
Why, even Taine, Sainte Beuve, and Gautier didn't know him! They glorified his work just so long as it had to do with fleshly Paris, but called him mad in his loftier altitudes where they couldn't follow." It was possibly an hour afterward, when Bedient halted before a certain picture longer than others; then went back to another that had interested him. Moments passed.
Your old troubadour is here, not so badly off. He will go to dine on Monday at Magny's, we shall agree on a day for both of us to dine with Maurice. He is at home at five o'clock but not before Monday. He is running around! He embraces you. Then Wednesday, if you wish, my dear old fellow. Whom do you want to have with us? Certainly, the dear Beuve if that is possible, and no one if you like.
Stendhal speaks of Byron's "Apollonic power;" and Sainte Beuve writes to the same intent, with some judicious caveats. M. Taine concludes his survey of the romantic movement with the remark: "In this splendid effort, the greatest are exhausted. One alone Byron attains the summit.
This leads to another great and important distinction to be drawn between Rousseau and the school whom in other respects he inspired. The admirable Sainte Beuve perplexes one by his strange remark, that the union of the poetry of the family and the hearth with the poetry of nature is essentially wanting to Rousseau. It only shows that the great critic had for the moment forgotten the whole of the second part of the New Heloïsa, and his failure to identify Cowper's allusion to the matinée
Even Mme. du Deffand, whom Sainte Beuve ranks next to Voltaire as the purest classic of the epoch in prose, says of herself, "I do not know a word of grammar; my manner of expressing myself is always the result of chance, independent of all rule and all art."
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