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Le Bourget, everyone said, had been taken in the morning, our artillery was on ahead, and we were carrying everything before us, so towards Le Bourget I advanced. About a mile from Le Bourget, there is a cross-road running to St. Denis through Courneuve. Here I found the barricade which had formed our most advanced post removed. Le Bourget seemed to be on fire.
To sum up: Bourget is in the realm of fiction what Frederic Amiel is in the realm of thinkers and philosophers a subtle, ingenious, highly gifted student of his time. With a wonderful dexterity of pen, a very acute, almost womanly intuition, and a rare diffusion of grace about all his writings, it is probable that Bourget will remain less known as a critic than as a romancer.
De Musset and Anatole France may be taken as revealing authoritatively the moral philosophy of nineteenth-century thought. I must not omit to mention the Jacqueline of Th. Bentzon, and the "Attic" Philosopher of Emile Souvestre, nor the, great names of Loti, Claretie, Coppe, Bazin, Bourget, Malot, Droz, De Massa, and last, but not least, our French Dickens, Alphonse Daudet.
Next morning, the 8th, I awoke at Bourg in High Savoy. Here too the poplar dominates in the valleys. We ran along the shores of Lake Bourget and up the beautiful valley of the Arc in misty rain. We arrived at Modane at 10 a.m., and I was booked through to Palmanova, a new name to me at that time.
The doctor understood the sarcastic smile that lurked about Raphael's mouth, and took his leave without finding another word to say. The Lake of Bourget lies seven hundred feet above the Mediterranean, in a great hollow among the jagged peaks of the hills; it sparkles there, the bluest drop of water in the world. From the summit of the Cat's Tooth the lake below looks like a stray turquoise.
The old man then took the horses through the wood, returned them to the driver, unbound the latter, and also the young men, who had been garotted. After resting for a time, Courceuil, Hiley, and Boislaurier paid their men a paltry sum for their trouble, and the whole band departed, leaving the plunder in charge of Bourget.
It was not until past eleven o'clock that I found myself on the outside of the gate of La Villette, advancing, as Grouchy should have done at Waterloo, in the direction of the sound of the cannon. From the gate a straight road runs to Le Bourget, having the Fort of Aubervilliers on the right, and St. Denis on the left.
The young man was M. Paul Bourget, who had not yet begun to write novels, while his literary and philosophical essays seemed rather to mark him out as the disciple of M. Taine than as the Catholic protagonist he was soon to become.
The latter had wished to break through the German lines on the day of Sedan, and he now wished to break through them round Paris. Various schemes occurred to him. One was to make a sortie in the direction of Le Bourget and the plain of Saint Denis, but it seemed useless to attempt to break out on the north, as the Germans held Laon, Soissons, La Fere, and Amiens.
So subtle and sensitive an old-world consciousness as that of M. Paul Bourget was set vibrating by them like a violin to the concussion of a trip-hammer, and to the following tune: The portals of the basements, usually arched as if crushed beneath the weight of the mountains which they support, look like dens of a primitive race, continually receiving and pouring forth a stream of people.
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