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Le Comte Zamoyski a bien voulu me communiquer votre lettre, monsieur, et j'ai ete bien sincerement touchee du souvenir d'affection que vous conservez a un ami qui n'a cesse non plus, je puis vous le garantir, de vous porter un sentiment inalterable et sincere.
But, when one tries to catch him and pin him down on the dissecting-table, he turns out to be exasperatingly elusive. Even his most fervent admirers cannot agree among themselves as to the true nature of his achievements. Balzac thought of him as an artist, Taine was captivated by his conception of history, M. Bourget adores him as a psychologist, M. Barrès lays stress upon his 'sentiment d'honneur, and the 'Beylistes' see in him the embodiment of modernity. Certainly very few writers have had the good fortune to appeal at once so constantly and in so varied a manner to succeeding generations as Henri Beyle. The circumstances of his life no doubt in part account for the complexity of his genius. He was born in 1783, when the ancien régime was still in full swing; his early manhood was spent in the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars; he lived to see the Bourbon reaction, the Romantic revival, the revolution of 1830, and the establishment of Louis Philippe; and when he died, at the age of sixty, the nineteenth century was nearly half-way through. Thus his life exactly spans the interval between the old world and the new. His family, which belonged to the magistracy of Grenoble, preserved the living tradition of the eighteenth century. His grandfather was a polite, amiable, periwigged sceptic after the manner of Fontenelle, who always spoke of 'M. de Voltaire' with a smile 'mélangé de respect et d'affection'; and when the Terror came, two representatives of the people were sent down to Grenoble, with the result that Beyle's father was pronounced (with a hundred and fifty others) 'notoirement suspect' of disaffection to the Republic, and confined to his house. At the age of sixteen Beyle arrived in Paris, just after the coup d'état of the 18th Brumaire had made Bonaparte First Consul, and he immediately came under the influence of his cousin Daru, that extraordinary man to whose terrific energies was due the organisation of Napoleon's greatest armies, and whose leisure moments for apparently he had leisure moments were devoted to the composition of idylls in the style of Tibullus and to an enormous correspondence on literary topics with the poetasters of the day. It was as a subordinate to this remarkable personage that Beyle spent nearly the whole of the next fifteen years of his life in Paris, in Italy, in Germany, in Russia wherever the whirling tempest of the Napoleonic policy might happen to carry him. His actual military experience was considerably slighter than what, in after years, he liked to give his friends to understand it had been. For hardly more than a year, during the Italian campaign, he was in the army as a lieutenant of dragoons: the rest of his public service was spent in the commissariat department. The descriptions which he afterwards delighted to give of his adventures at Marengo, at Jéna, at Wagram, or at the crossing of the Niémen have been shown by M. Chuquet's unkind researches to have been imaginary. Beyle was present at only one great battle Bautzen. 'Nous voyons fort bien, he wrote in his journal on the following day, 'de midi
She was, as M. Boissier has well said, the exact counterpart of her still more famous brother: "Elle apportait dans sa conduite privée, dans ses engagements d'affection, les mêmes emportements et les mêmes ardeurs que son frère dans la vie publique. Prompte
Vous ne sauriez croire a quel point tous vos amis d'Angleterre, qui sont encore plus nombreux que ceux dont vous avez une connaissance personnelle, m'ont temoigne pour vous d'interet, de consideration et d'affection. Aussi votre convalescence est une bonne nouvelle pour nous tous les Lewis, les Hatherton, les Grote, Knight-Bruce et tant d'autres.
Ce n'est pas, croyez le bien, Monsieur, ce n'est pas ici pour nous une question d'interet personnel, c'est une question d'affection; vous me pardonnerez si nous vous parlons de vos enfants, si nous nous occupons de leur avenir, comme si elles faisaient partie de notre famille; leurs qualites personnelles, leur bon vouloir, leur zele extreme sont les seules causes qui nous poussent a nous hasarder de la sorte.
Enfin je me dis que puisque ma mort ne te ferait pas de bien, je dois tacher de me conserver; si ma mort pouvait t'etre utile je mourrais bien volontiers. Ta chere lettre, toute pleine d'affection, m'a fait du bien. Dis a mon bon petit Stephen que je le remercie de toute sa tendresse pour moi et que je vais mieux. J'ai beaucoup pense a mes chers enfants, ne sachant pas si je les reverrais.
Je n'esperais plus la revoir; je le lui disais dans la derniere lettre que je lui ai ecrite, et en me repondant il y a un mois, elle me disait presque adieu. Mais la distance est grande entre l'adieu annonce et l'adieu reel. Sa mort est pour moi un vrai chagrin. Et pour mes filles aussi, a qui elle a temoigne tant d'affection et de bonte.
En vous rappelant quelques traits de cette noble figure je voulais, comme je vous l'ai dit tout a l'heure, acquitter une dette de coeur envers un ami qui, jusqu'aux derniers moments de sa vie, m'a prodigue les marques d'affection. 'La memoire du philosophe, du lettre, de l'erudit, dn confrere eminent, de l'homme bon et aimable, merite de rester honoree dans notre compagnie.
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