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"But we can do no more. Let us each retire to his home. To-morrow the National Guard will fraternize with the people, and the Ministry will resign." A few words of parting salutation passed, and all departed. M. Dantès and Lamartine left the office in company. "What say you, Edmond," asked Lamartine, "will your wife spare you long enough from her pillow to make with me a brief tour of the town?"
The long and difficult course of study that many a boy was proud to finish when he was nineteen, was almost over before she had entered her teens. She was paler and thinner than ever and felt glad the warm weather had come, for really, her frock was not thick enough for comfort. That terrible wolf had again howled in the dark echoing entry way of the house on the Rue Lamartine.
Here he took a house a "preposterous" house, according to his own account, with only gleams of reason in it; and visited many theatres; and went very often to the Morgue, where lie the unowned dead; and had pleasant friendly intercourse with the notable French authors of the time, Alexandre Dumas the Great, most prolific of romance writers; and Scribe of the innumerable plays; and the poets Lamartine and Victor Hugo; and Chateaubriand, then in his sad and somewhat morose old age.
He asserts that in the future, Bolivar will take his place beside the French Emperor. Napoleon owes his glory to Chateaubriand, to Lamartine, to Madame de Stael, to Byron, to Victor Hugo, while Bolivar has had few biographers, and a very few have spoken of him with the power and authority of those who praised or attacked Napoleon.
Of the three poets who, in making their literary debuts, had just published the 'Meditations, Poemes antiques et modernes, and Odes', only one had, at that time, the instinct of renewal in the spirit of French poesy, and a sense of the manner in which this must be accomplished; and that one was not Lamartine, and certainly it was not Victor Hugo.
Like almost all the distinguished authors of France, Lamartine fought his duel. He had written something disparaging to modern Italy, and one Colonel Pepe, an Italian, challenged him to fight a duel. He accepted the challenge and was wounded. For six months he hung between life and death.
Admiration did not here fall upon one with lightning speed; it was slowly, irresistibly that one grew charmed. And the contrast was like that of Racine beside Corneille, Lamartine beside Hugo, the eternal pair, the masculine and feminine genius coupled through centuries of glory. With Raffaelle it is nobility, grace, exquisiteness, and correctness of line, and divineness of harmony that triumph.
No, some instinct of harmony held desire remote from my heart. "It was not love then," some one will say. I know not what it was, but I know that it filled my soul. Clearly, however, the feelings I experienced cannot have been strange to the heart of man, since I have found them expressed with power and sweetness in the works of the poets, in Virgil, in Racine and Lamartine.
It was a refreshment and an inspiration to look into this book between my long rows of figures, and read such poems as "The Angel of Patience," "Follen," "Raphael," and that wonderfully rendered "Hymn" from Lamartine, that used to whisper itself through me after I had read it, like the echo of a spirit's voice:
I had a dozen platforms at my fingers' ends, and could move an audience equal to Lamartine. Here then was my game, and at it I made a nice thing.
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