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Michelet was in the right path when he came in contact with the fistula of Louis XIV., but he fell back into the old rut almost immediately afterwards. After this judicious expression of opinion, the young physiologist went to join a party of passing friends.
In spite of its transitory character the invasion of Charles VIII., therefore, was a great fact in the history of the Renaissance. It was, to use the pregnant phrase of Michelet, no less than the revelation of Italy to the nations of the North.
"Never," says Michelet, "was Caesar more alive, more powerful, more terrible, than when his old and worn-out body, his withered corpse, lay pierced with blows; he appeared then purified, redeemed, that which he had been, despite his many stains the man of humanity."
It is the most marvellous bibliographical fact on record. However, on consideration, this statement does not depend on Michelet. The bibliographer, Barbier, has absolutely specified sixty in a separate dissertation, soixante traductions, amongst those even that have not escaped the search. The Italian translations are said to be thirty.
But now, confining our attention to M. Michelet, we in England who know him best by his worst book, the book against priests, etc. know him disadvantageously. That book is a rhapsody of incoherence. But his "History of France" is quite another thing. A man, in whatsoever craft he sails, cannot stretch away out of sight when he is linked to the windings of the shore by towing-ropes of History.
A nation that without greatness had done so many great things, as Michelet says, required an heroic style of painting, if it may be so called, destined to illustrate its men and achievements.
During the tranquil intervals that ensued on this rude awakening from dreams of an Italian Empire, and between the third and fourth wars with the emperor, the king was able to initiate a project that had long been dear to him. "Come," says Michelet, "in the still, dark night, climb the Rue St. Jacques, in the early winter's morning. See you yon lights?
With Lamartine and Michelet, she has best reflected and expressed the dreams and hopes and loves of the first half of the nineteenth century.
In vain the emperor strove, by offers of immunities and exemptions, to recall the cultivator to his deserted fields. Nothing could do so. The desert extended daily. At the commencement of the fifth century there was, in the happy Campania, the most fertile province of the empire, 520,000 jugera in a state of nature." MICHELET, Histoire de France, i. 104-108.
Michelet, who talks nonsense as soon as he has to do with a cathedral, is hard on the mediæval architects for their belief in the meaning of figures. He accuses them of having observed mystic rules in the arrangement of certain parts of the buildings; of having, for instance, restricted the number of windows, or arranged pillars and bays in accordance with some arithmetical combination.
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