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Updated: May 9, 2025
But throughout, it is the ideal intensity of love of love based upon a perfect yet peculiar type of physical or material beauty which is enthroned in the midst of those mysterious powers; Youth and Death, Destiny and Fortune, Fame, Poetic Fame, Memory, Oblivion, and the like. Rossetti is one of those who, in the words of Mérimée, se passionnent pour la passion, one of Love's lovers.
Alfred de Vigny contributed to it successively Stello, Laurette and Le Capitaine Renaud; Alexandre Dumas, whose jealousy was only aroused later on, published therein his Impressions de Voyage; Balzac wrote for it, as did also Nodier, Victor Hugo, Barbier, Brizeux, Mérimée, Lerminier, George Sand, Jouffry, Alfred de Musset, Sainte-Beuve, Gustave Planche and Augustin Thierry, whose Nouvelles lettres sur l'Histoire de France first appeared in the Revue.
His work is more joyous than Merimée's, if not so vigorous and compact, and his delight in it is less disguised. Even in the Cardinal sketches there is nothing that leaves an acrid after-taste, nothing corroding as there is not seldom in the stronger and sterner short stories of Maupassant. More than Maupassant or Flaubert or Merimée, is M. Halévy a Parisian.
And then, as she belonged to that witty 'Guermantes set' in which there survived something of the alert mentality, stripped of all commonplace phrases and conventional sentiments, which dated from Merimee, and found its final expression in the plays of Meilhac and Halevy she adapted its formula so as to suit even her social engagements, transposed it into the courtesy which was always struggling to be positive and precise, to approximate itself to the plain truth.
In speaking one day in 1847 with Mérimée about Morny, we had the following conversation: Mérimée said, "M. de Morny has a great future before him." And he asked me, "Do you know him?" I answered, "Ah! he has a fine future before him! Yes, I know M. de Morny. He is a clever man. He goes a great deal into society, and conducts commercial operations.
He started the Vieille Montagne affair, the zinc-mines, and the coal-mines of Liège. I have the honor of his acquaintance. He is a sharper." There was this difference between Mérimée and myself: I despised Morny, and he esteemed him. Morny reciprocated his feeling. It was natural. I waited until Mérimée had passed the corner of the street. As soon as he disappeared I went into No. 15.
Merimee would have been a man of the very highest mark if he had not had so many friends. But his friends took complete possession of him. How can a man write private letters when it is in his power to address himself to all the world. The person to whom you write reduces your talent; you are obliged to write down to his level. The public has a broader intelligence than any one person.
Happier than Prosper Mérimée, than Alexandre Dumas, and others, she saw the dawn of a new era of prosperity for her country, whose vital forces, as she had also foretold, were to prevail in the end over successive ills the enervation of corruption, of military disaster, and the "orgie of pretended renovators" at home, that signalized the first months of peace abroad.
A stricter sense of art has led to the exclusion of digressive and discursive passages; and the hurry and preoccupation of contemporary readers has militated against the leisurely and rambling habit of the authors of an earlier time. The lesson of excision and condensation has been taught by writers as different in tone as Mérimée, Turgénieff, and Stevenson.
Paris, any Frenchman will tell you, is the capital of intellect; and though this is but one of a hundred things equally flattering to their country which all Frenchmen believe, yet it happens to be true. In some societies it is social rank, in others wealth and fine houses, in others, still, capacity to render service to the state, which makes old men courted and opens doors to the novice. But in Paris it is brains. If you have written a book or painted a picture or discovered a scientific theory, you have at once a reserved seat, as it were, in the social world, and nobody thinks of asking who your father was, or where you live, or what your income may be. With the literary society the political is so closely allied that the two may be said to coincide. There are coteries of course, but there are also neutral grounds on which members of all sets meet in peace and separate in harmony; and especially since the Republic has become firmly established the barriers based upon party differences have tended steadily to disappear. During the Empire some of the cleverest writers, such as Sainte-Beuve and Mérimée and About, were imperialists: now they are all dead or have changed their politics. During this period, too, the intelligent and literary opposition was mostly Orleanistic, but the last seven years have clearly shown not only that the bourgeois monarchy had no roots in the heart of the people, but also that the conservative Republic possesses all its advantages, combined with few of its objectionable qualities. To men like Renan and Laugel, who have been Orleanists all their lives, and who cherish a personal affection for the party, the situation appears melancholy, and the wail of Renan in his last book is sad enough. He is French to the core; supports openly the doctrine, "My country right or wrong;" finds the centralization of the French system, carried to its logical extreme, the ideal government; and hates, above all things, "Americanism." What strikes an Anglo-Saxon as the merest commonplace of healthy politics or intellectual life is in his eyes the most pernicious heresy. We believe that freedom to teach and to write is the only way to discover the truth, and are confident that in the struggle of life which opposing systems must pass through the truth is sure in the end to win. Not so Renan. "The idea that there is a true knowledge, which must be taught, protected, patronized by the state, to the exclusion of false knowledge, is losing ground one of the results of the general enfeeblement of notions of government." This is bad enough, but the political situation is even worse than the moral and intellectual; for M. Renan finds that France has "preferred the democratic programme, according to which the state, composed of the agglomeration of individuals, having no other object than the happiness of these individuals as they themselves understand it, gives up all notion of initiative above their feelings and ideas. The consequence of such a state of things is the pursuit of prosperity and liberty, the destruction of whatever remains of the spirit of class, weakening of the power of the state. Individuals and the subordinate groups of the state, such as the county and the township, will prosper under such a régime; but it is to be feared that the nation, the country France will lose every day something of its authority and its strong cohesion. The period which we are entering upon will be one of liberty
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