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Abominable in either case, whether or not the implication was unfounded, Sainte-Beuve's numerous innuendoes in regard to Mme. Hugo are an indelible stain on his memory, and his infamy not only cost him his most precious friendships, but crippled him in every high endeavor.
There is a note of resigned exasperation in these comments which reminds me of the passionate feeling of another French critic Edmond Scherer, Sainte-Beuve's best successor ten years later.
We shall meet Saturday at poor Sainte-Beuve's funeral. How the little band diminishes! How the few survivors of the Medusa's raft are disappearing! A thousand affectionate greetings. CXXXII. TO GUSTAVE FLAUBERT Paris, 20 or 21 October, 1869 Impossible, dear old beloved. Brebant is too far, I have so little time. And then I have made an engagement with Marchal and Berton at Magny's to say farewell.
Sainte-Beuve's work was much more than literary criticism as that type of writing had been generally conceived before his time.
'It has been carried too long in the pocket. Be good enough to give me another. "On the ground he received a thrust; blood was drawn; his antagonist wished to stop. "'You are wounded, monsieur! "His antagonist kept his bed for six months. "This, still following on M. Sainte-Beuve's tracks, recalls the raffines, the fine-edged raillery of the best days of the monarchy.
François Buloz, the energetic and imperious founder and editor of the world-famed French bi-monthly, felt that he had found in the young critic the man whom French literary circles had been waiting for, and who was to be Sainte-Beuve's successor; and François Buloz was a man who seldom made mistakes. French literary criticism was just then at a very low ebb.
This autobiography has shown how short was the radius of the circle. The twelve volumes of his work attest, under Sainte-Beuve's definition, the degree of his powers of magic and enchantment.
Discounting the exaggerations, due either to literary morbidity of the kind that produced Chateaubriand's Rene and Sainte-Beuve's Joseph Delorme, or to the natural vanity of which the novelist had so large a share, there yet remains a considerable substratum of truth in this record of twin, boyish existence, which affords a valuable secondary help towards understanding its author's character.
Of M. Sainte-Beuve's delight in what is the most excellent product of literature, poetry, testimony is borne by many papers, ranging over the whole field of French poetry, from its birth to its latest page. "Poetry," says he, "is the essence of things, and we should be careful not to spread the drop of essence through a mass of water or floods of color.
He was a devout Roman Catholic, and the so-called facts that he reasons on seem to me quite amazing; and yet the possibilities that lie between inert matter and man's living, all-powerful, immortal soul may make almost anything credible. The soul at times can do anything with matter. I have been busying myself with Sainte-Beuve's seven volumes on the Port Royal development.
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