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Updated: June 3, 2025
The famous conversation with De Saci, when he entered Port Royal, must be taken as the chief key to Pascal’s own philosophical attitude. There is nowhere in any of the Thoughts so complete an exhibition of his point of view; and all the editors who have most entered into Pascal’s spirit—Sainte-Beuve, Faugère, and Havet alike—have recognised its importance.
Her little son, and Rocca's, five years old, was cared for by Auguste and Albertine, her daughter. After Madame de Staël's death, her Considerations on the French Revolution and Ten Years of Exile were published. Of the former, Sainte-Beuve says: "Its publication was an event. It was the splendid public obsequies of the authoress.
She adds, that it was a mistake not to publish them, as their suppression has given occasion for surmises utterly false. There is nothing in the "Souvenirs" to explain either the vague hints of Sainte-Beuve or the obscure allusions of Madame Möhl; and the biographical sketches of Constant throw no light upon the subject: they are chiefly narratives of his political career.
This possesses no interest for the historical student except to know the bare fact of the writing and publication as a step in the intellectual development of the historian. Sainte-Beuve in his two essays on Gibbon devoted three pages to an abstract and criticism of it, perhaps because it had a greater success in France than in England; and his opinion of Gibbon's language is interesting.
Sainte-Beuve says of him: "He was the continual object of the richest gifts, which he had not the power of managing, scattering and wasting them all, excepting, the gift of words, which seemed inexhaustible, and on which he continued to play to the end as on an enchanted flute."
"Than Mme. de Maintenon, no one ever better knew the evils of the world without having fallen prey to them," says Sainte-Beuve; "and no one ever satisfied and disgusted the world more, while charming it at the same time." Mme. de Maintenon's ideal methods of education were not immediately effective; there were many periods of hardship, apprehension, and doubt.
Sainte-Beuve, between ourselves, does not know me at all, no matter what he says. I have dreamed much and have done very little. What deceives the superficial observer is the lack of harmony between my sentiments and my ideas. If you want my confession, I shall make it freely to you. The sense of the grotesque has restrained me from an inclination towards a disorderly life.
Sainte-Beuve declared that a 'philosophical thought has probably not attained all its sharpness and all its illumination until it is expressed in French'. As the French are noted rather for their intelligence than for their imagination, they are the acknowledged masters of prose; and their achievement in poetry is more disputable.
From Sainte-Beuve downwards the fraternity has, justly or unjustly, been accused of a tendency to extol writers who are a little problematical, who approach the second class, above the unquestioned masters. And there was the yet further stimulus of redressing wrongs.
But there was something more serious than this. Sainte-Beuve had in fact succeeded in leaving a taint upon the name of Victor Hugo's wife. That Hugo did not repudiate her makes it fairly plain that she was innocent; yet a high-spirited, sensitive soul like Hugo's could never forget that in the world's eye she was compromised.
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