A History of French Literature Part 14

Born at Geneva in 1712, he died at Ermenonville in 1778. His childhood was followed by years of vagabondage. From 1732, the date of his third residence with Madame de Warens, until 1741, though his vagabondage did not wholly cease, he was collecting his powers and educating his mind with studies ardently pursued. During nine subsequent years in Paris, in Venice, and elsewhere, he was working his way towards the light; it was the period of his gayer writings, ballet, opera, comedy, and of the articles on music contributed to the _Encyclopedie_: he had not yet begun to preach and prophesy to his age. The great fourth period of his life, from 1749 to 1762, includes all his masterpieces except the _Confessions_. From 1762 until his death, while his temper grew darker and his reason was disturbed, Rousseau was occupied with apologetic and autobiographic writings.

His mother died in giving birth to Jean-Jacques. His father, a watchmaker, filled the child's head with the follies of romances, which they read together, and gave him through Plutarch's Lives a sense of the exaltations of virtue. The boy's feeling for nature was quickened and fostered in the garden of the pastor of Bossey. From a notary's office, where he seemed an incapable fool, he pa.s.sed under the harsh rule of an engraver of watches, learning the vices that grow from fear. At sixteen he fled, and found protection at Annecy, under Madame de Warens, a young and comely lady, recently converted to the Roman communion, frank, kind, gay, and as devoid of moral principles as any creature in the Natural History. Sent to Turin for instruction, Rousseau renounced his Protestant faith, and soon after found in the good Abbe Gaime the model in part of his Savoyard vicar.

Some experience of domestic service was followed by a year at Annecy, during which Rousseau's talent as a musician was developed. From eighteen to twenty he led a wandering life--"starved, feasted, despaired, was happy." Rejoining Madame de Warens at Chambery in 1732, he interested himself in music, physics, botany, and was more and more drawn towards the study of letters. He methodised his reading (1738-41), and pa.s.sionately pursued a liberal system of self-education, literary, scientific, and philosophical.

Rousseau's relations with his _bonne maman_, Madame de Warens, had been troubled by the latest of her other loves. In 1741 he set off for Paris, bearing with him the ma.n.u.script of a new system of musical notation, which was offered to the Academie des Sciences, and was declared neither new nor useful for instrumentalists. An experiment in life as secretary to the French Amba.s.sador at Venice closed, after fourteen months, with his abrupt dismissal. Again in Paris, Rousseau obtained celebrity by his operas and comedies, was received in the _salons_, and a.s.sociated joyously with Diderot, Marmontel, and Grimm.

He arranged his domestic life by taking an illiterate and vulgar drudge, Therese Le Va.s.seur, for his companion; their children were abandoned to the care of the Foundling Hospital.

In 1749 Diderot was a prisoner at Vincennes. Rousseau, on the road to visit his friend, read in the _Mercure de France_ that the Academy of Dijon had proposed as the subject for a prize to be awarded next year the question, "Has the progress of arts and sciences contributed to purify morals?" Suddenly a tumult of ideas arose in his brain and overwhelmed him; it was an ecstasy of the intellect and the pa.s.sions.

With Diderot's encouragement he undertook his indictment of civilisation; in 1750 the _Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts_ was crowned. In accordance with his theory he proceeded to simplify his own life, intensifying his self-consciousness by singularities of a.s.sumed austerity, and playing the part (not wholly a fict.i.tious one) of a moral reformer. Famous as author of the _Discours_ and the opera _Le Devin de Village_, presented before the King, he returned to his native Switzerland, and there re-entered the Protestant communion. In 1754 he again competed for a prize at Dijon, on the question, "What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorised by the law of nature?" Rousseau failed to obtain the prize, but the _Discours sur l'Inegalite_ was published (1755) with a dedication to the Republic of Geneva. He had discovered in private property the source of all the evils of society.

In Switzerland Rousseau prepared a first redaction of his political treatise, the _Contrat Social_, and filled his heart with the beauty of those prospects which form an environment for the lovers in his Helose. In 1756 he was established, through the kindness of Madame d'epinay, in the Hermitage, near the borders of the forest of Montmorency. His delight in the woods and fields was great; his delight in Madame d'Houdetot, kinswoman of his hostess, was a more troubled pa.s.sion. Quarrels with Madame d'epinay, quarrels with Grimm and Diderot, estrangement from Madame d'Houdetot, closed the scene at the Hermitage.

Authors.h.i.+p, however, had its joys and consolations. The _Lettre a D'Alembert_, a censure of the theatre (1758), was succeeded by _La Nouvelle Helose_ (1761), by the _Contrat Social_ (1762), and _emile_ (1762). The days at Montmorency which followed his departure from the Hermitage pa.s.sed in calm. With the publication of _emile_ the storms began again. The book, condemned by the Sorbonne, was ordered by the Parliament to be burnt by the common executioner. Rousseau escaped imprisonment by flight. In Switzerland he could not settle near Voltaire. A champion for the doctrine of a providential order of the world, an enemy of the stage--especially in republican Geneva--Rousseau had flung indignant words against Voltaire, and Voltaire had tossed back words of bitter scorn. Geneva had followed Paris in its hostility towards Rousseau's recent publications; whose doing could it be except Voltaire's? He fled from his persecutors to Motiers, where the King of Prussia's governor afforded him protection. Renewed quarrels with his countrymen, clerical intolerance, mob violence, an envenomed pamphlet from Voltaire, once more drove him forth. He took refuge on an island in the lake of Bienne, only to be expelled by the authorities of Berne. Encouraged by Hume--"le bon David"--he arrived in January 1766 in London.

At Wootton, in the Peak of Derbys.h.i.+re, Rousseau prepared the first five books of his _Confessions_. Within a little time he had a.s.sured himself that Hume was joined with D'Alembert and Voltaire in a triumvirate of persecutors to defame his character and render him an outcast; the whole human race had conspired to destroy him. Again Rousseau fled, sojourned a year at Trye-Chateau under an a.s.sumed name, and after wanderings. .h.i.ther and thither, took refuge in Paris, where, living meanly, he completed his _Confessions_, wrote other eloquent pieces of self-vindication, and relieved his morbid cerebral excitement by music and botanising rambles. The hospitality of M.

de Girardin at Ermenonville was gladly accepted in May 1778; and there, on July 2, he suddenly died; suicide was surmised; the seizure was probably apoplectic.

Rousseau was essentially an idealist, but an idealist whose dreams and visions were inspired by the play of his sensibility upon his intellect and imagination, and therefore he was the least impersonal of thinkers. Generous of heart, he was filled with bitter suspicions; inordinately proud, he nursed his pride amid sordid realities; cheris.h.i.+ng ideals of purity and innocence, he sank deep in the mire of imaginative sensuality; effeminate, he was also indomitable; an uncompromising optimist, he saw the whole world lying in wickedness; a pa.s.sionate lover of freedom, he aimed at establis.h.i.+ng the most unqualified of tyrannies; among the devout he was a free-thinker, among the philosophers he was the sentimentalist of theopathy. He stands apart from his contemporaries: they did homage to the understanding; he was the devotee of the heart: they belonged to a brilliant society; he was elated, suffered, brooded, dreamed in solitude: they were aristocratic, at least by virtue of the intellectual culture which they represented; he was plebeian in his origin, and popular in his sympathies.

He became a great writer comparatively late in life, under the compulsion of a ruling idea which lies at the centre of all his more important works, excepting such as are apologetic and autobiographical: Nature has made man good and happy; society has made him evil and miserable. Are we, then, to return to a state of primitive savagery?

No: society cannot retrograde. But in many ways we can ameliorate human life by approximating to a natural condition.

In the _Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts_, the _Discours sur l'Inegalite_, and the _Lettre a D'Alembert sur les Spectacles_, Rousseau pleads against the vices, the artificiality, the insincerities, the luxuries, the false refinements, the fact.i.tious pa.s.sions, the dishonest pleasures of modern society. "You make one wish," wrote Voltaire, "to walk on all fours." By nature all men are born free and equal; society has rendered them slaves, and impounded them in cla.s.ses of rich and poor, powerful and weak, master and servant, peasant and peer. Rousseau's conception of the primitive state of nature, and the origin of society by a contract, may not be historically exact--this he admits; nevertheless, it serves well, he urges, as a working hypothesis to explain the present state of things, and to point the way to a happier state. It exhibits property as the confiscation of natural rights; it justifies the sacred cause of insurrection; it teaches us to honour man as man, and the simple citizen more than the n.o.ble, the scientific student, or the artist.

Plain morals are the only safe morals. We are told that the theatre is a school of manners, purifying the pa.s.sions; on the contrary, it irritates and perverts them; or it offers to ridicule the man of straightforward virtue, as Moliere was not ashamed to do in his _Misanthrope_.

Having developed his destructive criticism against society as it is, Rousseau would build up. In the _Contrat Social_ he would show how freedom and government may be conciliated; how, through the arrangements of society, man may in a certain sense return to the law of nature. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains;"

yet social order, Rousseau declares, is sacred. Having resigned his individual liberty by the social pact, how may man recover that liberty? By yielding his individual rights absolutely to a self-governing community of which he forms a part. The _volonte generale_, expressing itself by a plurality of votes, resumes the free-will of every individual. If any person should resist the general will, he thereby sacrifices his true freedom, and he must be "forced to be free." Thus the dogma of the sovereignty of the people is formulated by Rousseau. Government is merely a delegation of power made by the people as sovereign for the uses of the people as subjects.

In Rousseau's system, if the tyranny of the majority be established without check or qualification, at least equality is secured, for, in the presence of the sovereign people and its manifested will, each individual is reduced to the level of all his fellows.

_La Nouvelle Helose_, in the form of a romance, considers the purification of domestic manners. Richardson's novels are followed in the epistolary style of narration, which lends itself to the exposition of sentiment. The story is simple in its incidents.

Saint-Preux's crime of pa.s.sion against his pupil Julie resembles that of Abelard against Eloisa. Julie, like Eloisa, has been a consenting party. Obedient to her father's will, Julie marries Wolmar. In despair Saint-Preux wanders abroad. Wolmar offers him his friends.h.i.+p and a home. The lovers meet, are tried, and do not yield to the temptation.

Julie dies a victim to her maternal devotion, and not too soon--"Another day, perhaps, and I were guilty!"

In 1757 Rousseau conceived the design of his romance. It might have been coldly edifying had not the writer's consuming pa.s.sion for Madame d'Houdetot, awakening all that he had felt as the lover of Madame de Warens, filled it with intensity of ardour. In the first part of the romance, pa.s.sion a.s.serts the primitive rights of nature; in the second part, those rights are shown to be no longer rights in an organised society. But the ideal of domestic life exhibited is one far removed from the artificialities of the world of fas.h.i.+on: it is a life of plain duties, patriarchal manners, and gracious beneficence.

Rousseau the moralist is present to rebuke Rousseau the sentimentalist; yet the sentimentalist has his own persuasive power.

The emotion of the lovers is reinforced by the penetrating influences of the beauty of external nature; and both are interpreted with incomparable harmonies of style and poignant lyrical cries, in which the violin note outsoars the orchestra.

A reform of domestic life must result in a reform of education.

Rousseau's ideal of education, capable of adaptations and modifications according to circ.u.mstances, is presented in his _emile_. How shall a child be formed in accordance, not with the vicious code of an artificial society, but in harmony with nature?

Rousseau traces the course of emile's development from birth to adult years. Unconstrained by swaddling-bands, suckled by his mother, the child enjoys the freedom of nature, and at five years old pa.s.ses into the care of his father or his tutor. During the earlier years his education is to be negative: let him be preserved from all that is false or artificial, and enter upon the heritage of childhood, the gladness of animal life, vigorous delights in suns.h.i.+ne and open air; at twelve he will hardly have opened a book, but he will have been in vital relation with real things, he will unconsciously have laid the foundations of wisdom. When the time for study comes, that study should be simple and sound--no Babel of words, but a wholesome knowledge of things; he may have learnt little, but he will know that little aright; a sunrise will be his first lesson in cosmography; he may watch the workman in his workshop; he may practise the carpenter's trade; he may read _Robinson Crusoe_, and learn the lesson of self-help. Let him ask at every moment, "What is the good of this?"

Unpuzzled by questions of morals, metaphysics, history, he will have grown up laborious, temperate, patient, firm, courageous.

At fifteen the pa.s.sions are awake; let them be gently and wisely guided.

Let pity, grat.i.tude, benevolence be formed within the boy's heart, so that the self-regarding pa.s.sions may fall into a subordinate place.

To read Plutarch is to commune with n.o.ble spirits; to read Thucydides is almost to come into immediate contact with facts. The fables of La Fontaine will serve as a criticism of the errors of the pa.s.sions.

And now emile, at eighteen, may learn the sublime mysteries of that faith which is professed by Rousseau's Savoyard vicar. A Will moves the universe and animates nature; that Will, acting through general laws, is guided by supreme intelligence; if the order of Providence be disturbed, it is only through the abuse of man's free-will; the soul is immaterial and survives the body; conscience is the voice of G.o.d within the soul; "dare to confess G.o.d before the philosophers, dare to preach humanity before the intolerant;" G.o.d demands no other wors.h.i.+p than that of the heart. With such a preparation as this, emile may at length proceed to aesthetic culture, and find his chief delight in those writers whose genius has the closest kins.h.i.+p to nature.

Finally, in Sophie, formed to be the amiable companion and helpmate of man, emile should find a resting-place for his heart. Alas, if she should ever betray his confidence!

The _Confessions_, with its sequels in the _Dialogues, ou Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques_, and the _Reveries du Promeneur Solitaire_, const.i.tute an autobiographical romance. The sombre colours of the last six Books throw out the livelier lights and shades of the preceding Books. While often falsifying facts and dates, Rousseau writes with all the sincerity of one who was capable of boundless self-deception. He will reserve no record of shame and vice and humiliation, confident that in the end he must appear the most virtuous of men. As the utterance of a soul touched and thrilled by all the influences of nature and of human life, the _Confessions_ affects the reader like a musical symphony in which various movements are interpreted by stringed and breathing instruments. If Rousseau here is less of the prophet than in his other writings, he is more of the great enchanter. Should a moral be drawn from the book, the author would have us learn that nature has made man good, that society has the skill to corrupt him, and finally that it is in his power to refas.h.i.+on himself to such virtue as the world most needs and most impatiently rejects.

The influence of Rousseau cannot easily be over-estimated. He restored the sentiment of religion in an age of abstract deism or turbid materialism. He inaugurated a moral reform. He tyrannised over France in the person of his disciple Robespierre. He emanc.i.p.ated the pa.s.sions from the domination of the understanding. He liberated the imagination. He caught the harmonies of external nature, and gave them a new interpretation.[1] He restored to French prose, colour, warmth, and the large utterance which it had lost. He created a literature in which all that is intimate, personal, lyrical a.s.serted its rights, and urged extravagant claims. He overthrew the cla.s.sical ideal of art, and enthroned the _ego_ in its room.

[Footnote 1: Among writers who fostered the new feeling for external nature, Ramond (1755-1827), who derived his inspiration, partly scientific, partly imaginative, from the Swiss Alps and the Pyrenees, deserves special mention.]

II

The fermentation of ideas was now quickened by the new life of pa.s.sion--pa.s.sion social and democratic as the days of Revolution approached; pa.s.sion also personal and private, which, welcomed as a sacred fire, too often made the inmost being of the individual a scene of agitating and desolating conflict.

The Abbe Raynal (1713-96) made his _Histoire des Deux Indes_ a receptacle not only for just views and useful information, but for every extravagance of thought and sentiment. "Insert into my book,"

he said to his brother philosophers, "everything that you choose against G.o.d, against religion, and against government." In the third edition appears a portrait of the author, posing theatrically, with the inscription, "To the defender of humanity, of truth, of liberty!"

The _salons_ caught the temper of the time. Voltairean as they were, disposed to set down Rousseau as an enthusiast or a charlatan, they could not resist the invasion of pa.s.sion or of sensibility. It mingled with a swarm of incoherent ideas and gave them a new intensity of life. The incessant play of intellect flashed and glittered for many spirits over a moral void; the bitter, almost misanthropic temper of Chamfort's maxims and _pensees_ may testify to the vacuity of faith and joy; sentiment and pa.s.sion came to fill the void; to desire, to love, to pity, to suffer, to weep, was to live the true life of the heart.

Madame du Deffand (1697-1780) might oppose the demon of ennui with the aid of a cool temperament and a brilliant wit; at sixty-eight, whatever ardour had been secretly stored up in her nature escaped to lavish itself half-maternally on Horace Walpole. Her young companion and reader, who became a rival and robbed her _salon_ of its brilliance, Mlle. de Lespina.s.se (1732?-76) might cherish a calm friends.h.i.+p for D'Alembert. When M. de Guibert came to succeed M. de Mora in her affections, she poured out the lava torrent of pa.s.sion in those Letters which have given her a place beside Sappho and beside Eloisa. Madame Roland in her girlhood had been the ardent pupil of Rousseau, whose _Nouvelle Helose_ was to her as a revelation from heaven. The first appearance in literature of Madame Necker's amazing daughter was as the eulogist of Rousseau.

The intellect untouched by emotion may be aristocratic; pa.s.sion and sentiment have popular and democratic instincts. "The Revolution was already in action," said Napoleon, "when in 1784 Beaumarchais's _Mariage de Figaro_ appeared upon the stage." If Napoleon's words overstate the fact, we may at least name that masterpiece of comedy a symptom of the coming explosion, or even, in Sainte-Beuve's words, an armed Fronde.

Pierre-Augustin Caron, who took the name of BEAUMARCHAIS (1732-99), son of a watchmaker of Paris, was born under a merry star, with a true genius for comedy, yet his theatrical pieces were only the recreations of a man of affairs--a demon of intrigue--determined to build up his fortune by financial adventures and commercial enterprises. Suddenly in 1774-75 he leaped into fame. Defeated in a trial in which his claim to fifteen thousand livres was disputed, Beaumarchais, in desperate circ.u.mstances, made his appeal to public opinion in four _Memoires_, which admirably united seriousness, gaiety, argument, irony, eloquence, and dramatic talent. "I am a citizen," he cried--"that is to say, something wholly new, unknown, unheard of in France. I am a citizen--that is to say, what you should have been two hundred years ago, what perhaps you will be twenty years hence." The word "citizen" sounded strange in 1774; it was soon to become familiar.

Before this incident Beaumarchais had produced two dramas, _Eugenie_ and _Les Deux Amis_, of the tearful, sentimental, bourgeois type, yet with a romantic tendency, which distinguishes at least _Eugenie_ from the bourgeois drama of Diderot and of Sedaine. The failure of the second may have taught their author the wisdom of mirth; he abandoned his high dramatic principles to laugh and to evoke laughter.

_Le Barbier de Seville_, developed from a comic opera to a comedy in five acts, was given, after long delays, in 1775. The spectators manifested fatigue; instantly the play reappeared in four acts, Beaumarchais having lost no time in removing the fifth wheel from his carriage. It delighted the public by the novelty of its abounding gaiety, a gaiety full and free, yet pointed with wit, a revolving firework scattering its dazzling spray. The old comic theme of the amorous tutor, the charming pupil, the rival lover, adorned with the prestige of youth, the intriguing attendant, was renewed by a dialogue which was alive with scintillating lights.

From the success of the _Barbier_ sprang _Le Mariage de Figaro_.

Completed in 1778, the royal opposition to its performance was not overcome until six years afterwards. By force of public opinion the watchmaker's son had triumphed over the King. The subject of the play is of a good tradition--a daring valet disputes the claim of a libertine lord to the possession of his betrothed. Spanish colour and Italian intrigue are added to the old mirth of France. From Regnard the author had learnt to entangle a varied intrigue; from Lesage he borrowed his Spanish costumes and decoration--Figaro himself is a Gil Blas upon the stage; in Marivaux he saw how women may a.s.sert themselves in comic action with a bright audacity. The _Mariage de Figaro_ resumes the past; it depicts the present, as a social satire, and a painting of manners; it conveys into art the experience, the spirit, the temerity of Beaumarchais's adventurous life as a man of the world; it creates characters--Almaviva, Suzanne, Figaro himself, the budding Cherubin. It is at the same time--or, rather, became through its public reception--a pamphlet in comedy which announces the future; it ridicules the established order with a sprightly insolence; it pleads for social equality; it exposes the iniquity of aristocratic privilege, the venality of justice, the greed of courtiers, the chicanery of politicians. Figaro, since he appeared in "The Barber of Seville," has grown somewhat of a moralist and a pedant; he must play the part of censor of society, he must represent the spirit of independent criticism, he must maintain the cause of intelligence against the authority of rank and station. Beaumarchais may have lacked elevation and delicacy, but he knew his craft as a dramatist, and left a model of prose comedy from which in later years others of his art and mystery made profitable studies. He restored mirth to the stage; he rediscovered theatrical intrigue; he created a type, which was Beaumarchais himself, and was also the lighter genius of France; he was the satirist of society; he was the nimble-feathered bird that foretells the storm.

III

BERNARDIN DE SAINT-PIERRE connects Rousseau with Chateaubriand and the romantic school of the nineteenth century. The new feeling for external nature attained through him a wider range, embracing the romance of tropic lands; it acquired an element of the exotic; at the same time, descriptive writing became more vivid and picturesque, and the vocabulary for the purposes of description was enlarged. He added to French literature a tale in which human pa.s.sion and the sentiment of nature are fused together by the magic of genius; he created two figures which live in the popular imagination, encircled with a halo of love and sorrow.

Born at Havre in 1737, Bernardin, through his imagination, was an Utopian visionary, an idyllic dreamer; through his temper, an angry disputant with society. His life was a fantastic series of adventures.

Having read as a boy the story of Crusoe, and listened to the heroic record of the travels and sufferings of Jesuit missionaries, his fancy caught fire; he would seek some undiscovered island in mid-ocean, he would found some colony of the true children of nature, far from a corrupt civilisation, peaceable, virtuous, and free.

In France, in Russia, he was importunate in urging his extravagant designs upon persons of influence. When the French Government in 1767 commissioned him to work in Madagascar, he believed that his dream was to come true, but a rude awakening and the accustomed quarrels followed. He landed on the Isle of France, purposing to work as an engineer, and there spent his days in gazing at the sea, the skies, the mountains, the tropical forests. All forms and colours and sounds and scents impressed themselves on his brain, and were transferred to his collection of notes. When, on returning to Paris, he published (1773) his _Voyage a l'ile de France_, the literature of picturesque description may be said to have been founded. Already in this volume his feeling for nature is inspired by an emotional theism, and is burdened by his sentimental science, which would exhibit a fantastic array of evidences of the designs for human welfare of an amiable and ingenious Author of nature. Before the book appeared, Bernardin had made the acquaintance of Rousseau, then living in retirement, tormented by his diseased suspicions and cloudy indignations. To his new disciple Rousseau was in general gracious, and they rambled together, botanising in the environs of Paris.

For a time Bernardin himself was in a condition bordering upon insanity; but the crisis pa.s.sed, and he employed himself on the _etudes de la Nature_, which appeared in three volumes in 1784. The tale of _Paul et Virginie_ was not included; for when the author had read it aloud, though ladies wept, the sterner auditors had been contemptuous; Thomas slumbered, and Buffon called for his carriage.

The _etudes_ acc.u.mulate the grotesque notions of Bernardin with reference to final causes in nature: nature is benevolent and harmonious; society is corrupt and harsh; scientific truth is to be discovered by sentiment, and not by reason; the whole universe is planned for the happiness of man; the melon is large because it was designed for the family; the pumpkin is larger, because Providence intended that it should be shared with our neighbours. Providence, indeed, in a sceptical and mocking generation, suffered cruelly at the hands of its advocate. Yet Bernardin conveyed into his book a feeling of the rich and obscure life and energy of nature; his descriptive power is admirable. "He desired," says M. Barine, "to open the door for Providence to enter; in fact he opened the door for the great Pan," and in this he was a precursor of much that followed in literature.

Bernardin's fame was now established. In the sentimental reaction against the dryness of sceptical philosophy, in the return to a feeling for the poetical aspect of things, he was looked upon as a leader. In the fourth volume of _etudes_ (1788) he had courage to print the tale of _Paul et Virginie_. It is an idyll of the tropics, written with the moral purpose of contrasting the beneficent influence of nature and of feeling with the dangers and evils of civilised society and of the intellect. The children grow up side by side in radiant innocence and purest companions.h.i.+p; then pa.s.sion makes its invasion of their hearts. The didactic commonplaces and the faded sentimentalities of the idyll may veil, but cannot hide, the genuine power of those pages which tell of the modest ardours of first love. An element of melodrama mingles with the tragic close.

Throughout we do more than see the landscape of the tropics: we feel the life of external nature throbbing in sympathy with human emotion.

Something was gained by Bernardin from the _Daphnis and Chloe_ of Longus in the motives and the details of his story, but it is essentially his own. It had a resounding success, and among its most ardent admirers was Napoleon.

Bernardin married at fifty-five, and became the father of a Paul and a Virginie. On the death of his wife, whom he regarded as a faithful housekeeper, he married again, and his life was divided between the devotion of an old man's love and endless quarrels with his colleagues of the _Inst.i.tut_. His later writings added nothing to his fame. _La Chaumiere Indienne_--the story of a pariah who learns wisdom from nature and from the heart--has a certain charm, but it lacks the power of the better portions of _Paul et Virginie_. The _Harmonies de la Nature_ is a feeble reflection of the _etudes_. Chateaubriand, to whom Bernardin was personally known, gave a grudging recognition of the genius of his precursor. Lamartine, in after years, was a more generous disciple. In January 1814 Bernardin died, murmuring the name of G.o.d; among the great events of the time his death was almost unnoticed.

IV

In the second half of the eighteenth century, aided by the labours of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, came a revival of the study of antiquity and of the sentiment for cla.s.sical art.