A source of very much pleasure to me was my acquaintance with the old
author and Collège de France Professor, Philarète Chasles. Grégoire
introduced me to him and I gradually became at home, as it were, in his
house, was always a welcome visitor, and was constantly invited there.
In his old age he was not a man to be taken very seriously, being
diffusive, vague and vain. But there was no one else so communicative,
few so entertaining, and for the space of fifty years he had known
everybody who had been of any mark in France. He was born in 1798; his
father, who was a Jacobin and had been a member of the Convention, did
not have him baptised, but brought him up to believe in Truth, (hence
the name Philarète,) and apprenticed him to a printer. At the
Restoration of the Royal Family, he was imprisoned, together with his
father, but released through the influence of Chateaubriand; he then
went to England, where he remained for full seven years (1819-1826),
working as a typographer, and made a careful study of English
literature, then almost unknown in France. After having spent some
further time in Germany, he returned to Paris and published a number of
historical and critical writings.
Philarète Chasles, as librarian to the Mazarin Library, had his
apartments in the building itself, that is, in the very centre of
Paris; in the Summer he lived in the country at Meudon, where he had
had his veranda decorated with pictures of Pompeian mosaic. He was
having a handsome new house with a tower built near by. He needed room,
for he had a library of 40,000 volumes.
His niece kept house for him; she was married to a German from Cologne,
Schulz by name, who was a painter on glass. The pair lived apart.
Madame Schulz was pretty, caustic, spiteful, and blunt. Her daughter,
the fourteen-year-old Nanni, was enchantingly lovely, as developed and
mischievous as a girl of eighteen. Everyone who came to the house was
charmed with her, and it was always full of guests, young students from
Alsace and Provence, young negroes from Hayti, young ladies from
Jerusalem, and poetesses who would have liked to read their poems aloud
and would have liked still better to induce Chasles to make them known
by an article.
Chasles chatted with everyone, frequently addressing his conversation
to me, talking incessantly about the very men and women that I most
cared to hear about, of those still living whom I most admired, such as
George Sand, and Mérimée, and, in fact, of all the many celebrities he
had known. As a young man, he had been taken to the house of Madame
Récamier, and had there seen Chateaubriand, an honoured and adored old
man, and Sainte-Beuve an eager and attentive listener, somewhat
overlooked on account of his ugliness, in whom there was developing
that lurking envy of the great, and of those women clustered round,
which he ought to have combatted, to produce just criticism.
Chasles had known personally Michelet and Guizot, the elder Dumas and
Beyle, Cousin and Villemain, Musset and Balzac; he knew the Comtesse
d'Agoult, for so many years the friend of Liszt, and Madame Colet, the
mistress, first of Cousin, then of Musset, and finally of Flaubert, of
whom my French uncle, who had met her on his travels, had drawn me a
very unattractive picture. Chasles was on terms of daily intimacy with
Jules Sandeau; even as an old man he could not forget George Sand, who
had filched the greater part of his name and made it more illustrious
than the whole became. Sandeau loved her still, forty years after she
had left him.
Chasles was able, in a few words, to conjure up very vividly the images
of the persons he was describing to his listener, and his anecdotes
about them were inexhaustible. He took me behind the scenes of
literature and I saw the stage from all its sides. The personal history
of his contemporaries was, it is quite true, more particularly its
chronicle of scandals, but his information completed for me the severe
and graceful restraint of all Taine said. And side by side with his
inclination for gay and malicious gossip, Chasles had a way of
sketching out great synopses of intellectual history, which made one
realise, as one reflected,' the progress of development of the
literatures with which one was familiar. Those were pleasant evenings,
those moonlight Spring evenings in the open veranda out there at
Meudon, when the old man with the sharp-pointed beard and the little
skull-cap on one side of his head, was spokesman. He had the aptest and
most amusing way of putting things. For instance, to my question as to
whether Guizot had really been as austere by nature as he was in
manner, he replied: "It is hard to say; when one wishes to impress, one
cannot behave like a harlequin."
Although I had a keen enough eye for Philarète Chasles' weaknesses, I
felt exceedingly happy in his house. There I could obtain without
difficulty the information I wished for, and have the feeling of being
thoroughly "in Paris." Paris was and still is the only city in the
world that is and wishes to be the capital not only of its own country
but of Europe; the only one that takes upon itself as a duty, not
merely to meet the visitor half-way by opening museums, collections,
buildings, to him, but the only one where people habitually, in
conversation, initiate the foreigner in search of knowledge into the
ancient, deep culture of the nation, so that its position with regard
to that of other races and countries is made clear to one.