BÉRANGER.

Béranger is certainly the most popular poet there has ever been in

France; there was convincing proof of it at the time of and after

his death. He had not printed anything since 1833, the epoch when he

published the last collection of his poems; when he died, then, on the

16th of July, 1857, he had been silent twenty-four years. He had, it

is true, appeared for a moment in the National Assembly, after the

Revolution of February, 1848; but it was only to withdraw again almost

immediately and to resign his seat. In spite of this long silence and

this retirement, in which he seemed a little forgotten, no sooner did

the news of his last illness spread and it was known that his life was

in danger, than the interest, or we should rather say the anxiety, of

the public was awakened. In the ranks of the people, in the most humble

classes of society, everybody began inquiring about him and asking day

by day for news; his house was besieged by visitors; and as the danger

increased, the crowd gathered, restless, as if listening for his

last sigh. The government, in charging itself with his obsequies and

declaring that his funeral should be celebrated at the cost of the

State, may have been taking a wise precaution to prevent all pretext for

disturbance; but it responded also to a public and popular sentiment. At

sight of the honors paid to this simple poet, with as much distinction

as if he had been a Marshal of France,--at sight of that extraordinary

military pomp, (and in France military pomp is the great sign of

respectability, and has its place whenever it is desired to bestow

special honor,) no one among the laboring population was surprised, and

it seemed to all that Béranger received only what was his due.

And since that time there has been in the French journals nothing but

a succession of hymns to the memory of Béranger, hymns scarcely

interrupted by now and then some cooler and soberer judgments. People

have vied with each other in making known his good deeds done in secret,

his gifts,--we will not call them alms,--for when he gave, he did not

wish that it should have the character of alms, but of a generous,

brotherly help. Numbers of his private letters have been printed; and

one of his disciples has published recollections of his conversations,

under the title of _Mémoires de Béranger_. The same disciple, once a

simple artisan, a shoemaker, we believe, M. Savinien Lapointe, has

also composed _Le petit Évangile de la Jeunesse de Béranger_. M. de

Lamartine, in one of the numbers of his _Cours familier de Littérature_,

has devoted two hundred pages to an account of Béranger and a commentary

on him, and has recalled curious conversations which he had with him in

the most critical political circumstances of the Revolution of 1848. In

short, there has been a rivalry in developing and amplifying the

memory of the national songster, treating him as Socrates was once

treated,--bringing up all his apophthegms, reproducing the dialogues in

which he figured,--going even farther,--carrying him to the very borders

of legend, and evidently preparing to canonize in him one of the Saints

in the calendar of the future.

What is there solid in all this? How much is legitimate, and how much

excessive? Béranger himself seems to have wished to reduce things to

their right proportions, having left behind him ready for publication

two volumes: one being a collection of his last poems and songs; the

other an extended notice, detailing the decisive circumstances of his

poetic and political life, and entitled "My Biography."

The collection of his last songs, let us say it frankly, has not

answered expectation. In reading them, we feel that the poet has grown

old, that he is weary. He complains continually that he has no longer

any voice,--that the tree is dead,--that even the echo of the woods

answers only in prose,--that the source of song is dried up; and says,

prettily,--

"If Time still make the clock run on,

He makes it strike no longer."

And unhappily he is right. We find here and there pretty designs, short

felicitous passages, smiling bits of nature; but obscurity, stiffness of

expression, and the dragging in of Fancy by the hair continually mar the

reading and take away all its charm. Even the pieces most highly lauded

in advance, and which celebrate some of the most inspiring moments in

the life of Napoleon,--such as his Baptism, his Horoscope cast by a

Gypsy, and others,--have neither sparkle nor splendor. The prophet is

not intoxicated, and wants enthusiasm. On the theme of Napoleon, Victor

Hugo has done incomparably better; and as to the songs, properly so

called, of this last collection, there are at this moment in France

numerous song-writers (Pierre Dupont and Nadaud, for instance) who have

the ease, the spirit, and the brilliancy of youth, and who would be

able easily to triumph over this forced and difficult elevation of the

Remains of Béranger, if one chose to institute a comparison. We may well

say that youth is youth; to write verses, and especially songs, when one

is old, is to wish still to dance, still to mount a curvetting horse;

one gains no honor by the experiment. Anacreon, we know, succeeded; but

in French, with rhyme and refrain, (that double butterfly-chase,) it

seems to be more difficult.

But in prose, in the Autobiography, the entire Béranger, the Béranger of

the best period, the man of wit, freshness, and sense, is found again;

and it is pleasant to follow him in the story of his life, till now

imperfectly known. He was born at Paris, on the 19th of August, 1780;

and he glories in being a Parisian by birth, saying, that "Paris had not

to wait for the great Revolution of 1789 to be the city of liberty

and equality, the city where misfortune receives, perhaps, the most

sympathy." He came into the world in the house of a tailor, his good

old grandfather, in the Rue Montorgueil,--one of the noisiest of the

Parisian streets, famous for its _restaurants_ and the number of oysters

consumed in them. "Seeing me born," he says, "in one of the dirtiest and

noisiest streets, who would have thought that I should love the woods,

fields, flowers, and birds so much?" It is true that Béranger loved

them,--but he loved them always, as his poems show, like a Parisian and

child of the Rue Montorgueil. A pretty enclosure, as many flowers and

hedges as there are in the Closerie des Lilas, a little garden,

a courtyard surrounded by apple-trees, a path winding beside

wheat-fields,--these were enough for him. His Muse, we feel, has never

journeyed, never soared, never beheld its first horizon in the Alps, the

ocean, or the illimitable prairie. Lamartine, born in the country, amid

all the wealth of the old rural and patriarchal life, had a right to

oppose him, to put his own first instincts as poet in contrast with his,

and to say to him, "I was born among shepherds; but you, you were born

among citizens, among proletaries." Béranger loved the country as people

love it on a Sunday at Paris, in walks just without the suburbs. How

different from Burns, that other poet of the people, with whom he has

sometimes been compared! But, on the other hand, Béranger loved

the dweller in the city, the mechanic, the _ouvrier_, industrious,

intellectual, full of enthusiasm and also of imprudence, passionate,

with the heart of a soldier, and with free, adventurous ideas. He loved

him even in his faults, aided him in his poverty, consoled him with his

songs. Before all things he loved the street, and the street returned

his love.

His father was a careless, dissipated man, who had tried many

employments, and who strove to rise from the ranks of the people without

having the means. His mother was a pretty woman, a dress-maker, and

thorough _grisette_, whom his father married for her beauty, and who

left her husband six months after their marriage and never gave a

thought to her child. The little Béranger, born with difficulty and only

with the aid of instruments, put out to nurse in the neighborhood of

Auxerre, and forgotten for three years, was the object of no motherly

cares. He may be said never to have had a mother. His Muse always showed

traces of this privation of a mother's smile. The sentiment of home, of

family, is not merely absent from his poems,--it is sometimes shocked by

them.

Returning to his grandparents in Paris, and afterwards sent to a school

in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where, on the 14th of July, 1789, he saw

the Bastille taken, he pursued his primary studies very irregularly. He

never learned Latin, a circumstance which always prejudiced him. Later

in life, he sometimes blushed at not knowing it, and yet mentioned the

fact so often as almost to make one believe he was proud of it. The

truth is, that this want of classical training must have been felt

more painfully by Béranger than it would have been by almost any other

person; for Béranger was a studied poet, full of combinations, of

allusion and artifice, even in his pleasantry,--a delicate poet,

moreover, of the school of Boileau and Horace.

The _pension_ in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, even, was too much for the

narrow means of his father. He was taken away and sent to Péronne, in

Picardy, to an aunt who kept an inn in one of the suburbs, at the sign

of the Royal Sword. It was while he was with this excellent person, who

had a mind superior to her condition, that he began to form himself

by the reading of good French authors. His intelligence was not less

aroused by the spectacle of the events which were passing under his

eyes. The Terror, the invasion by the armies of the Coalition, the roar

of cannon, which could be heard at this frontier town, inspired him

with a patriotism which was always predominant in him, and which at all

decisive crises revived so strongly as even to silence and eclipse for

the moment other cherished sentiments which were only less dear.

"This love of country," said he, emphatically, "was the great, I should

say the only, passion of my life." It was this love which was his best

inspiration as poet,--love of country, and with it of equality. Out of

devotion to these great objects of his worship, he will even consent

that the statue of Liberty be sometimes veiled, when there is a

necessity for it. That France should be great and glorious, that she

should not cease to be democratic, and to advance toward a democracy

more and more equitable and favorable to all,--such were the aspirations

and the programme of Béranger. He goes so far as to say that in his

childhood he had an aversion, almost a hatred, for Voltaire, on account

of the insult to patriotism in his famous poem of _La Pucelle_; and that

afterwards, even while acknowledging all his admirable qualities and the

services he rendered to the cause of humanity, he could acquire only a

very faint taste for his writing. This is a striking singularity,

if Béranger does not exaggerate it a little; it is almost an

ingratitude,--for Voltaire is one of his nearest and most direct

masters.

There is, indeed, a third passion which disputes with those for country

and equality the heart of Béranger, and which he shares fully with

Voltaire,--the hatred, namely, we will not say of Christianity, but

of religious hypocrisy, of Jesuitic Tartufery. What Voltaire did in

innumerable pamphlets, _facetioe_, and philosophic diatribes, Béranger

did in songs. He gave a refrain, and with it popular currency to the

anti-clerical attacks and mockeries of Voltaire; he set them to his

violin and made them sing with the horsehair of his bow. Béranger was in

this respect only the minstrel of Voltaire.

Bold songs against hypocrites, the Reverend Fathers and the Tartufes, so

much in favor under the Restoration, and some which carry the attack yet

higher, and which sparkle with the very spirit of buffoonery, like _Le

Bâtard du Pape_; beautiful patriotic songs, like _Le vieux Drapeau_;

and beautiful songs of humanity and equality, like _Le vieux

Vagabond_;--these are the three chief branches which unite and

intertwine to make the poetic crown of Béranger in his best days,

and they had their root in passions which with him were profound and

living,--hatred of superstition, love of country, love of humanity and

equality.

His aunt at Péronne was superstitious, and during thunder-storms had

recourse to all kinds of expedients, such as signs of the cross,

holy-water, and the like. One day the lightning struck near the house

and knocked down young Béranger, who was standing on the door-step. He

was insensible for some time, and they thought him killed. His first

words, on recovering consciousness, were, "Well, what good did your

holy-water do?"

At Péronne he finished his very irregular course of study at a kind of

primary school founded by a philanthropic citizen. During the Directory,

attempts were made all over France to get up free institutions for the

young, on plans more or less reasonable or absurd, by men who had fed

upon Rousseau's _Émile_ and invented variations upon his system. On

leaving school, Béranger was placed with a printer in the city, where

he became a journeyman printer and compositor, which has occasioned

his being often compared to Franklin,--a comparison of which he is

not unworthy, in his love for the progress of the human race, and the

piquant and ingenious turn he knew how to give to good sense. From this

first employment as printer Béranger acquired and retained great nicety

in language and grammar. He insisted on it, in his counsels to the

young, more than seems natural in a poet of the people. He even

exaggerated its importance somewhat, and might seem a purist.

Béranger's father reappeared suddenly during the Directory and reclaimed

his son, whom he carried to Paris. The father had formed connections in

Brittany with the royalists. He had become steward of the household

of the Countess of Bourmont, mother of the famous Bourmont who was

afterwards Marshal of France and Minister of War. Bourmont himself, then

young, was living in Paris, in order the better to conspire for the

restoration of the Bourbons. The elder Béranger was neck-deep in these

intrigues, and was even prosecuted after the discovery of one of the

numerous conspiracies of the day, but acquitted for want of proof. He

was the banker and money-broker of the party,--a wretched banker enough!

The narrative of the son enables us to see what a miserable business

the father was engaged in. This near view of political intriguers, of

royalists driven to all manner of expedients and standing at bay, of

adventurers who did not shrink from the use of any means, not even the

infernal-machine, did not dispose the young man already imbued with

republican sentiments to change them, and this initiation into the

secrets of the party was not likely to inspire him with much respect for

the future Restoration. He had too early seen men and things behind the

scenes. His father, in consequence of his swindling transactions, made a

bankruptcy, which reduced the son to poverty and filled him with grief

and shame.

He was now twenty years old; he had courage and hope, and he already

wrote verses on all sorts of subjects,--serious, religious, epic, and

tragic. One day, when he was in especial distress, he made up a little

packet of his best verses and sent them to Lucien Bonaparte, with a

letter, in which he set forth his unhappy situation. Lucien loved

literature, and piqued himself on being author and poet. He was pleased

with the attempts of the young man, and made him a present of the salary

of a thousand or twelve hundred francs to which he was entitled as

member of the Institute. It was Béranger's first step out of the poverty

in which he had been plunged for several years, and he was indebted for

the benefit to a Bonaparte, and to the most republican Bonaparte of the

family. He was always especially grateful for it to Lucien, and somewhat

to the Bonapartes in general.

Receiving a small appointment in the bureau of the University through

the intervention of the Academician Arnault, a friend of Lucien

Bonaparte, Béranger lived gayly during the last six years of the Empire.

He managed to escape the conscription, and never shouldered a musket. He

reserved himself to sing of military glory at a later day, but had no

desire to share in it as soldier. He was elected into a singing club

called _The Cellar_, all of whose members were songwriters and good

fellows, presided over by Désaugiers, the lord of misrule and of jolly

minstrels. Béranger, after his admission to the _Caveau_, at first

contended with Désaugiers in his own style, but already a ground of

seriousness and thought showed through his gayety. He wrote at this

time his celebrated song of the _Roi d'Yvetot_, in which, while he

caricatured the little play-king, the king in the cotton nightcap, he

seemed to be slyly satirizing the great conquering Emperor himself.

The Empire fell, and Béranger hesitated for some time to take part

against the Bourbons. It was not till after the battle of Waterloo and

the return of Louis XVIII. under convoy of the allied armies, that he

began to feel the passion of patriotism blaze up anew within him and

dictate stinging songs which soon became darts of steel. Meanwhile he

wrote pretty songs, in which a slight sentiment of melancholy mingled

with and heightened the intoxication of wine and pleasure. _La bonne

Vieille_ is his _chef-d'oeuvre_ in this style. He arranged the design of

these little pieces carefully, sketching his subjects beforehand, and

herein belongs to the French school, that old classic school which left

nothing to chance. He composed his couplets slowly, even those

which seem the most easy. Commonly the song came to him through the

refrain;--he caught the butterfly by the wings;--when he had seized the

refrain, he finished at intervals, and put in the nicer shadings at

leisure. He wrote hardly ten songs a year at the time of his greatest

fecundity. It has since been remarked that they smell of the lamp here

and there; but at first no one had eyes except for the rose, the vine,

and the laurel.

The Bourbons, brought back for the second time in 1815, committed all

manner of blunders: they insulted the remains of the old _grande armée_;

they shot Marshal Ney and many others; a horrible royalist reaction

ensanguined the South of France. The Jesuit party insinuated itself at

Court, and assumed to govern as in the high times of the confessors of

Louis XIV. It was hoped to conquer the spirit of the Revolution, and to

drive modern France back to the days before 1789; hence thousands of

hateful things impossible to be realized, and thousands of ridiculous

ones. Towards 1820 the liberal opposition organized itself in the

Chambers and in the press. The Muse of Béranger came to its assistance

under the mask of gay raillery. He was the angry bee that stung flying,

and whose stings are not harmless; nay, he would fain have made them

mortal to the enemy. He hated even Louis XVIII., a king who was esteemed

tolerably wise, and more intelligent than his party. "I stick my pins,"

said Béranger, "into the calves of Louis XVIII." One must have seen

the fat king in small-clothes, his legs as big as posts and round as

pin-cushions, to appreciate all the point of the epigram.

Béranger had been very intimate since 1815 with the Deputy Manuel, a man

of sense and courage, but very hostile to the Bourbons, and who, for

words spoken from the Tribune, was expelled from the Chamber of Deputies

and declared incapable of reëlection. Though intimate with many

influential members of the opposition, such as Laffitte the banker, and

General Sebastiani, it was only with Manuel that Béranger perfectly

agreed. It is by his side, in the same tomb, that he now reposes in Père

la Chaise, and after the death of Manuel he always slept on the mattress

upon which his friend had breathed his last. Manuel and Béranger

were ultra-inimical to the Restoration. They believed that it was

irreconcilable with the modern spirit of France, with the common sense

of the new form of society, and they accordingly did their best to goad

and irritate it, never giving it any quarter. At certain times, other

opposition deputies, such as General Foy, would have advised a more

prudent course, which would not have rendered the Bourbons impossible

by attacking them so fiercely as to push them to extremes. However

this might have been, poetry is always more at home in excess than in

moderation. Béranger was all the more a poet at this period, that he was

more impassioned. The Bourbons and the Jesuits, his two most violent

antipathies, served him well, and made him write his best and most

spirited songs. Hence his great success. The people, who never perceive

nice shades of opinion, but love and hate absolutely, at once adopted

Béranger as the singer of its loves and hatreds, the avenger of the old

army, of national glory and freedom, and the inaugurator or prophet of

the future. The spirit prisoned in these little couplets, these tiny

bodies, is of amazing force, and has, one might almost say, a devilish

audacity. In larger compositions, breath would doubtless have failed the

poet,--the greater space would have been an injury to him. Even in songs

he has a constrained air sometimes, but this constraint gave him more

force. He produces the impression of superiority to his class.

Béranger had given up his little post at the University before declaring

open war against the government. He was before long indicted, and in

1822 condemned to several months' imprisonment, for having scandalized

the throne and the altar. His popularity became at once boundless; he

was sensible of it, and enjoyed it. "They are going to indict your

songs," said some one to him. "So much the better!" he replied,--"that

will gilt-edge them." He thought so well of this _gilding_, that in

1828, during the ministry of M. Martignac, a very moderate man and of a

conciliatory semi-liberalism, he found means to get indicted again and

to undergo a new condemnation, by attacks which some even of his friends

then thought untimely. Once again Béranger was impassioned; he declared

his enemies incurable and incorrigible; and soon came the ordinances of

July, 1830, and the Revolution in their train, to prove him right.

In 1830, at the moment when the Revolution took place, the popularity

of Béranger was at its height. His opinion was much deferred to in the

course taken during and after "the three great days." The intimate

friend of most of the chiefs of the opposition who were now in power,

of great influence with the young, and trusted by the people, it was

essential that he should not oppose the plan of making the Duke of

Orleans King. Béranger, in his Biography, speaks modestly of his part

in these movements. In his conversations he attributed a great deal to

himself. He loved to describe himself in the midst of the people who

surrounded the Hôtel of M. Laffitte, going and coming, listening to

each, consulted by all, and continually sent for by Laffitte, who was

confined to his armchair by a swollen foot. Seeing the hesitation

prolonged, he whispered in Laffitte's ear that it was time to decide,

for, if they did not take the Duke of Orleans for King pretty soon, the

Revolution was in danger of turning out an _émeute_. He gave this advice

simply as a patriot, for he was not of the Orleans party. When he came

out, his younger friends, the republicans, reproached him; but he

replied, "It is not a king I want, but only a plank to get over the

stream." He set the first example of disrespect for the plank he thought

so useful; indeed, the comparison itself is rather a contemptuous one.

He afterwards behaved, however, with great sense and wisdom. He declined

all offices and honors, considering his part as political songster at an

end. In 1833 he published a collection in which were remarked some songs

of a higher order, less partisan, and in which he foreshadowed a broader

and more peaceful democracy. After this he was silent, and as he was

continually visited and consulted, he resolved upon leaving Paris for

some years, in order to escape this annoyance. He went first to the

neighborhood of Tours, and then to Fontainebleau; but the free,

conversational life of Paris was too dear to him, and he returned to

live in seclusion, though always much visited by his troops of friends,

and much sought after. In leaving Paris during the first years of Louis

Philippe's reign, and _closing_, as he called it, _his consulting

office_, his chief aim was to escape the questions, solicitations, and

confidences of opposite parties, in all of which he continued to have

many friends who would gladly have brought him over to their way of

thinking. He did not wish to be any longer what he had been so

much,--a consulting politician; but he did not cease to be a practical

philosopher with a crowd of disciples, and a consulting democrat.

Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Lamartine,--the chiefs of parties at first

totally opposed to his own,--came to seek his friendship, and loved to

repose and refresh themselves in his conversation. He enjoyed, a

little mischievously, seeing one of them (Chateaubriand) lay aside his

royalism, another (Lamennais) abjure his Catholicism, and the third

(Lamartine) forget his former aristocracy, in visiting him. He looked

upon this, and justly, as a homage paid to the manners and spirit of the

age, of which he was the humble but inflexible representative.

When the Revolution of 1848 burst unexpectedly, he was not charmed

with it,--nay, it made him even a little sad. Less a republican than

a patriot, he saw immense danger for France, as he knew her, in the

establishment of the pure republican form. He was of opinion that it was

necessary to wear out the monarchy little by little,--that with time and

patience it would fall of itself; but he had to do with an impatient

people, and he lamented it. "We had a ladder to go down by," said he,

"and here we are jumping out of the window!" It was the same sentiment

of patriotism, mingled with a certain almost mystical enthusiasm for

the great personality of Napoleon, nourished and augmented with growing

years, which made him accept the events of 1851-2 and the new Empire.

The religion of Béranger, which was so anti-Catholic, and which seems

even to have dispensed with Christianity, reduced itself to a vague

Deism, which in principle had too much the air of a pleasantry. His

_Dieu des bonnes gens_, which he opposed to the God of the congregation

and the preachers, could not be taken seriously by any one.

Nevertheless, the poet, as he grew older, grew more and more attached

to this symbol of a Deity, indulgent before all else, but very real and

living, and in whom the poor and the suffering could put their trust.

What passed in the days preceding his death has been much discussed, and

many stories are told about it. He received, in fact, some visits from

the curate of the parish of Saint Elizabeth, in which he lived. This

curate had formerly officiated at Passy,--a little village near Paris,

where Béranger had resided,--and was already acquainted with the poet.

The conversations at these visits, according to the testimony of those

best informed, amounted to very little; and the last time the curate

came, just as he was going out, Béranger, already dying, said to

him, "Your profession gives you the right to bless me; I also bless

you;--pray for me, and for all the unfortunate!" The priest and the

old man exchanged blessings,--the benedictions of two honest men, and

nothing more.

Béranger had one rare quality, and it was fundamental with

him,--obligingness, readiness to perform kind offices, humanity carried

to the extent of Charity. He loved to busy himself for others. To some

one who said that time lay heavy on his hands, he answered, "Then you

have never occupied yourself about other people?" "Take more thought

of others than of yourself" was his maxim. And he did so occupy

himself,--not out of curiosity, but to aid, to succor with advice and

with deeds. His time belonged to everybody,--to the humblest, the

poorest, the first stranger who addressed him and told him his sorrows.

Out of a very small income (at most, four or five thousand francs a

year) he found means to give much. He loved, above all, to assist poor

artisans, men of the people, who appealed to him; and he did it always

without wounding the fibre of manhood in them. He loved everything that

wore a blouse. He had, even stronger than the love of liberty, the love

of equality, the great passion of the French.

He spent the last years of his life with an old friend of his youth by

the name of Madame Judith. This worthy person died a few months before

him, and he accompanied her remains to the church. He was seventy-seven

years old when he died.

Estimating and comparing chiefly literary and poetic merits, some

persons in France have been astonished that the obsequies of Béranger

should have been so magnificently celebrated, while, but a few months

before, the coffin of another poet, M. Alfred de Musset, had been

followed by a mere handful of mourners; yet M. de Musset was capable of

tones and flights which in inspiration and ardor surpassed the habitual

range of Béranger. Without attempting here to institute a comparison,

there is one thing essential to be remarked: in Béranger there was not

only a poet, but a man, and the man in him was more considerable than

the poet,--the reverse of what is the case with so many others. People

went to see him, after having heard his songs sung, to tell him how much

they had been applauded and enjoyed,--and, after the first compliments,

found that the poet was a man of sense, a good talker on all subjects,

interested in politics, a wonderful reasoner, with great knowledge

of men, and characterizing them delicately with a few fine and happy

touches. They became sincerely attached to him; they came again, and

delighted to draw out in talk that wisdom armed with epigram, that

experience full of agreeable counsels. His passions had been the talent

of the poet; his good sense gave authority to the man. Even by those

least willing to accept popular idols, Béranger will always be ranked as

one of the subtilest wits of the French school, and as something more

than this,--as one of the acutest servants of free human thought.