SOME OCCUPANTS OF MONTPARNASSE.
The Boulevard Montparnasse--The Cemetery--Father Loriquet--Hégésippe
Moreau--Sainte-Beuve.
To return to the Carmelite Monastery and the Rue de Rennes, which
continues its course until it reaches the Boulevard Montparnasse. This
boulevard is a section of the road round Paris, formed under Louis XV.,
together with all the southern boulevards, in virtue of letters patent.
Until recently the Boulevard Montparnasse was full of restaurants and
dancing-places, among the latter the most celebrated being La Grande
Chaumière, much patronised by students in the time of Louis Philippe and
of Gavarni. Since the construction of the great terminus of the Western
Railway the boulevard in question has become transformed. It has been
invaded by industry and commerce. The hovels, booths, and public gardens
of former days have been replaced by well-built houses, many of which,
with the studios attached to them, are occupied by painters and
sculptors.
The name of this boulevard has a genuine literary origin. The land was
given in the sixteenth century, with the high ground in the immediate
neighbourhood, to the scholars of the different Paris colleges, who
assembled on its slopes and summit to read poems, and to discuss matters
of literature and art. The height of the so-called “mount” is on a level
with that of the roof of the railway station; but the railway line is
itself considerably above the level of the boulevard. The region of
Mount Parnassus has its theatre and its cemetery. At the former many a
dramatic author, afterwards to become celebrated, has brought out his
first piece; in the latter numbers of writers and painters who, without
perhaps failing in their art, failed in life, have found repose, with
the poet Hégésippe Moreau among them. Here, too, lie Henri Regnault, the
young painter who was killed in the sortie towards Buzenval on the 19th
of January, 1871; the surgeon Lisfranc, self-declared rival of the
illustrious Dupuytren, whom, in his lectures, he used freely to describe
as “This brigand from over the water” (Lisfranc was attached to the
Charité on the left bank, Dupuytren to the Hôtel Dieu on the island);
Father Loriquet, author of the celebrated “History of France,” in which
Napoleon Bonaparte is represented as one of the generals of Louis
XVIII., in whose name he gains important victories; Sainte-Beuve, the
famous critic; Baron Gérard, the painter; Rude, the sculptor; Orfila,
the great chemist, who discovered arsenic in the body of M.
Lafarge--whereupon Raspail, the chemist retained for the defence,
declared that he would find as much arsenic in a pair of old window
curtains; the four sergeants of Rochelle, whose unhappy fate has been
told in connection with Bicêtre, where for a time they were confined;
the philosopher Jouffroy, and the famous writer on political and
religious subjects, Montalembert.
Hégésippe Moreau, just mentioned as one of the most interesting tenants
of the Montparnasse cemetery, was the author of a terrible poem, “To
Hunger,”--with which he was only too intimately acquainted. But his
reputation rests on a collection of poems gracefully entitled “Le
Myosotis.”
Father Loriquet was one of the most remarkable historians of ancient or
modern times. Holding individually, perhaps, the doctrine ascribed to
Jesuits collectively by their enemies, that the end justifies the means,
and resolved in his “History of France” to work according to the motto
of his Order, “_Ad majorem Dei gloriam_,” he rearranged the historical
facts so as to make them accord, not with what did happen, but with what
in his opinion ought to have happened--a mode of writing history not
indeed peculiar to himself. The work was published immediately after the
Restoration, and, according to the titlepage, was expressly designed
“for the instruction of youth.” It is said to be still used in certain
ultra-religious boarding schools, where no words are looked upon as so
odious as those of “Revolution” and “Republic.”
Speaking of the American War of Independence, this strange historian
writes: “Louis XVI. did not think it just or politic to take the part of
rebels, who claimed rights for subjects against kings. But sacrificing
inopportunely his own intelligence to that which he thought he
recognised among his councillors, he acknowledged the independence of
the United States of America” (vol. ii., p. 129).
Here are some more extracts from this curious work:--
“Louis XVI. committed the fault of tolerating an illegal meeting of
factious persons in the Tennis Court. He should have known that a few
drops of impure blood shed in time are the salvation of empires (page
130).
“In the midst of convulsive movements the assembly, after a splendid
repast, held the midnight meeting so well known under the name of the
sitting of the 4th of August. There, without discussion, without
deliberation, inspired solely by the vapours of wine, it decreed a
number of unjust things against landed proprietors and the owners of
feudal rights (page 144).
“It was the evening of the 5th of October. The most alarming news was
being circulated in Versailles. The days of the royal family, above all
those of the queen, were seriously menaced. The aim of the conspirators
was, by intimidating Louis XVI., to compel him to fly and quit the
throne, which the Duke of Orleans proposed to seize. But the king having
declared that he would not take flight, the duke and his accomplices
resolved to get rid of him by assassination. It was in a church
dedicated to St. Louis that the horrible plot was prepared. At daybreak
the signal was given. Thirty thousand assassins, intoxicated with wine
and debauchery, threw themselves into the palace, calling out, ‘Long
live our Orleans King!’ (page 146).
“Bonaparte, having by his crimes reached the summit of power, was
proclaimed emperor.” In his narrative of the retreat from Moscow Father
Loriquet compares the French to Pharaoh’s Egyptians lost in the snow
instead of being drowned in the Red Sea. At Fontainebleau, in 1814, when
the allies were approaching Paris, Napoleon, according to the historian
in question, was suddenly informed by his generals that he was no longer
emperor, and that France had a king. “This information made him shed
many tears, and he only seemed to be consoled when the allies ceded to
him the little island of Elba with an income of 6,000,000 francs.”
The poet Hégésippe Moreau had but little in common with the Jesuit
father whose last resting-place he shares. As a writer he is remembered
solely by the volume of poems previously referred to, called “Le
Myosotis.” As a man, little is known of him except that he was miserably
poor--obliged, during one period of his life, to sleep in the trees of
the Champs Élysées and of the Bois de Boulogne. In a touching letter of
his, preserved by one of his biographers, he tells his correspondent
how, being invited to a fashionable evening party, he found nothing
there to eat but a little fruit jelly, when he had hoped to have the
opportunity of dining. He was, in fact, in the position of that
unfortunate young man in M. Ponsard’s _Honneur et Argent_ who exclaims
pathetically: “Je porte des gants blancs, et je n’ai pas dîné!”--“I have
white gloves on and I’ve had no dinner!” One terrible incident is
related of Hégésippe Moreau. During the cholera year of 1832 he was
carried in a state of exhaustion, caused solely by hunger, to the
hospital of La Charité, where, in the hope of catching the epidemic and
dying of it, he rolled himself up in the sheets of a cholera patient who
had but lately expired. Contagion, however, spared him, and wanting
nothing but food and rest he was soon restored to health. On leaving the
hospital he walked on foot to his native town of Provins, where, such
was the unpractical character of his mind, he not only started a
journal, but a journal in verse. _Diogenes_ it was called, and his only
reason for starting it in the little town of Provins, where it could not
possibly find a sufficient number of readers, seems to have been that he
had influence and credit at a local printing-office, where he had at one
time been employed as proof-reader. _Diogenes_ had doubtless been
suggested by the _Nemesis_ of Barthélémy, which, however, was published
not in a little provincial town, but at Paris. Only a few numbers of
_Diogenes_ appeared; and in his rage at not being appreciated the
satirist filled his dying number with the bitterest attacks on leading
inhabitants of the town. This led to a duel, and obliged him once more
to quit Provins for Paris.
It is related of Hégésippe Moreau that in the revolutionary days of
1830, fighting at the barricades, he wounded a Swiss soldier, and then,
taking pity on the man, gave him his own coat, to enable him to get away
in disguise.
Let us pass, however, to a writer enjoying far more celebrity than
either the graceful poet Hégésippe Moreau or the grotesque
historiographer, Father Loriquet. It was probably from his English
mother that Sainte-Beuve derived that taste for certain English poets,
with Cowper, Wordsworth, and Shelley among them, whom he attempted to
imitate in his earliest flights. His mother, having been left a widow,
sent him for preliminary study to the College of Boulogne, his native
town; afterwards transferring him, for the completion of his general
education, to Paris. At length he commenced the study of medicine, urged
by his mother, who is said to have distrusted the literary aspirations
which her son had already manifested. But after waiting for a year as
assistant-physician at the hospital of Saint-Louis, he felt that he had
missed his true vocation, and, without completely abandoning medicine,
wrote a series of historical, philosophical, and critical articles for
the _Globe_, directed at that time by M. Dubois, formerly one of his
professors. Sainte-Beuve was then living in the Rue de Vaugirard, a few
doors from the house inhabited by Victor Hugo; and when the latter
changed his abode and installed himself in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs,
accident once more threw Sainte-Beuve within easy distance of the poet.
Community of literary taste produced an intimate acquaintance between
the neighbours, and Sainte-Beuve took part in the new intellectual
movement of which Victor Hugo and Alexander Dumas were the originators
and chiefs. The New School, breaking from classical traditions, turned
back its attention to the sixteenth century, and to a group of writers
greatly obscured by the literary lustre of the two centuries which
followed. Sainte-Beuve set himself to study Ronsard and Du Bellay; and
in due time he had an opportunity of showing that he had not studied
them in vain. The Academy having, in 1827, proposed as the subject of
its Prize for Eloquence a “Picture of French Poetry in the Sixteenth
Century,” Daunou persuaded the critic of the _Globe_ to compete,
and placed at the young man’s disposition his own rich library.
Sainte-Beuve’s essay did not gain the prize. But it was published by
its author, who printed with it an edition of the “Selected Works”
of Ronsard; and the work, which the Academy had rejected, took rank
ultimately as the first authority on the period of French literature
with which it deals.
Whilst throwing himself into romanticism Sainte-Beuve was not blind to
the defects of the New School, though he could not himself, as poet,
avoid the very faults against which he had warned others. In reference
to Victor Hugo’s “Odes and Ballads” he wrote as follows: “M. Hugo’s
first inspiration is invariably true and profound; the whole mischief
arises from extravagant similes, frequent digressions, and
over-refinement of analysis.... There are forced metaphors, moreover,
improprieties of language, ellipses in the series of ideas, and prosaic
passages in the midst of the most dazzling poetry.” Victor Hugo was
naturally not delighted with this criticism. But he encouraged the
critic, and persuaded him to publish his “Poésiés de Joseph Delorme,” of
which Sainte-Beuve had read him some specimens. Having once taken up
with romanticism, Sainte-Beuve went at least as far as his master, and
committed precisely those faults which he had censured; for eccentric
lines, prosaic phrases, and outrageous metaphors abound in his
collection, although these eccentricities, far from injuring the volume,
seem to have caused its success. People who liked everything that was
odd or audacious read the book, and praised it for faults at which
scholars would knit their brows.
The Revolution of 1830 opened a new sphere of activity to Sainte-Beuve.
Hitherto he had occupied himself little with politics; but now he plied
his pen freely in the _Globe_ as a supporter of those principles of
humanitarianism so strongly championed by Pierre Leroux, who had become
director of the journal in question. Subsequently he undertook a
political campaign in the _National_ with Armand Carrel. In his various
writings, both in and out of the newspapers, he showed himself
inconstant to any fixed principles. His whole life, in fact, was
composed of intellectual changes and variations. These, however, were
simply the outcome of a mind curious to fathom all kinds of ideas, to
penetrate within them, in order to extract from them their sap or their
honey. Approaching the teachers in order to appreciate them as well as
their doctrines, he made himself their pupil, sat at their feet, and
quitted them as soon as he had completed his analysis. He himself was
quite conscious of this tendency, and confessed that even when he
entered Victor Hugo’s school of romanticism he only assumed as much of
that enthusiasm as might be expected to characterise a devotee. If,
however, he was on this, and on other similar occasions, consciously
insincere, his fault is largely redeemed by the genuine ardour with
which he played the neophyte at each fresh initiation; by the respect
which he always entertained for his masters, even after he had changed
them; and by the universality of the knowledge which he derived from
these studies, pursued, as they were, in a spirit of adventure or of
intellectual speculation. He sketches his own character admirably in
some advice which he gave to a young man in 1864; nor is it difficult to
see that he was consciously proposing himself as an example: “Seek the
most noble friendships,” he wrote, “and bring to them the benevolence
and sincerity of an open soul, desirous, above all things, of admiring;
pour into criticism--emulous sister of your poetry--your ardour,
sympathy, and all that is purest in your nature; eulogise, lay your
eloquence at the service of new talents, usually so much contested and
combated, and do not forsake them until the day when they withdraw
themselves from the right path and falsify their promises: after that
treat them with reserve. Incessantly vary your studies, cultivate your
mind in every direction; do not narrow yourself to one party, one
school, or one idea; let it see the dawn break on every horizon;
maintain your independence and your dignity; lend yourself for a time,
if necessary, but do not give yourself away. Remain judicious and
clear-sighted even in your weaker moments; and even if you do not say
the whole truth, never utter what is false. Never allow fatigue to lay a
hold upon you; never feel that you have attained your goal. At the age
when others are reposing or relaxing themselves, redouble your courage
and ardour; recommence like a novice, run your career a second time,
renew yourself.” Such was precisely the course which Sainte-Beuve
himself followed. When he wrote the above lines he was reviewing his own
life.
[Illustration: THE MONTPARNASSE STATION.]
Votary of romanticism as he had been, Sainte-Beuve adopted on one
occasion a course which many would have considered the reverse of
romantic. Challenged to a duel by M. Lecaze for words which he had
uttered in the Senate, he replied that he would fight his adversary with
no other weapon than that with which they were both familiar--the pen.
The death of Sainte-Beuve was preceded by cruel bodily tortures, and, as
he saw his end approaching, he took precautions to keep the priests away
from his bedside, and to divest his interment of all solemnity. By his
testamentary wishes none of the associations to which he belonged,
neither the Academy nor the Senate, was to be represented at his
funeral; and no oration was to be pronounced over his tomb. “Finally,”
he added, “I wish to be carried straight from my home to the cemetery of
Montparnasse, and to be placed in the vault where my mother lies,
without passing through the church, which I could not do without
violating my sentiments.” His dying directions were obeyed to the
letter.