sanctioned anew the original title of the paper. A check of more importance was in store for Academical despotism. On the 15th of January, 1784, the Journal de Paris published a letter to the following effect: "To the Authors [Auteurs] of the Journal, Gentlemen: M. Cardonne, professor of the Oriental languages at the Collége-Royal, communicated to me, some time before his death, a collection of Indian fables which he had translated, and of which he allowed me to make what use I pleased. I have the honour to send you one which appears to me suitable to figure in your journal. Through the translation the poet is yet visible: as M. Lemierre has said, Même quand l'oiseau marche, on sent qu'il a des ailes. You will at least perceive in the French prose a certain elegance, Et la facilité, la grace du génie : this vers en maxime is M. de la Harpe's. "In short, it will not be without interest that a piece will be read which has escaped from the portfolio of a man of studious life, in the course of which he has never known the tedious slowness of time,-of that time whereof M. de Marmontel has said: C'est le travail qui lui donne des ailes. "I seize upon this opportunity of paying a feeble tribute of praise to a scholar who has not, perhaps, enjoyed all the happiness he deserved, but who could say with the Edipus of M. Ducis : Edipe est malheureux, mais Edipe est tranquille. "I have the honour to be, etc." "KING ELEPHANT. A FABLE. "A young elephant of good family reigned, not very long since, in the beautiful forests of the Ganges, over a numerous race of animals renowned for their industry. This just and altogether beneficent King (a King who richly deserves, I take it, to be a little talked about), convinced that liberty is the mother of great things, gave permission to every one of his subjects to say, do, and write anything whatsoever that was not injurious to morals, laws, or individuals. Ample use was made of this permission. Some even took upon themselves to lecture the prince on his duties, to denounce in public what they called the abuses of his government, and the prince, naturally debonair, read their exaggerations without losing his temper, and with entire readiness to make use of whatever he might find serviceable in them for the public good, for he had somewhere read, that a fool may occasionally impart counsel of importance. "Reader, you find this prologue over-long; but you are mistaken; it was indispensable. "Our elephant one day saw appear before him a farm-yard dog of rude exterior, a decidedly bull-headed bull, a screech-owl (chat-huant) of variegated plumage, and a horse of tolerably handsome make. These four animals were combined together to lodge a complaint before him against two or three lynxes whose piercing eye had detected in them some faults mingled with good qualities. They advanced towards the king, and thus addressed him : "Horse. Some lynxes have had the audacity to tell the world that I run well enough for a single mile, but that I want breath to accomplish an entire journey. "Bull. These same lynxes discover that I don't manage my furrow amiss, but wish me a less painful and a lighter step. "Screech-owl.-I am perfectly aware, with the universe at large, that my plumage has characteristic traits which pertain to myself alone: but why discover in my voice a want of sweetness and harmony? To please them, peradventure, my throat should be turned into a flute. "House-dog.-To avow that I, as a faithful guardian of the house, know how to bark and show my teeth at every one who has no right to go in, is, no doubt, doing me simple justice; but to maintain that on fêtedays, when all the animal world is assembled in public, it is not my native gift to perform tricks in mimicry of the actions of men, or to make myself intelligible in a language that interests, softens, and compels tears of pleasure-[this, the dog complains of as insulting to nature, boon mother nature, by whom he has been consciously endowed with her richest gifts, and that without measure; wherefore he beseeches the Sovereign to impose eternal silence on these lynxes-for the Sovereign's right divine it is to hinder his subjects from speaking what they think. But his Majesty bursts out into a guffaw at this enunciation of the Right divine of kings to govern wrong; and, having indulged to the full his elephantine explosion, proceeds to initiate old Growler into juster views of toleration, and the proper privileges of a free press:] (DOG, loq.) "C'est insulter à la nature, Qui des plus riches dons m'a comblé sans mesure. D'imposer à ces lynx un éternel silence. 'Quand, par le droit de la naissance, Vous reçûtes l'autorité, Ce fut pour empêcher de dire ce qu'on pense.' "Il partit d'un éclat de rire; Et puis il ajouta: Sur moi, sur mon empire, "Sans bruit que chacun se retire Et retienne ce mot plein de sens et de goût: Si vous voulez qu'en tout on vous admire.' Most of the readers of the Journal de Paris probably regarded this apologue, M. Nisard observes, as a mere homage to Louis XVI., ingeniously put, in compliment to his Majesty's general tolerance and equity towards literary men. None of them may have suspected the author to have been prompted by another kind of feeling. But the clear sighted, and such as looked below the surface-those especially who had cause for concluding the elephant's lecture to be directed at themselves— could see at a glance that the fabulist had a far more extensive meaning in what he wrote. They could see for certain that the four quotations which are given in the introductory part of the letter, were not brought in naturally by the thought which preceded them, but that, on the contrary, they were the occasion of that thought; in other words, that the préambule had been made for the quotations and not the quotations for the letter. They concluded that the four poets there quoted, and quoted by name, must be related individually, in the fabulist's design, to the four petitioning animals. Struck, moreover, by the resemblance existing between the parts assigned to the four animals, and the habits, conduct, and private demeanour of the four men, they were at no loss to recognise Ducis in the horse, Marmontel in the bull, La Harpe in the owl, and Lemierre in the dog. And calling to mind that all four had recently been deputed by their confrères to wait on M. de Breteuil, and desire that dignitary to impose silence on certain journalists, such as the Abbés Royou and Aubert, and others,-and that M. de Breteuil had laughed in their face, and answered them in almost the same terms as those employed in the Indian apologue,-they perceived that the elephant was the Minister himself, and the lynxes the journalists. And such were, in fact, the persons intended by the author of the fable. That author was the Abbé Aubert aforesaid,—this being the only revenge he took on the reiterated denunciations of the Academy against the journalists, his brethren, and himself. Only-adds M. Nisard-there were worse-intentioned folks who averred that the animal representing La Harpe ought to have been named, not chat-huant, but chat-hué. But the Academy went further wrong than in this system of boring the government with its petty grievances, and incurring shame by for ever appealing to the powers that be, to heal the scratches inflicted on it by the press. It had the misfortune to be sometimes defended by journalist Academicians, with a vehemence that it had not, perhaps, required at their hands, but which it was believed to relish on the whole. These doughty gentlemen were backed by the Academy when they refused to insert in their columns the apologies demanded by aggrieved parties without. The Abbé Delille, while staying at Constantinople, had written a letter to Madame de Vaisne, in which he gave her an account of his voyage to Malta, where, he said, he had been received right well, though he indulged himself at the same time in a few very trivial jokes on the Order, at whose constitution and morals he fired off a few popgun pleasantries, of mere paper-pellet calibre, and no more. "This letter made a noise; it was circulated about till it reached Malta itself, where it excited no small surprise. The Bailli de Frélon, colonel of the regi ment at Malta, wrote from that island to a confrère at Paris, to justify the Order from the imputations of the poet, and to quietly bring the latter to feel that he was not only a frivolous and unjust tale-bearer, but, moreover, a forgetful and ungrateful guest. All which Delille certainly had been. "This was in 1785; Suard was then the director of the Journal de Paris. The proprietors of this journal, seeing its existence more and more compromised day after day, by the chicanery practised against it by the Academy, had shown their good sense and good taste in asking to have Suard for director and reviser of its pages, as the man whose wisdom and good faith, though he was an Academician, were most in agreement with the government which kept watch, and the journalists over whom watch was kept. And yet the fact is a strange one, but clearly proves the despotism and blinding influence of the Academical esprit de corps-even Suard, honest and impartial Suard, refused pointblank to insert the bailli's letter, under the pretext that the Journal de Paris was forbidden to insert aught that told against a member of the Academy. Suard perhaps spoke the truth; but it must be confessed that he somewhat abused the almost royal right of inviolability conferred on the members of the Academy; simple equity made it the more incumbent on him to sacrifice a little of it under present circumstances, inasmuch as the bailli's letter was written with the greatest moderation; and as the Order of Malta was a power having ambassadors at nearly all the courts of Europe, it was highly rash in a journalist to treat this power as he would have done a private individual. The French government felt this, for, on the complaint of the ambassador of the Order, the ministre de Paris, says Bachaumont, enjoined the director of the journal to insert the letter." Incidents of this nature, of which there were not a few, tended to spread and to deepen public distrust of the Academy; it was no longer a minister alone, like the Chancellor Maupeou, who rose against it, and talked of suppressing it, but public opinion at large, supported by news-writers of the non-privileged majority. The more moderate were content with saying that the French Academy was useless, and with demanding its absorption in the Academy of Inscriptions. Here, at least, they said, there is an end in view, and work done, the result of which is proved by Memoirs. The same feeling had been expressed forty years previously, by one of the most respected members of the French Academy itself. "It really is a pity," wrote the Abbé d'Olivet to one of his colleagues, "to see the life led by these people. How and when would you have them work? They get up at nine o'clock, work for an hour or two, dress, go out, and there you have the whole day's history. Such is the life now-a-days of the Forty. . . . Two volumes from the Academy of Belles-Lettres are to appear at Easter. This makes the public keep saying continually that we do nothing." It is at any rate certain, according to M. Nisard, that the Academy of Belles-Lettres was at that period, as it has been since, the object of considerable and well-merited esteem on the part of the public; and that if this learned and laborious company had the glory of now exciting the jealousy of her elder sister, she had not the happiness of exciting her emulation. The nearer the Revolution approached, the more frequent and animated became the denunciations against the Forty. In 1790, a "literary man," Palissot by name, put forward an address to the National Assembly and printed it in the Chronique de Paris-demanding the suppression of the French Academy, on the plea that it was a relic of *Nisard, pp. 265 sq. Unpublished Letters of Abbé d'Olivet to President Bouhier, 16th March and 31st May, 1786. aristocracy. In the following year, Chamfort demanded the same thing, under the same pretext and many others yet more absurd and ungrounded, in a report that Mirabeau was to have read to the National Assembly, and which tended to the destruction not of the French Academy alone, but of all the Academies. This report is designated by M. Nisard a "monument of impertinence, ingratitude, and baseness"-"from one end to the other a mere tissue of sophisms and gross falsehoods." The author of it "insolently violates the commonest social duties;" he "heaps insults on what he had delighted to honour," and showers contempt on a body" of which he had passionately desired to become a member, and on employments in which he had made it his glory to partake." Only a madman or the lowest of mankind could have even conceived, exclaims our critic, the idea of such a writing-" and Chamfort has proved that he was both." Here was a man who had obtained an early and easy entrance into the Academy, who was always applauded at the public assemblies, and well treated by littérateurs, courtiers, and placemen; reader to the Comte d'Artois and librarian to Madame, and enjoying, in these several capacities, an income of seven or eight thousand livres ; but who now took upon him to decry those to whom he owed his bread and those who had forwarded his reputation, with a degree of "ingratitude, impudence, and wickedness, of which it would be difficult to find a second example." M. Nisard does not give any particulars of Chamfort's performance; but it may be interesting to add, from other sources, some further account of that spiteful manifestation. Commissioned by Mirabeau to draw up a report on the Academies, the sour and cynical Academician only too eagerly obeyed-with an obtrusion of hatred to his order that admits but of one possible explanation-viz. in M. Paul Mesnard's words, the "morose, jealous, and ever-detracting disposition of that unhappy Chamfort." One of the worst characteristics of this turbulent epoch, envy, was his torment; in his case the less pardonable, because his talents had been welcomed and recompensed in a way that should have fully satisfied his pride. Mirabeau died before he could make use of the report, but Chamfort published it for the world's instruction. In it he reviews the history of the Academy from the beginning, placing the principal events of its career in the worst light; its establishment by Richelieu, enlightened by a rare instinct as to all the means of extending and perfecting despotic power;" its exhibition, under the protectorate of Louis XIV., of "the vilest flattery to which men can descend;" its servility to the sovereign and its persecution of the patriot; its intestine discords, petty rivalries, and play of personal vanities between lettrés, titrés, mitrés. 66 Some of these reproaches were a little curious, M. Mesnard observes, as coming from one who, in his reception-speech, had topped all his brethren in eulogies on the memory of Richelieu, of Séguier, and of Louis XIV. These he appears to have forgotten, as well as the prizes which he had often written for, and not unfrequently obtained. Chamfort had now nothing but contumely wherewith to characterise the Academical prizes. The "works" (travaux) of the Academy were similarly exposed to contempt. His general conclusion was that as that body was becoming daily more enfeebled, and ready to fall of itself at the birth of |
