LITERATURE OF THE MONTH (for January). My Adventures, by Colonel 147-152 288-296 (for March): Prince Puckler Muskau's Tra- 431-440 (for April): History of the Consulate and the 573-584 THE NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE. PASSAGES IN THE LIVES OF THE CELEBRATED HIS EXCELLENCY COMTE DE SAINTE-AULAIRE, Peer of France, Ambassador to the Court of St. James, Member of the French Academy, and Author of the "History of the Fronde." THE life of a man who has long held the loftiest dignities of both the literary and political world-of one who is at this moment an alltrusted agent in the portentous relations of this nation with one of the greatest governments of the globe-such a life is right worthy of study. Duly to estimate men who have already figured in another age, we must contemplate the state of our own. Nothing can be more extensive than the moral horizon of our day; the eye cannot scan it; like the physical, the further pursued the further it recedes. On the other hand, nothing can be smaller, individually and politically speaking, than the present generation. Power and grandeur are the attributes of the masses; the lofty intellect, the daring, all-foreseeing genius which controls events, is utterly wanting in our age, and in every country which has undergone revolution. Nations once renowned for their grandeur, like Spain, are shaken down to their very dregs, and not a leader or a statesman can be found in their bitter necessities. In France, there is not a man ten years more advanced in life than a Condé when he achieved great battles, and a Pitt when he ruled an empire in political storms, who inspires the least confidence by the grasp of mind. In France are seen threefourths of a nation madly rising in clamour against a great minister; but at the hour when the time-serving representatives in Parliament would curry favour with their constituency, and dethrone Genius from its pedestal the blow is withheld. For, lo! there is no other helmsman to be found, but a hoary intriguer, who possesses nought but the external forms of greatness; and an upstart, who has chaffered and trafficked with the power of the state, on the conditions which legends relate sublunary power was purchased of the devil in the olden time. So strange is the change in our days, that rarely is to be found the scion of a great man of the old nobility, of the Republic, or of the Empire, possessing even a mediocrity of talent. It is fortunate when the degenerate descendants possess the manners that distinguish the fashionable pretender from the man of sense-the vulgar ruffler from Jan.-VOL. LXXIII. NO. CCLXXXIX. B the Christian gentleman, who bears that knighthood in his heart, the great of this earth can neither give nor take away. The past age exhausted the procreative power-it called forth every quality, general and personal, by moral events the most stupendous. Man responded to the necessity of the moment, and came forth equal to the exigencies of the age, or reached its level by straining every faculty with which he was endowed; and as the moral power, like the physical, is susceptible of extension, they learned to bear the brunt of their times, as easily as Damosels of gentle nurture, to endure the weight of plate armour in the middle ages. He who is sixty years of age now has seen inore than two centuries. The eighteenth and nineteenth do not differ in date alone, they are epochs in the history of mankind, with an abyss between, as yet unfathomed-marking revolutions, which altogether changed the face of society: habits and usage, costume and manners, thoughts and feelings, are utterly and most contrastingly changed. Denon, less remembered for his shallow science and Egyptian researches, than for the anecdote of Princess Talleyrand mistaking him for Robinson Crusoe-Denon asserted that he had seen the celebrated Marion de Lorme in 1825, when 135 years of age. Had a Frenchman reached that age, and preserved his faculties, he had seen all that is necessary in the history of his country to form the historical lore that guides a statesman. But he who has only lived from 1780 to 1840, has existed more than the ten previous centuries. Amongst those who have rejoiced in this advantage-whose intellect has kept pace with the mighty changes of the time, and has reflected them-whose moral character and political bias have been formed by them, the nobleman of whom we are now to speak must be numbered. Louis Beaupoil Count de Sainte-Aulaire, born in 1799, the scion of a noble race, is not the first of his family who has inscribed his name in records of multiple fame. The intellectual society in which he has moved has been often noticed, how much he inherited of the peculiar traits of one of his ancestors; to which the trials of his career have added that loftiness of purpose, those serious contemplations and practical spirit, which higher trusts demand. The ancestor to whom we allude is François Joseph de Beaupoil, Marquis de Sainte-Aulaire, one of the gayest and most accomplished cavaliers of his time. Ruffling it in camps and courts, it was only at sixty years of age that he commenced regularly to indite verses, and it was at ninety years that his muse was most inspired: the poetic fire kept alive the waning lamp of life, for he died when close upon his hundredth year. But the latent genius burst forth once at a much earlier period, when he wrote the most beautiful extempore lines of erotic poetry, perhaps, extant in any languagethanks to which, Voltaire has reversed the opinion of Boileau, who, jealous of the high-born poet, vainly attempted in 1706, to resist his entrance amongst the conscript fathers of French literature," Les quarante de l'Académie." One evening, seated within the chosen circle of the beautiful Duchesse de Maine, silent and deeply absorbed in thought, all the ladies were curious to learn the cause of the reverie of the gay Marquis de SainteAulaire. The duchesse, although suspecting the cause, urged by her fair friends, could not resist the inquiry. The young marquis said he dare not speak the cause, but if her highness insisted he would explain in writing the train of thought that possessed him he then wrote those daring lines, so inimitable in delicacy. La Divinité qui s'amuse A me demander mon secret, Si j'étais Apollon ne serait pas ma Muse, Elle serait Thetis, et le jour finirait. Did they win the affections of her highness, as they have the admiration of successive ages? We know not, but we do know that the marquis lived forty years at the court of his "ladie love," who was wont to call him "son berger." This nobleman affords a strong instance of the power of literature. A staunch soldier of the Grand Monarque, by his valour in the field, and not through his elevated birth alone, he rose to the rank of lieutenantgeneral, a rank of tenfold more honour and consequence in those days. His three sons, a mareschal-de-camp, a colonel, and a captain, all died on the field of battle. Of these, contemporary records scarce speak. History has forgotten their names and deeds; but the general, the father of these three young heroes, writes four exquisite lines for the Duchesse du Maine, and at sixty becomes a poet. At once he becomes renowned, the great Académie opens its portals, and Voltaire hands his name down to posterity, in terms of admiration, in his "Temple du Goût." Some years since, having chanced to meet with the story of this nobleman of the French Augustan age, we were naturally led to seek some passages in the life of his descendant, whose double taste, literary and political, of such surpassing merit, claim a page in modern memoirs. We, however, found no materials, nothing but slight sketches, the most bald and curt; and we have been induced to link together some memoranda that we have gradually collected. That à propos of repartee and wit, that sprightly refined bantering manner, that art of imparting a charm to the trifling of society, and a freshness to the compliment of usage, of the marquis of bygone days, distinguish his descendant, who is excessive in nothing, save politeness and good breeding. Let us now see where he has read in those most instructive of pages-the Book of Life; where he has been at the best school-that of trials and misfortune; and where the change has been produced, so that the marquis of our day, instead of being like a butterfly, trifling away existence, restless and unsettled, amidst the perfumes of flowers, is become a bee, all utility and intelligence, seeking from each chosen plant its richest juices, with honey for gentle hands, and not without a sting to punish the unlawful aggressor. M. de Sainte-Aulaire's father, le Comte Joseph Beaupoil SainteAulaire, afterwards General, Chef d'Escadron of the noble Gardes du Corps, and ultimately a Peer of France, emigrated in 1791, and enlisted with his brother nobles under the banner of the Prince du Condé, who then waged the war of the White Flag and Fleur de Lys, with the sanguinary revolted lieges of France. Without his father, bereft of fortune, the young Sainte-Aulaire remained the sole support of his mother, who rewarded with an affection amounting almost to idolatry, the filial piety of her youthful son. This noble lady, to buy off the life of her father, Count de Noyon, from the ferocious murderers of the "Comité du Salut publique," had sold all that was left of the wreck of her fortune-furniture, plate, and personal ornaments. His position was most trying, but justly did the younger Dionysius once exclaim at Corinth, "Happy those who in infancy have served an apprenticeship to misfortune!" The youthful descendant of the brilliant pampered marquisses of the "Old Régime," saw where fortune pointed out the only open path-that of labour and industry. Night and day did he study to acquire all those sciencesand they are not only the most positive, but the most difficult and abstruse-which were indispensable for an examination at the Ecole Polytechnique, that marvellous school of science, celebrated from the first days of its existence-if ever equalled, never surpassed. Here the young noble entered triumphantly, despite the strong prejudices entertained against his lineage, and although the hawk's eye of the Newton of France, the immortal author of the " Mécanique Céleste," Laplace, had measured the competency of the new pupil. The mother of M. de Sainte-Aulaire, for the sake of economy, having taken an obscure lodging outside the Barrière, the young student used to set off on foot at earliest dawn, with a piece of bread in his pocket for his sole food and day's ration; and the eyes of the famished boy would glisten when he thought of some future day of triumph over adversity, when he could command, as he would say, "as much bread as he could eat." Let us add here, for it has been feelingly and openly recorded* that M. de Sainte-Aulaire derived from misfortune another far more important lesson. Unlike many of his more volatile countrymen, who, in the bloody days of terror, danced away their sadness coiffés à la victime-the triumph of the wicked, the shouts of the murderers, the echoes that responded to the guillotine, marking the minutes during the day with the regularity of a physician's stop-watch-these reminded our student of a better world-and throughout life a strong religious feeling has attended him, and imparted to his demeanour that absence of all uncharitableness, and that winning amiability, by which he is so signally characterised. We who live in happier days, and in a religious country, may not feel surprised at this result, and may think that adversity naturally leads to piety; but history tells us otherwise. In the days of Boccaccio, when the plague exterminated all classes, reckless pleasure filled men's thoughts; and the last time the plague visited our great Babylon, intoxication and revelry were still more rampant, and the hearts of men subsequently required to be purified by bloodshed, just as the city by fire. When M. de Sainte-Aulaire entered the Ecole Polytechnique, openly practising his religious duties, Atheism was the fashion and the rage-the pride of age and of youthas well it might be amongst men who had trampled under their feet with impunity all order, virtue, the altar, and the throne. The voice of Europe addressed to Paris the lines Sozomenes did to Rome, Vivere qui sanctè cupitis, discedite Roma! Otia cum liceant, non licet esse bonum. As the Republic expired, times improved, society was reconstituted. In the beau monde of talent, literature, and of rank, the winning manners of M. de Sainte-Aulaire attracted attention to his more solid merits, and the eagle glance of Napoleon, ever anxious to surround his * Vide Séances de l'Académie. 1841. |