that which was alive, amid much that might be dead. "A pilgrim of ideas, but lacking the first essential of a pilgrim—faith"—he gave all that he was to literature through all his life, and when near its end, he had the right to say: "Devoted with all my heart to my profession of critic, I have tried to be, more and more, a good and—if possible—a skilful workman."

Alphonse de Lamartine.
(From a sketch by David d'Angers. "un soir chez Hugo.")

He devoted himself so entirely to his profession, that his life was like a mill, as he said, perpetually feeding and grinding. On the Monday morning, he would shut himself in with the new volumes, which he was to feed into himself and assimilate, during the twelve hours of each of the five following days; on Saturday he was ready to grind out the result. His Sunday holiday was given to the proof-reading of his next day's "Causerie du Lundi." On that evening he took his only relaxation, in the theatre. His work-room was bare of all superfluities, and his daily life went in a round, with simple diet, no wine, nor coffee, nor tobacco.

At the age of twenty-five, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve was living, with his mother, in a small apartment on the fourth floor of No. 19—now 37—Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He had given himself to letters instead of medicine, for which he had studied, and had become a regular contributor of critical papers to the press. His name was already spoken along with the names of Victor Cousin, Villemain, Guizot, Mérimée. He had produced his "Historical and Critical Pictures," his "French Poetry and French Theatre of the Sixteenth Century," and the "Poems of Joseph Delorme"—his selected pen-name. The poet in him had abdicated to the critic, handing down many choice gifts. In this apartment he received for review a volume of poems, "by a young barbarian," his editor wrote. This was the "Odes et Ballades" of Victor Hugo, with whom the critic soon made acquaintance, and at whose house, a few doors away in the same street, he became a constant visitor. From here Madame Sainte-Beuve removed, with her son, in 1834, to Rue du Mont-Parnasse, and in that street he had his home during his remaining years. His official residence, from 1840 to 1848, as a Keeper of the Mazarin Library, was in that building now occupied by the Institute. He found installed there, among the other Keepers, Octave Feuillet. The upheaval of February, 1848, drove Sainte-Beuve into Belgium. On his return in the following year, he settled in the house left him by his mother, and there he died in 1869. This two-storied, plaster-fronted, plain little No. 11 Rue du Mont-Parnasse, saw his thirty years of colossal work. From here, he went to take his chair of Latin poetry in the Collège de France, where he was hissed by the students, who meant to hiss, not the critic and lecturer, but the man who had accepted the Second Empire in accepting that chair. He was no zealous recruit, however, and preserved his entire independence; and when he consented to go to the Senate in 1865, it was for the sake of its dignity and its salary. He was always poor in money.

To his workroom in this house, came every French writer of those thirty years, anxious to plead with or to thank that Supreme Court of Criticism. Among those who bowed to its verdicts and who have owned to its influence, Edmond de Goncourt has given us the most vivid sketch of the critic in conversation: "When I hear him touch on a dead man, with his little phrases, I seem to see a swarm of ants invading a body; cleaning out all the glory, and in a few minutes leaving a very clean skull of the once illustrious one." And, in his written reviews, Sainte-Beuve had the supreme art of distilling a drop of venom in a phial of honey, so making the poison fragrant and the incense deadly. There is no more constant presence than his on this southern hill-side, where all his days and nights were spent. We seem to see there the short, stout figure, erect and active, the bald head covered with a skull-cap, the bushy red eyebrows, the smooth-shaven face, redeemed from ugliness by its alert intelligence. His walks were down this slope of Mont-Parnasse, which he thought of as the pleasure-ground of the mediæval students of the University, to the quays, where he hunted among the old-book stalls. And he loved to stroll in the alleys of the Luxembourg Gardens. In the Poets' Corner, now made there, you will find his bust along with those of Henri Murger, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, and Paul Verlaine.

Crossing the street from Sainte-Beuve's last home to No. 32, we find a modest house set behind its garden-wall, in which is a tablet containing the name of Edgar Quinet. More than passing mention of his name is due to this fine intellect and this great soul. His mother thought that "an old gentleman named M. Voltaire"—whom she might have seen in her childhood, as her village crowded about his carriage on its way to Paris—was the cleverest man who ever lived. She brought up her boy to think for himself, after that philosopher's fashion, and the boy bettered her teachings. He spent his life in looking into the depths of beliefs and institutions, in getting at the essence of the real and the abiding, in letting slip that which was shallow and transitory; so that, towards the end, he could say: "I have passed my days in hearing men speak of their illusions, and I have never experienced a single one." He became, in Professor Dowden's apt phrase, "a part of the conscience of France," and as such, his influence was of higher value than that exerted by his busy pen in politics, history, poetry. Indeed, his enthusiasms for the freedom and progress of his fellow-beings carried his pen beyond due restraint. Of course he was honored by exile during the Second Empire, and when it tumbled to pieces, he returned to Paris, and soon went to Versailles as a Deputy. At his grave, in 1875, Hugo spoke of him as living and dying with the serene light of truth on his brow, and he can have no happier epitaph.

Quinet had outlived, by only a few months, his life-long friend Jules Michelet, who died in 1874. He, too, had his homes and did his work, private and public, on this same hill-side. His birth-place, far away on the northern bank, on the corner of Rues de Tracy and Saint-Denis, is now given over to business. It was a church, built about 1630 in the gardens of "Les Dames de Saint-Chaumont," and had been closed in 1789, along with so many other churches. Going fast to ruin, it was fit only for the poverty-stricken tenant, who came along in the person of the elder Michelet, a printer from Laon. He set up his presses in the nave and his household gods in the choir, where the boy Jules was born on August 22, 1798. The building is unchanged as to its outer aspect, with its squat columns supporting the heavy pediment of the façade, except that two stories have been placed above its main body. In these strange surroundings for a child, and in the shelters equally squalid, to and from which his father removed during many years, the boy grew up, haunted and nervous, cold, hungry and ill-clad, and always over his books when set free from type-setting.

He got lessons and took prizes at the Lycée Charlemagne, but the pleasantest lesson and the dearest prize of his youth did not come in school. They were his first sight, from his father's windows in Rue Buffon, of the sun setting over beyond the trees, tuneful with birds, of the Jardin du Roi. Grass and foliage, and a sky above an open space, had been unknown to his walled-in boyhood. When he became able to