The Ways of Men

he chatting with its owner, and I listening to their conversation, and wondering at the confusion of books in the big room. As we drove away, my companion turn

lder, and it will be a satisfaction to remember

teps took me many times through that quiet street, but never without a vision of the poet-critic flashing back, as I glanced up at the window where he had stood and talked wi

any years' delay, a bust of this writer has been unveiled, with the same c

a blazing, white wilderness, these gardens remain cool and tranquil in the heart of turbulent "Bohemia," a bit of fragrant nature filled with the song of birds and the voices of children. Surely it was a gracious inspiration that selected this shady park as the "Poets' Corner" of great, new Paris. Henri Murger, Leconte de Lisle,

an finding a face one has loved turned into stone, or names that were the watchwords of one's youth serving as signs at street corners-la rue Flaubert or Théodore de Banville? How far away they make the past s

o' and mentioned 'Uncle Beuve' with tenderness. The Goncourt brothers accepted Sainte-Beuve's judgment on their work as the verdict of a 'Supreme Court.' Not a poet or author of that day

te-Beuve came daily to work (away from the importunate who besieged his dwelling) in a room hired under the assumed name of Delorme. It was there tha

ved. If one chose to seek for them it would not be hard to discover on the pavement of this same passage the mar

ill where the students of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came to amuse themselves. In 1761 the slope was level

'He is like a character out of Balzac,' always threw my master into a temper. I cannot remember, however, having seen him in one of those famous rages which made Barbey d'Aurévilly say that 'Sainte-Beuve was a clever man with the temper of a turkey!' The former was much nea

the other to blow out his own brains. It was no idle threat. The man Guizot had nicknamed 'Werther' was capable of executing his plan, for this causeless unpopularity was anguish to him. After his death, I found those two pistols loaded in his

im, 'I always read the Moniteur on Monday, when your article appears.' Unfortunately for this compliment, it was the Constitutionnel that had been publishing the Nouveaux Lund

ion of no one. And what a worker! Reading, sifting, studying, analyzing his subject before composing one of his famous Lundis, a literary portra

ficult art of conversation, and on whom a fair woman acted as an inspiration, surpassed himself on this occasion, surprising even the Goncourts with his knowledge of the Eighteenth century and the women of that time, Mme. de Boufflers, Mlle. de Lespinasse, la Maréchale de Luxembourg. The hours flew by unheeded by all of his guests but one. The débutante was overheard confiding,

ing the performance was so keen that M. Thierry, then administrateur of La Comédie, took Mlle. Favart to the rue Montparnasse, tha

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had been speaking. The marble of the statues gleamed white against the shadows of the sombre old garden. T

o surrounded him-Flaubert, Tourguéneff, Théophile Gautier, Renan, George Sand-were realities at that moment, not abstractions wi