Encyclopaedia Britannica > Volume 21, ROT-Siam

162
S A I —S A I
Lorraine soon became rival competitors for the authority over St
Die The institution of a town council in 1628, and the establish¬
ment under King Stanislaus of a bishopric which appropriated
part of their spiritual jurisdiction, contributed greatly to dimmish
the influence of the canons; and with the Revolution they were
completely swept away. During the 17th century the town was
repeatedly sacked by the Burgundians under Charles the Bold, by
the French, and by the Swedes. It was also partially destroyed
by fire in 1065, 1155, 1554, and 1757. St Die was the seat of a
very early printing press.
SAINTE-BEUVE, Charles Augustin (1804-1869),
the most notable critic of our time, was born at Boulogne-
sur-Mer on 23d December 1804. He was a posthumous
child,—his father, a native of Picardy, and controller of
town-dues at Boulogne, having married in this same year,
at the age of fifty-two, and died before the birth of his son.
The father was a man of literary tastes, and used to read,
like his son, pencil in hand; his copy of the Elzevir edition
of Virgil, covered with his notes, was in his son’s possession,
and is mentioned by him in one of his poems. Sainte-
Beuve’s mother was half English,—her father, a mariner of
Boulogne, having married an Englishwoman. The little
Charles Augustin was brought up by his mother, who
never remarried, and an aunt, his father s sister, who
lived with her. They were poor, but the boy, having
learnt all he could at his first school at Boulogne, per¬
suaded his mother to send him, when he was near the age
of fourteen, to finish his education at Paris. He boarded
with a M. Landry, and had for a fellow-boarder and inti¬
mate friend Charles Neate, afterwards fellow of Oriel
College and member of parliament for the city of Oxford.
From M. Landry’s boarding-house he attended the classes,
first of the College Charlemagne, and then of the College
Bourbon, winning the head prize for history at the first,
and for Latin verse at the second. In 1823 he began to
study medicine, and continued the study with diligence
and interest for nearly four years, attending lectures on
anatomy and physiology and walking the hospitals. But
meanwhile a Liberal newspaper, the Globe, w7as founded in
1827 by M. Dubois, one of Sainte-Beuve’s old teachers at
the College Charlemagne. M. Dubois called to his aid
his former pupil, who, now quitting the study of medicine,
contributed historical and literary articles to the Globe,
among them two, which attracted the notice of Goethe, on
Victor Hugo’s Odes and Ballads. These articles led to a
friendship with Victor Hugo and to Sainte-Beuve’s con¬
nexion with the romantic school of poets, a school never
entirely suited to his nature. In the Globe appeared
also his interesting articles on the French poetry of the
16th century, which in 1828 were collected and published
in a volume, and followed by a second volume contain¬
ing selections from Bonsard. In 1829 he made his first
venture as a poet with the Vie, Poesies, et Pensees de Joseph
Delorme. His own name did not appear; but J oseph
Delorme, that “ Werther in the shape of Jacobin and
medical student,” as Guizot called him, was the Sainte-
Beuve of those days himself. About the same time wras
founded the Revue de Paris, and Sainte-Beuve contributed
the opening article, with Boileau for its subject. In 1830
came his second volume of poems, the Consolations, a
work on which Sainte-Beuve looked back in later life
with a special affection. To himself it marked and ex¬
pressed, he said, that epoch of his life to which he could
with most pleasure return, and at which he could like best
that others should see him. But the critic in him grew
to prevail more and more and pushed out the poet. In
1831 the Revue des Deux Mondes was founded in rivalry
with the Revue de Paris, and from the first Sainte-Beuve
was one of the most active and important contributors.
He brought out his novel of Volupte in 1834, his third
and last volume of poetry, the Pensees d’Aout, in 1837.
He himself thought that the activity which he had in the
meanwhile exercised as a critic, and the offence which in
some quarters his criticism had given, were the cause of
the less favourable reception which this volume received.
He had long meditated a book on Port Royal. At the
end of 1837 he quitted France, accepting an invitation
from the academy of Lausanne, where in a series of lectures
his work on Port Royal came into its first form of being.
In the summer of the next year he returned to Paris to
revise and give the final shape to his work, which, how¬
ever, was not completed for twenty years. In 1840 M.
Cousin, then minister of public instruction, appointed him
one of the keepers of the Mazarin Library, an appointment
which gave him rooms at the library, and, with the money
earned by his pen, made him for the first time in his life
easy in his circumstances, so that, as he afterwards used
to say, he had to buy rare books in order to spend his in¬
come. A more important consequence of his easier cir¬
cumstances was that he could study freely and largely.
He returned to Greek, of which' a French schoolboy brings
from his lycee no great store. With a Greek teacher, M.
Pantasides, he read and re-read the poets in the original,
and thus acquired, not, perhaps, a philological scholar’s
knowledge of them, but a genuine and invaluable acquaint¬
ance with them as literature. His activity in the Revue
des Deux Mondes continued, and articles on Homer, Theo¬
critus, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Meleager were fruits of
his new Greek studies. He wrote also a very good article
in 1844 on the Italian poet Leopardi; but in general his
subjects were taken from the great literature which he knew
best, that of his own country,—its literature both in the
past and in the contemporary present. Seven volumes of
“Portraits,” contributed to the Revue de Paris and the
Revue des Deux Mondes, exhibit his work in the years from
1832 to 1848, a work constantly increasing in range and
value. In 1844 he was elected to the French Academy
as successor to Casimir Delavigne, and was received there
at the beginning of 1845 by Victor Hugo.
From this settled and prosperous condition the revolu¬
tion of February 1848 dislodged him. In March of that
year was published an account of secret-service money
distributed in the late reign, and Sainte-Beuve was put
down as having received the sum of one hundred francs.
The smallness of the sum would hardly seem to suggest cor¬
ruption ; it appears probable that the money was given to
cure a smoky chimney in his room at the Mazarin Library,
and was wrongly entered as secret-service money. But
Sainte-Beuve, who piqued himself on his independence and
on a punctilious delicacy in money matters, was indignant
at the entry, and thought the proceedings of the minister
of public instruction and his officials, when he demanded to
have the matter sifted, tardy and equivocal. He resigned
his post at the Mazarin and accepted an offer from the
Belgian Government of a chair of French literature in the
university of Liege. There he gave the series of lectures
on Chateaubriand and his contemporaries which was after¬
wards (in 1861) published in two volumes. He liked Liege,
and the Belgians would have been glad to keep him,
but the attraction of Paris carried him back there in the
autumn of 1849. Louis Napoleon was then president.
Disturbance was ceasing; a time of settled, governmen,
which lasted twenty years and corresponds with the second
stage of Sainte-Beuve’s literary activity, was beginning.
Dr Veron, the editor of the Constitutionnel,^ proposed to
him that he should supply that newspaper with a literary
article for every Monday; and thus the Causenes M
Lundi were started. They at once succeeded, and ga_ve
the signal,” as Sainte-Beuve himself says with truth, °1’
the return of letters.” Sainte-Beuve now lived in the sma
house in the Rue Mont-Parnasse (No. 11) which he occu