born in
Toulon, the great military Mediterranean sea-port of France, in the year
1849. His studies were begun in the college of his native city and
continued in Paris, in the Lycee Louis le Grand, where in the class of
philosophy he came under Professor Emile Charles, by whose original and
profound though decidedly sad way of thinking he was powerfully
influenced. His own ambition then was to become a teacher in the
University of France, an ambition which seemed unlikely to be ever
realized, as he failed to secure admission to the celebrated Ecole
Normale Superieure, in the competitive examination which leads up to
that school. Strangely enough, about fifteen years later he was, though
not in possession of any very high University degree, appointed to the
Professorship of French Literature in the school which he had been
unable to enter as a scholar, and his appointment received the hearty
indorsement of all the leading educational authorities in France.

[Illustration: Ferdiand Brunetiere]

For several years after leaving the Lycee Louis le Grand, while
completing his literary outfit by wonderfully extensive reading,
Ferdinand Brunetiere lived on stray orders for work for publishers. He
seldom succeeded in getting these, and when he got any they were seldom
filled. Thus he happened to be commissioned by the firm of Germer,
Bailliere and Company to write a history of Russia, which never was and
to all appearances never will be written. The event which determined the
direction of his career was the acceptance by the Revue des Deux Mondes,
in 1875, of an article upon contemporary French novelists. Francois
Buloz, the energetic and imperious founder and editor of the world-famed
French bi-monthly, felt that he had found in the young critic the man
whom French literary circles had been waiting for, and who was to be
Sainte-Beuve's successor; and Francois Buloz was a man who seldom
made mistakes.

French literary criticism was just then at a very low ebb. Sainte-Beuve
had been dead about five years; his own contemporaries, Edmond Scherer
for instance, were getting old and discouraged; the new generation
seemed to be turning unanimously, in consequence of the disasters of the
Franco-German war and of the Revolution of September, 1870, to military
or political activity. The only form of literature which had power to
attract young writers was the novel, which they could fill with the
description of all the passions then agit