ty of
life. The incessant play of intellect flashed and glittered for many
spirits over a moral void; the bitter, almost misanthropic temper
of Chamfort's maxims and _pensees_ may testify to the vacuity of faith
and joy; sentiment and passion came to fill the void; to desire, to
love, to pity, to suffer, to weep, was to live the true life of the
heart.

Madame du Deffand (1697-1780) might oppose the demon of ennui with
the aid of a cool temperament and a brilliant wit; at sixty-eight,
whatever ardour had been secretly stored up in her nature escaped
to lavish itself half-maternally on Horace Walpole. Her young
companion and reader, who became a rival and robbed her _salon_ of
its brilliance, Mlle. de Lespinasse (1732?-76) might cherish a calm
friendship for D'Alembert. When M. de Guibert came to succeed M. de
Mora in her affections, she poured out the lava torrent of passion
in those Letters which have given her a place beside Sappho and beside
Eloisa. Madame Roland in her girlhood had been the ardent pupil of
Rousseau, whose _Nouvelle Heloise_ was to her as a revelation from
heaven. The first appearance in literature of Madame Necker's amazing
daughter was as the eulogist of Rousseau.

The intellect untouched by emotion may be aristocratic; passion and
sentiment have popular and democratic instincts. "The Revolution was
already in action," said Napoleon, "when in 1784 Beaumarchais's
_Mariage de Figaro_ appeared upon the stage." If Napoleon's words
overstate the fact, we may at least name that masterpiece of comedy
a symptom of the coming explosion, or even, in Sainte-Beuve's words,
an armed Fronde.

Pierre-Augustin Caron, who took the name of BEAUMARCHAIS (1732-99),
son of a watchmaker of Paris, was born under a merry star, with a
true genius for comedy, yet his theatrical pieces were only the
recreations of a man of affairs--a demon of intrigue--determined to
build up his fortune by financial adventures and commercial
enterprises. Suddenly in 1774-75 he leaped into fame. Defeated in
a trial in which his claim to fifteen thousand livres was disputed,
Beaumarchais, in desperate circumstances, made his appeal to public
opinion in four _Memoires_, which admirably united seriousness,
gaiety, argument, irony, eloquence, and dramatic talent. "I am a
citizen," he cried--"that is to say, something wholly new, unknown,
unheard of in France. I am a citizen--that is to say, what you should
have been two hundred years ago, wh