Beuve, Emile Deschamps,
afterwards the translator of _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Macbeth_, his
brother Antony, afterwards the translator of the _Divine Comedy_.
The first Cenacle was formed; in the _Muse Francaise_ and in the
_Globe_ the principles of the new literary school were expounded and
illustrated. Victor Hugo looked on with friendly intentions, but
still held aloof.

JEAN-PIERRE DE BERANGER (1780-1857) was not one of this company of
poets. A child of Paris, of humble parentage, he discovered, after
various experiments, that his part was not that of a singer of large
ambitions. In 1815 his first collection of _Chansons_ appeared; the
fourth appeared in 1833. Standing between the bourgeoisie and the
people, he mediated between the popular and the middle-class
sentiment. His songs flew like town sparrows from garret to garden;
impudent or discreet, they nested everywhere. They seemed to be the
embodied wisdom of good sense, good temper, easy morals, love without
its ardours, poverty without its pains, patriotism without its
fatigues, a religion on familiar terms with the _Dieu des bonnes gens_.
In his elder years a Beranger legend had evolved itself; he was the
sage of democracy, the Socrates of the people, the patriarch to whom
pilgrims travelled to receive the oracles of liberal and benevolent
philosophy. Notwithstanding his faults in the pseudo-classic taste,
Beranger was skilled in the art of popular song; he knew the virtue
of concision; he knew how to evolve swiftly his little lyric drama;
he knew how to wing his verses with a volant refrain; he could catch
the sentiment of the moment and of the multitude; he could be gay
with touches of tenderness, and smile through a tear reminiscent of
departed youth and pleasure and Lisette. For the good bourgeois he
was a liberal in politics and religion; for the people he was a
democrat who hated the Restoration, loved equality more than liberty,
and glorified the legendary Napoleon, representative of democratic
absolutism. In the history of politics the songs of Beranger count
for much; in the history of literature the poet has a little niche
of his own, with which one may be content who, if he had not in elder
years supposed himself the champion of a literary revolution, might
be called modest.

II

Among the members of the Cenacle was to be seen a poet already famous,
their elder by several years, who might have been the master of a
school had he not preferred to