eginning with Chateaubriand,
and, I fear, ending with Saint Victor. Lamartine became the historian
in this Corinthian school of style, and his purple patches outdo
everything in effectiveness. But it would appear that in French
rhetoric there are pitfalls which tamer pens avoid. Rousseau compared
the Roman Senate to two hundred kings, because his sensitive ear did
not allow him to say three hundred--_trois cents rois_. Chateaubriand,
describing in a private letter his journey to the Alps, speaks of the
moon along the mountain tops, and adds: "It is all right; I have
looked up the Almanac, and find that there was a moon." Paul Louis
Courier says that Plutarch would have made Pompey conquer at Pharsalus
if it would have read better, and he thinks that he was quite right.
Courier's exacting taste would have found contentment in Lamartine. He
knows very well that Marie Antoinette was fifteen when she married the
Dauphin in 1770; yet he affirms that she was the child the Empress
held up in her arms when the Magyar magnates swore to die for their
queen, Maria Theresa. The scene occurred in 1741, fourteen years
before she was born. Histories of literature give the catalogue of his
amazing blunders.

In his declining years he reverted to this book, and wrote an apology,
in which he answered his accusers, and confessed to some passages
which he exhorted them to tear out. There was good ground for
recantation. Writing to dazzle the democracy by means of a bright
halo, with himself in the midst of it, he was sometimes weak in
exposing crimes that had a popular motive. His republicanism was of
the sort that allows no safeguard for minorities, no rights to men
but those which their country gives them. He had been the speaker who,
when the Chamber wavered, rejected the Regency which was the legal
government, and compelled the Duchess of Orleans to fly. When a report
reached him that she had been seized, and he was asked to order her
release, he refused, saying, "If the people ask for her, she must be
given up to them."

In his own defence he showed that he had consulted the widow of
Danton, and had found a witness of the last banquet of the Girondins.
In his book he dramatised the scene, and displayed the various bearing
of the fallen statesmen during their last night on earth. Granier de
Cassagnac pronounced the whole thing a fabrication. It was told by
Nodier who was a professional inventor, and by Thiers who gave no
authority,