u dix-huitieme siecle_.' On all these accounts he appears to
be the fittest expositor of those conceptions which the anarchy that
closed the eighteenth century provoked into systematic existence.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] See Damiron's _La Philosophie en France au XIXieme Siecle_.
Introduction to Vol. I. (Fifth edition.)

I.

Joseph de Maistre was born at Chambery in the year 1754.[2] His family
was the younger branch of a stock in Languedoc, which about the
beginning of the seventeenth century divided itself into two, one
remaining in France, the other establishing itself in Piedmont. It is
not wonderful that the descendants of the latter, settled in a country
of small extent and little political importance, placed a high value on
their kinship with an ancient line in the powerful kingdom of France.
Joseph de Maistre himself was always particularly anxious to cultivate
close relations with his French kinsfolk, partly from the old
aristocratic feeling of blood, and partly from his intellectual
appreciation of the gifts of the French mind, and its vast influence as
an universal propagating power. His father held a high office in the
government of Savoy, and enjoyed so eminent a reputation that on his
death both the Senate and the King of Sardinia deliberately recorded
their appreciation of his loss as a public calamity. His mother is said
to have been a woman of lofty and devout character, and her influence
over her eldest son was exceptionally strong and tender. He used to
declare in after life that he was as docile in her hands as the youngest
of his sisters. Among other marks of his affectionate submission to
parental authority, we are told that during the whole time of his
residence at Turin, where he followed a course of law, he never read a
single book without previously writing to Chambery to one or other of
his parents for their sanction. Such traditions linger in families, and
when he came to have children of his own, they too read nothing of which
their father had not been asked to express his approbation. De Maistre's
early education was directed by the Jesuits; and as might have been
expected from the generous susceptibility of his temper, he never ceased
to think of them with warm esteem. To the end of his life he remembered
the gloom which fell upon the household, though he was not nine years
old at the time, when the news arrived of the edict of 1764, abolishing
the Society in the kingdom of France. One