is dead before
his father, _who in his dotage remains obstinately faithful to his
principles_.... Gallicanism in its dissolution left a vast patrimony:
the Jesuits may grab a huge bit of it, but the bulk will be diminished
and disseminated.... At the rate things are going, Catholicism is
tending to become _a sect_." The insight of this is as remarkable as the
expression. Some years afterward, marking the progress of liberal ideas
in religion, he says: "Men's conceptions of God are constantly changing.
What was the atheism of yesterday will be the deism of to-morrow."

There are few Frenchman of any calling who are indifferent to politics,
and the men of letters almost without exception are interested
spectators when not actors in public affairs. From 1843 to 1845, the
period of the _Chroniques_, was a dead calm in the political horizon of
France, undisturbed by the little distant cloud of warfare in Algiers:
the Legitimists worked up farcical fermentations which had no more body
or head than those of the present day, although the chances of the party
were rather better. The duke of Bordeaux (as the Comte de Chambord was
then called) made an excursion to England one Christmas, which was
seized as an occasion, or more probably was a preconcerted signal, for a
dreary little demonstration of loyalty on the part of his adherents, who
crossed over to pay their respects to him in London: by great
arithmetical efforts their number was added up and made to amount to
four hundred, though whether so many really went was doubted. There were
a few old noblemen of great family: Berryer the eminent lawyer and
Chateaubriand were the only names of individual distinction in the list,
and the chief results were that Queen Victoria was annoyed (some of the
Orleans family being on a visit to her at the time) and intimated her
annoyance, and that the superb Chateaubriand was spoken of in the
English newspapers as "the good old man;" which Sainte-Beuve enjoyed
extremely.

The _Cahiers_ extend from 1847 to 1869, including the vicissitudes which
brought about the Second Empire, whose annihilation Sainte-Beuve died
half a year too soon to witness. In January, 1848, he felt the storm
brewing in the air, though he little guessed from what quarter it would
come nor on whose head it would burst. On the revolution of the 24th of
February he writes: "What events! what a dream! I was prepared for much,
but not so soon, nor for this.... I am tempted t