ir provisional government, as
they formerly did their good king Louis XII., and more than one simple
person said with emotion, 'It must be admitted that we are well
governed, _they talk so well!_'" Before three months had elapsed the
provisional government was at an end: "their feet slipped in
blood--literally, in torrents of blood." "The politicians of late years
have been playing a game of chess, intent wholly upon the board, but
never giving a thought to the table under the board. But the table was
alive, the back of a people which began to move, and in the twinkling of
an eye chessboard and men went to the devil."

Among the entries of the next ten or twelve years are sketches of the
leading statesmen and scraps of their conversation: those of Thiers are
very animated. Sainte-Beuve says that he has a happiness of verbal
expression which eludes his pen; "yet raise him upon a pinnacle of works
of art" (of which M. Thiers has always been a patron publicly and
privately), "of historical monuments and flatterers, and he will never
be aught but the cleverest of marmosets." If he had lived another
twelvemonth, Sainte-Beuve might have had some other word for the Great
Citizen. On Guizot he is still more severe, making him out a mere
humbug, and of the poorest sort. When the poet Auguste Barbier became a
candidate for the French Academy, M. Guizot had never heard of him, and
had to be told all about him and his verses--there was surely no
disgrace in this ignorance on the part of a man engrossed in studies and
pursuits of a more serious nature--but before a week was over he was
heard expressing amazement that another person knew nothing of Barbier,
and talking of his poems as if he had always been familiar with them.
The Duchesse de Broglie said: "What M. Guizot has known since morning he
pretends to have known from all eternity."

This paper might be prolonged almost to the length of the volumes
themselves by quoting all the keen, sagacious or brilliant sayings
which they contain. Two more, merely to exemplify Sainte-Beuve's command
of words in very different lines of thought: "The old fragments of cases
in [Greek: phi] and [Greek: then], the ancient remains of verbs in
[Greek: mi] the second aorists, which alone survive the other submerged
tenses, always produce the same effect upon me, in view of the regular
declensions and conjugations, as the multitude of the isles and Cyclades
in relation to the Peloponnesus and the r