his friend had breathed his last.  Manuel and Beranger were ultra-inimical to the Restoration.  They believed that it was irreconcilable with the modern spirit of France, with the common sense of the new form of society, and they accordingly did their best to goad and irritate it, never giving it any quarter.  At certain times, other opposition deputies, such as General Foy, would have advised a more prudent course, which would not have rendered the Bourbons impossible by attacking them so fiercely as to push them to extremes.  However this might have been, poetry is always more at home in excess than in moderation.  Beranger was all the more a poet at this period, that he was more impassioned.  The Bourbons and the Jesuits, his two most violent antipathies, served him well, and made him write his best and most spirited songs.  Hence his great success.  The people, who never perceive nice shades of opinion, but love and hate absolutely, at once adopted Beranger as the singer of its loves and hatreds, the avenger of the old army, of national glory and freedom, and the inaugurator or prophet of the future.  The spirit prisoned in these little couplets, these tiny bodies, is of amazing force, and has, one might almost say, a devilish audacity.  In larger compositions, breath would doubtless have failed the poet,—­the greater space would have been an injury to him.  Even in songs he has a constrained air sometimes, but this constraint gave him more force.  He produces the impression of superiority to his class.

Beranger had given up his little post at the University before declaring open war against the government.  He was before long indicted, and in 1822 condemned to several months’ imprisonment, for having scandalized the throne and the altar.  His popularity became at once boundless; he was sensible of it, and enjoyed it.  “They are going to indict your songs,” said some one to him.  “So much the better!” he replied,—­“that will gilt-edge them.”  He thought so well of this gilding, that in 1828, during the ministry of M. Martignac, a very moderate man and of a conciliatory semi-liberalism, he found means to get indicted again and to undergo a new condemnation, by attacks which some even of his friends then thought untimely.  Once again Beranger was impassioned; he declared his enemies incurable and incorrigible; and soon came the ordinances of July, 1830, and the Revolution in their train, to prove him right.

In 1830, at the moment when the Revolution took place, the popularity of Beranger was at its height.  His opinion was much deferred to in the course taken during and after “the three great days.”  The intimate friend of most of the chiefs of the opposition who were now in power, of great influence with the young, and trusted by the people, it was essential that he should not oppose the plan of making the Duke of Orleans King.  Beranger, in his Biography, speaks modestly of his part in these movements.  In his conversations he attributed a great deal to