to the Minister, and that he had no doubt that the young man got what he wanted.  But it was evident that even if he had really attempted to do anything for the son of his old love, he had totally forgotten the result.  I do not think that he was pleased at Miss Clarke’s attention and sympathy being diverted from himself.  Later still in Madame Recamier’s life, when she had become blind, and Chateaubriand deaf, and Ballanche very infirm, the evenings were sad.  I had to try to amuse persons who had become almost unamusable.’

‘How did Madame de Chateaubriand,’ I asked, ’take the devotion of her husband to Madame Recamier?’

‘Philosophically,’ answered Ampere.  ’He would not have spent with her the hours that he passed at the Abbaye au bois.  She was glad, probably, to know that they were not more dangerously employed.’

‘Could I read Chateaubriand?’ I asked.

‘I doubt it,’ said Ampere.  ‘His taste is not English.’

‘I have read,’ I said, ’and liked, his narrative of the manner in which he forced on the Spanish war of 1822.  I thought it well written.’

‘It is, perhaps,’ said Ampere, ’the best thing which he has written, as the intervention to restore Ferdinand, which he effected in spite of almost everybody, was perhaps the most important passage in his political life.

’There is something revolting in an interference to crush the liberties of a foreign nation.  But the expedition tended to maintain the Bourbons on the French throne, and, according to Chateaubriand’s ideas, it was more important to support the principle of legitimacy than that of liberty.  He expected, too, sillily enough, that Ferdinand would give a Constitution.  It is certain, that, bad as the effects of that expedition were, Chateaubriand was always proud of it.’

‘What has Ballanche written?’ I asked.

‘A dozen volumes,’ he answered.  ’Poetry, metaphysics, on all sorts of subjects, with pages of remarkable vigour and finesse, containing some of the best writing in the language, but too unequal and too desultory to be worth going through.’

‘How wonderfully extensive,’ I said, ’is French literature!  Here is a voluminous author, some of whose writings, you say, are among the best in the French language, yet his name, at least as an author, is scarcely known.  He shines only by reflected light, and will live only because he attached himself to a remarkable man and to a remarkable woman.’

‘French literature,’ said Ampere, ’is extensive, but yet inferior to yours.  If I were forced to select a single literature and to read nothing else, I would take the English.  In one of the most important departments, the only one which cannot be re-produced by translation—­poetry—­you beat us hollow.  We are great only in the drama, and even there you are perhaps our superiors.  We have no short poems comparable to the “Allegro” or to the “Penseroso,” or to the “Country Churchyard."’