[Illustration:  Paul Bourget]

His student life was passed at the Lycee of Clermont, and later at the College de Sainte-Barbe at Paris, where his scholarship was rewarded by several prizes.  But his voracious reading of French and English poetry, fiction, and philosophy has probably done more for him than scholastic training.  Like so many other novelists, he began his literary life with journalism; and in 1872 became collaborator on the Renaissance, living frugally meantime, and studying Paris from her cafes and boulevards as any poor man may.

His first book, ‘La Vie Inquiete’ ‘Restless Life’, a collection of poems sad in tone, dainty in touch, echoed the French verses which he loved best, but offered nothing very original.  They show a tinge of Baudelaire’s fantastic love of morbid phases of life and beauty, and also of Leconte de Lisle’s exquisite phrasing.  But Bourget lacks poetic ardor, and in metre is always a little artificial.  Although he went on writing poetry for some years, he found few readers until he turned to prose.  When the ‘Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine’ appeared in 1883, the public were delighted with their original charm.  Taking five authors whom he knew and loved particularly,—­Baudelaire, Renan, Flaubert, Taine, and Stendhal,—­he wrote a brilliant, profoundly psychologic exposition of their minds and temperaments.  The scientific explanation was fervid with his own emotion over these strong influences in his life, and thus comes indirectly as an interpretation of himself.  These studies, which he calls “a few notes made to help the historian of the modern moral life in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century,” stand, as criticism, between Brunetiere’s formal structure and Lemaitre’s appreciations.  They have been very popular, and Bourget has since written another volume of ’Nouveaux Essais de Psychologie Contemporaine,’ and other books of critical sketches called ’Etudes et Portraits.’

Certain qualities of his talent show forcibly in ‘Sensations d’Italie,’ a delightful appreciation of beauty and sensuous charm.  The reader feels the author’s joy in close analysis, and his sensitive discriminations.  In ‘Outre-Mer,’ especially interesting to Americans as a study of the United States, which he visited in 1894, he shows the same receptivity to new feelings and new ideas.  The book is often ludicrously inaccurate, and fundamentally incomplete in that it ignores the great middle class of our people, yet it is full of suggestive comments on American character.

Most people know Bourget best as a novelist.  As in criticism, his method is psychologic dissection.  Taking a set of men and women who are individually interesting, he draws their environment with careful detail and shows the reactions of their characters upon each other.  His subtlety of analysis comes out strongly in his pictures of women, whose contradictory moods and emotional intuitions offer him the refined