With his eccentric, yet lofty nature, with a nervous organization and all that it entails of torment and delight, the craving for perfection becomes morbid.  Intellectually he is akin to Sterne, though he is not a literary worker.  There is an indescribable piquancy about his epigrams and sallies of thought.  He is eloquent, he knows how to love, but the uncertainty that appears in his execution is a part of the very nature of the man.  The brotherhood loved him for the very qualities which the philistine would style defects.

Last among the living comes Fulgence Ridal.  No writer of our times possesses more of the exuberant spirit of pure comedy than this poet, careless of fame, who will fling his more commonplace productions to theatrical managers, and keep the most charming scenes in the seraglio of his brain for himself and his friends.  Of the public he asks just sufficient to secure his independence, and then declines to do anything more.  Indolent and prolific as Rossini, compelled, like great poet-comedians, like Moliere and Rabelais, to see both sides of everything, and all that is to be said both for and against, he is a sceptic, ready to laugh at all things.  Fulgence Ridal is a great practical philosopher.  His worldly wisdom, his genius for observation, his contempt for fame ("fuss,” as he calls it) have not seared a kind heart.  He is as energetic on behalf of another as he is careless where his own interests are concerned; and if he bestirs himself, it is for a friend.  Living up to his Rabelaisian mask, he is no enemy to good cheer, though he never goes out of his way to find it; he is melancholy and gay.  His friends dubbed him the “Dog of the Regiment.”  You could have no better portrait of the man than his nickname.

Three more of the band, at least as remarkable as the friends who have just been sketched in outline, were destined to fall by the way.  Of these, Meyraux was the first.  Meyraux died after stirring up the famous controversy between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a great question which divided the whole scientific world into two opposite camps, with these two men of equal genius as leaders.  This befell some months before the death of the champion of rigorous analytical science as opposed to the pantheism of one who is still living to bear an honored name in Germany.  Meyraux was the friend of that “Louis” of whom death was so soon to rob the intellectual world.

With these two, both marked by death, and unknown to-day in spite of their wide knowledge and their genius, stands a third, Michel Chrestien, the great Republican thinker, who dreamed of European Federation, and had no small share in bringing about the Saint-Simonian movement of 1830.  A politician of the calibre of Saint-Just and Danton, but simple, meek as a maid, and brimful of illusions and loving-kindness; the owner of a singing voice which would have sent Mozart, or Weber, or Rossini into ecstasies, for his singing