“What do you think of Monsieur Sainte-Beuve?  Is he as unfaithful a critic as Monsieur Theophile Gautier and Monsieur Jules Janin?” I asked, rather timidly.

“Monsieur Sainte-Beuve has received from Heaven (which he has ceased to believe in) an exquisite taste, an extraordinary delicacy of tact, admirable talents of criticism, relieved, and, as it were, fertilized, by rare poetical faculties.  He possesses and exercises in the most masterly manner the art of shading, of hints, of hesitations, of insinuations, of infiltrations, of evolutions, of circumlocutions, of precautions, of ambuscades, of feline gambols, of ground and lofty tumbling, of strategy, and of literary diplomacy.  He excels in the art of distilling a drop of poison in a phial of perfume so as to render the poison delicious and the perfume venomous.  His prose is as attractive and magnetizing as a woman slightly compromised in public opinion, and who does not tell all her secrets, but increases her attractions both by what she shows and by what she conceals.  Monsieur Sainte-Beuve has had no desire but to be a pilgrim of ideas, lacking the first requisite in a pilgrim, which is faith.  He has circumnavigated, merely in the character of amateur, every doctrine of the century; but though he has never adopted one of them for his creed, when he abandoned them he seemed to have betrayed them.  Accused unjustly of treachery and apostasy, he has done his best to confirm his reputation, and has ended by becoming the enemy of those from whom at first he had only deserted.  His error has been in adulterating that which he might have put, with singular grace, talents, and natural superiority, pure into currency,—­in acting as if literature were a war of treachery, where one was constantly obliged to keep a sword in the hand and a poniard in the pocket.  They say he is at great pains to provide himself with an immense arsenal of defensive and offensive weapons, that he may be able to crush those he loves to-day and may detest to-morrow, and those he hates to-day and wishes to wreak vengeance on hereafter.  Monsieur Sainte-Beuve might have been the most indisputable of authorities:  he is only the most delightful of literary curiosities.”

Such was the language of Monsieur Jules Sandeau.  He spoke in the same strain of many another eminent literary man.  Around these illustrious planets gravitated satellites.  When new pieces were brought out, he told me one could see between the acts the lieutenants go up to the captain-critics and receive instructions from them; the consequence was, the theatrical criticisms were either collective apotheoses or collective executions.  One day it was Mademoiselle Rachel they put on the black list for three months, and they raised up against her Madame Ristori, declaring that she was as superior to Rachel as Alfieri was to Racine.  Then ’twas the Gymnase Theatre they put in Coventry, for having spoken disrespectfully of newspaper-writers.