order of things, and the special from the subject under treatment,” is no easy matter.  V. Hugo tells us that it is only for a man of genius to undertake such a task, but he himself is an example that even a man so gifted is fallible.  In a letter written in the French capital on January 14, 1832, Mendelssohn says of the “so-called romantic school” that it has infected all the Parisians, and that on the stage they think of nothing but the plague, the gallows, the devil, childbeds, and the like.  Nor were the romances less extravagant than the dramas.  The lyrical poetry, too, had its defects and blemishes.  But if it had laid itself open to the blame of being “very unequal and very mixed,” it also called for the praise of being “rich, richer than any lyrical poetry France had known up to that time.”  And if the romanticists, as one of them, Sainte-Beuve, remarked, “abandoned themselves without control and without restraint to all the instincts of their nature, and also to all the pretensions of their pride, or even to the silly tricks of their vanity,” they had, nevertheless, the supreme merit of having resuscitated what was extinct, and even of having created what never existed in their language.  Although a discussion of romanticism without a characterisation of its specific and individual differences is incomplete, I must bring this part of my remarks to a close with a few names and dates illustrative of the literary aspect of Paris in 1831.  I may, however, inform the reader that the subject of romanticism will give rise to further discussion in subsequent chapters.

The most notable literary events of the year 1831 were the publication of Victor Hugo’s “Notre Dame de Paris,” “Feuilles d’automne,” and “Marion Delorme”; Dumas’ “Charles VII”; Balzac’s “La peau de chagrin”; Eugene Sue’s “Ata Gull”; and George Sand’s first novel, “Rose et Blanche,” written conjointly with Sandeau.  Alfred de Musset and Theophile Gautier made their literary debuts in 1830, the one with “Contes d’Espagne et d’ltalie,” the other with “Poesies.”  In the course of the third decade of the century Lamartine had given to the world “Meditations poetiques,” “Nouvelles Meditations poetiques,” and “Harmonies poetiques et religieuses”; Victor Hugo, “Odes et Ballades,” “Les Orientales,” three novels, and the dramas “Cromwell” and “Hernani”; Dumas, “Henri III et sa Cour,” and “Stockholm, Fontainebleau et Rome”; Alfred de Vigny, “Poemes antiques et modernes” and “Cinq-Mars”; Balzac, “Scenes de la vie privee” and “Physiologie du Mariage.”  Besides the authors just named there were at this time in full activity in one or the other department of literature, Nodier, Beranger, Merimee, Delavigne, Scribe, Sainte-Beuve, Villemain, Cousin, Michelet, Guizot, Thiers, and many other men and women of distinction.