"Let us have a few more words here and there--I would like it. Outside of the Revolution which, taken as a whole, is an immense human affirmation, '93, alas! is a reply. You think it inexorable, but the whole monarchy, monsieur? Carrier is a bandit; but what name do you give to Montrevel? Fouquier-Tinville is a wretch; but what is your opinion of Lamoignon Bâville? Maillard is frightful, but Saulx Tavannes, if you please? Le père Duchêne is ferocious, but what epithet will you furnish me for Le père Letellier? JourdanCoupe-Tête is a monster, but less than the Marquis of Louvois. Monsieur, monsieur, I lament Marie Antoinette, archduchess and queen; but I lament also that poor Huguenot woman who, in 1685, under Louis le Grand, monsieur, while nursing her child, was stripped to the waist and tied to a post, while her child was held before her; her breast swelled with milk and her heart with anguish; the little one, weak and famished, seeing the breast, cried with agony; and the executioner said to the woman, to the nursing mother: 'Recant!' giving her the choice between the death of her child and the death of her conscience. What say you to this Tantalus torture adapted to a mother? Monsieur, forget not this; the French Revolution had its reasons. Its wrath will

be pardoned by the future; its result is a better world. From its most terrible blows comes a caress for the human race. I must be brief. I must stop. I have too good a cause; and I am dying."

And, ceasing to look at the bishop, the old man completed his idea in these few tranquil words:

"Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over this is recognized; that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced."

The conventionist thought that he had borne down successively one after the other all the interior intrenchments of the bishop. There was one left, however, and from this, the last resource of Mgr. Bienvenu's resistance, came forth these words, nearly all the rudeness of the exordium reappearing:

"Progress ought to believe in God. The good cannot have an impious servitor. An atheist is an evil leader of the human race."

The old representative of the people did not answer. He was trembling. He looked up into the sky and a tear gathered slowly in his eye. When the lid was full the tears rolled down his livid cheek, and he said, almost stammering, low and talking to himself, his eye lost in the depths: "O Thou! O Ideal! Thou alone dost exist!"

The bishop felt a kind of inexpressible emotion.

After brief silence the old man raised his finger toward heaven and said:

"The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no me, the me would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it is. Then it has a This me of the infinite is God."

me.

The dying man pronounced these last words in a loud voice and with a shudder of ecstasy, as if he saw some one. When he ceased his eyes closed. The effort had exhausted him. It was evident that he had lived through in one minute the few hours that remained to him. What he had said had brought him near to him who is in death. The last moment was at hand.

The bishop perceived it; time was pressing.

He had come as a priest; from extreme coldness he had passed by degrees to extreme emotion; he looked upon those closed eyes, he took that old, wrinkled and icy hand and drew closer to the dying man.

"This hour is the hour of God. Do you not think it would be a source of regret if we should have met in vain ?" The conventionist re-opened his eyes. Calmness was imprinted upon his face, where there had been a cloud.

"M. Bishop," said he, with a deliberation which perhaps came still more from the dignity of his soul than from the ebb of his strength, "I have passed my life in meditation, study and contemplation. I was sixty years old when my country called me and ordered me to take part in her affairs. I obeyed. There were abuses, I fought them; there were tyrannies, I destroyed them; there were rights and principles, I proclaimed and confessed them. The soil was invaded, I defended it; France was threatened, I offered her my breast. I was not rich; I am poor. I was one of the masters of the

state, the vaults of the bank were piled with specie, so that we had to strengthen the walls or they would have fallen under the weight of gold and of silver; I dined in the Rue de l'Arbre-Sec at 22 sous for the meal. I succored the oppressed, I solaced the suffering. True, I tore the drapery from the altar; but it was to stanch the wounds of the country. I have always supported the forward march of the human race toward the light, and I have sometimes resisted a progress which was without pity. I have, on occasion, protected my own adversaries, your friends. There is at Peteghem, in Flanders, at the very place where the Merovingian kings had their summer palace, a monastery of Urbanists, the Abbey of Sainte Claire in Beaulieu, which I saved in 1793; I have done my duty according to my strength, and the good that I could. After which I was hunted, hounded, pursued, persecuted, slandered, railed at, spit upon, cursed, proscribed. For many years now, with my white hairs, I have perceived that many people believed they had a right to despise me; to the poor, ignorant crowd I have the face of the damned, and I accept, hating no man myself, the isolation of hatred. Now I am eighty-six years old; I am about to die. What have you come to ask of me?"

"Your blessing," said the bishop. And he fell upon his

knees.

When the bishop raised his head the face of the old man had become august. He had expired.

The bishop went home deeply absorbed in thought. He spent the whole night in prayer. The next day some persons, emboldened by curiosity, tried to talk with him of the conventionist, G; he merely pointed to heaven.

From that moment he redoubled his tenderness and brotherly love for the weak and the suffering.

Every allusion to "that old scoundrel G-" threw him into a strange reverie. No one could say that the passage of that soul before his own, and the reflex of that grand conscience upon his own, had not had its effect upon his approach to perfection.

THE supreme chief of French songwriters is Pierre Jean de Béranger (17801857). Born the grandson of a poor tailor

and son of a grocery clerk-his mother deserted by her husband-Béranger was truly one of the people, and always remained one of them. But from his garret flew forth the songs that were to make him famous, that spoke to the hearts of the people, and glorified Napoleon Bonaparte as the idol of the people. Béranger tells us: "God in His grace bade me sing, sing, poor little one!" And as he once said in a preface to his poems: "My songs are myself." Sir Walter Besant, surveying the world of song, declares not only that "Béranger sums up the poetry of the esprit gaulois; in him is the gayety of the trouvères, the malice of the fabliaux, the bonhommie of La Fontaine, the clearness of Marot, the bonne manière of Villon, and the sense of Regnier," but also that "there has been, indeed, no lyrist like him in any language; none with a voice and heart so intensely human, so sympathetic, so strong to move, so quick to feel. . . . He is the one great and unique type of the perfect chansonnier."

It is this very middle-class aspect of Béranger, which caused the classicists and romanticists alike to scorn his Muse as vulgar and pedestrian, that really constitutes his greatness. He reflects the ideas of the masses of his day. Furthermore, there is a notable spice of Gallic mockery even in his songs of patriotism and democracy. He continued, too, the traditions of the eighteenth century chanson, only adding a human tenderness and a patriotic sentiment to the old songs of wine and woman. Thus he glorified the chanson and eclipsed even the prince of light song-writers of France before him-De

saugiers (1772-1827). Although Béranger became a member of the jolly Caveau-the tavern club of wit and song instituted by Piron (1689-1773), "the greatest epigrammatist of France," of which Desaugiers was president, Béranger lifted the chanson to a new level and to a grander mission.

As a boy he had seen the Bastile taken and the stirring events of his youth inspired him with a mixed Bonapartism and republicanism that swayed him to the end, through all the vicissitudes of political change. His gratitude was due to the Bonapartes, too, for he was saved from poverty and obscurity by Lucien Bonaparte. In 1804 he sent to Lucien some of his songs. Lucien gave Béranger the fee sent himself from the Institute and secured the needy poet a clerkship under the Empire. Well did he repay the debt, for he more than any one else established the Napoleonic legend. Of that legend his "Remembrances of the People" was, and remains, the best popular expression. A similar Napoleonic worship breathed in "The Lesson," "He is not dead," "Madame Mère," and "The Old Flag." His contempt for the returning "emigré" nobles was demonstrated with withering sarcasm in the "Marquis de Carabas." After the Restoration he was repeatedly fined and imprisoned, but after its overthrow he sang as he pleased, and he was buried with high honors by the Second Empire government. He added the element of pathos to the chanson, as well as discovered the lyric capabilities of the common people, and he had an actual love romance of a lifetime with a poor ouvrière, Judith Frère. But for posterity a special interest attaches to the satirical and sarcastic chansons, such as that on "The Senator," and on the bonhomme king, the "Roi d'Yvetot," a sharp contrast to the ambitious Napoleon.

As Professor Saintsbury has remarked: "Only prejudice against his political, religious and ethical attitude can obscure the lively wit of his best work; its remarkable pathos; its sound common sense; its hearty, if somewhat narrow and mistaken, patriotism; its freedom from self-seeking and personal vanity, spite, cr greed; its thorough humanity and wholesome good feeling. Nor can it be fairly said that his range is narrow. 'Le Grenier,' 'Le Roi d'Yvetot,' 'Roger