There was a celebrated Fourier at the Academy of Science, whom posterity has forgotten; and in some garret an obscure Fourier, whom the future will recall.Lord Byron was beginning to make his mark; a note to a poem by Millevoye introduced him to France in these terms:
a certain Lord Baron.
David d'Angers was trying to work in marble.
The Abbe Caron was speaking, in terms of praise, to a private gathering of seminarists in the blind alley of Feuillantines, of an unknown priest, named Felicite-Robert, who, at a latter date, became Lamennais.A thing which smoked and clattered on the Seine with the noise of a swimming dog went and came beneath the windows of the Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV.; it was a piece of mechanism which was not good for much; a sort of plaything, the idle dream of a dream-ridden inventor; an utopia--a steamboat.
The Parisians stared indifferently at this useless thing.
M. de Vaublanc, the reformer of the Institute by a coup d'etat, the distinguished author of numerous academicians, ordinances, and batches of members, after having created them, could not succeed in becoming one himself.The Faubourg Saint-Germain and the pavilion de Marsan wished to have M. Delaveau for prefect of police, on account of his piety.Dupuytren and Recamier entered into a quarrel in the amphitheatre of the School of Medicine, and threatened each other with their fists on the subject of the divinity of Jesus Christ.
Cuvier, with one eye on Genesis and the other on nature, tried to please bigoted reaction by reconciling fossils with texts and by making mastodons flatter Moses.
M. Francois de Neufchateau, the praiseworthy cultivator of the memory of Parmentier, made a thousand efforts to have pomme de terre [potato] pronounced parmentiere, and succeeded therein not at all.The Abbe Gregoire, ex-bishop, ex-conventionary, ex-senator, had passed, in the royalist polemics, to the state of "Infamous Gregoire."The locution of which we have made use--passed to the state of--has been condemned as a neologism by M. Royer Collard.
Under the third arch of the Pont de Jena, the new stone with which, the two years previously, the mining aperture made by Blucher to blow up the bridge had been stopped up, was still recognizable on account of its whiteness.Justice summoned to its bar a man who, on seeing the Comte d'Artois enter Notre Dame, had said aloud:
"Sapristi!
I regret the time when I saw Bonaparte and Talma enter the Bel Sauvage, arm in arm."A seditious utterance.
Six months in prison.
Traitors showed themselves unbuttoned; men who had gone over to the enemy on the eve of battle made no secret of their recompense, and strutted immodestly in the light of day, in the cynicism of riches and dignities; deserters from Ligny and Quatre-Bras, in the brazenness of their well-paid turpitude, exhibited their devotion to the monarchy in the most barefaced manner.
This is what floats up confusedly, pell-mell, for the year 1817, and is now forgotten.
History neglects nearly all these particulars, and cannot do otherwise; the infinity would overwhelm it.Nevertheless, these details, which are wrongly called trivial,-- there are no trivial facts in humanity, nor little leaves in vegetation,--are useful.
It is of the physiognomy of the years that the physiognomy of the centuries is composed.In this year of 1817 four young Parisians arranged "a fine farce."
BOOK THIRD.--IN THE YEAR 1817
CHAPTER II