Bragance, on le connaît ct’oiseau-là;
Faut-il que son orgueil soye profonde
Pour s’être f … u un nom comme ça!
Peut donc pas s’appeler comme tout le monde!
Bragance, we know that character;
He must be really big-headed
To have got himself a f … ing name like that!
Couldn’t he have a name like everyone else!
But the poet, if he is sincere, does not share in such merriment but, with his eyes fixed on the past that such names disclose to him, will reply with Verlaine:
Je vois, j’entends beaucoup de choses
Dans son nom Carlovingien.
I see, I hear many things
In his Carolingian name.
An enormous past perhaps. I should like to think that these names, so few examples of which have come down to us, thanks to the attachment to tradition of certain families, were in the old days very common names – the names of villeins as well as noblemen – so that, through the naive colours of the magic-lantern slides that such names offer us, it is not only the mighty lord with the blue beard or Sister Anne in her tower that we can see, but also the peasant bent over the ripening meadow or the men-at-arms riding along dusty thirteenth-century roads.
Very often no doubt the medieval impression their names give off does not survive an acquaintance with those who bear them and who have neither preserved nor understood their poetry; but can we reasonably ask of human beings that they should show themselves worthy of their names when the most beautiful things have so much difficulty in living up to theirs, when there is no landscape, no city, no river the sight of which can assuage the dreamlike desire its name had given birth to in us? The sensible thing would be to replace all our society connections and many journeys by a reading of the Almanach de Gotha or the railway timetable …
What is moving about Memoirs from the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, like those of the Countess de Boigne, is that they lend to the contemporary age, to our own days that are lived without beauty, a rather noble, rather melancholy per spective, by making them as it were into the foreground of History. They enable us to pass easily from the persons whom we have met with in life – or whom our parents have known – to the parents of those persons, who themselves, as authors or as characters in these Memoirs, may have witnessed the Revolution and seen Marie-Antoinette go by.
So that the people whom we may have been able to glimpse or to know – the people we have seen with our own eyes – are like those life-size wax models in the foreground of panoramas, treading on real grass and holding up a cane bought from a shop, who seem still to be part of the crowd that is gazing at them and lead us gradually to the painted backcloth, to which, thanks to skilfully contrived transitions, they lend the three-dimensional appearance of life and reality.
This Mme de Boigne then, born a d’Osmond and brought up, so she tells us, on the laps of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, as an adolescent I very often saw her niece at balls, the old Duchess de Maillé, née d’Osmond, over eighty yet still splendid beneath the grey hair brushed upwards from her forehead which put one in mind of the bob-wigs worn by presidents in the High Court.
And I recall that my parents very often dined with Mme de Boigne’s nephew, M. d’Osmond, for whom she wrote these Memoirs and whose photograph I found among their papers, together with many letters he had addressed to them.
So that my own earliest memories of balls, which hang by a thread from the for me somewhat less distinct yet still very real accounts of my parents, are connected by an already almost immaterial link to the memories which Mme de Boigne had preserved and which she recounts to us of the earliest entertainments at which she was present; all of which weaves a tissue of frivolities, yet a poetic one, for it ends as the stuff of dreams, a slender bridge thrown between the present and an already distant past, and which joins life to history, making history more alive and life almost historical.
Here I am, alas, at the third column of the newspaper and I have not yet begun my article even. It was to have been called. ‘Snobbery and Posterity’, but I am not going to be able to leave it with that title since I have filled the entire space reserved for me without saying a single word to you as yet about either Snobbery or Posterity, two persons whom you no doubt thought would never be called upon to meet, for the greater good fortune of the second, and on the topic of whom I was intending to subject you to a few reflections inspired by reading the Memoirs of Mme de Boigne. That must wait until next time. And if then one of those phantoms that interpose themselves ceaselessly between my mind and its object, as happens in dreams, should again come to solicit my attention and distract it from what I have to say to you, I shall thrust it aside just as Ulysses thrust aside with his sword the shades that crowded round him imploring him for a human form or for burial.
Today I have been unable to resist the appeal of these visions that I could see floating halfway down, in the transparency of my mind. And I have attempted without success what the master glassmaker so often achieved when he transported and fixed his dreams, at the very distance at which they had appeared to him, between two waters clouded by dark, pink reflections, in a translucid substance in which at times a fitful ray of light, coming from its heart, might have made them think that they were still at play inside a living mind.
Like the Nereids which the sculptor of antiquity had snatched from the sea but who could still believe themselves to be immersed in it as they swam between the marble waves of the bas-relief that figured it. I was wrong. It will not happen again. Next time I shall talk to you of snobbery and posterity, without digressing. And should some untoward idea, some indiscreet fancy seek to meddle in what is none of its business and threaten once more to interrupt us, I shall at once beg it to let us be: ‘We are talking, do not cut us off, mademoiselle!’
From The Method of Sainte-Beuve (extracts)
[ … ]
Thus it seems to me that I would have things that have their importance perhaps to say about Sainte-Beuve, and presently much more in connection with him than about him, that by showing where he sinned, in my view, both as writer and as critic, I should perhaps come to say some things about which I have often thought as to what criticism should be and what art is. In passing, and in his connection, as he does so often, I shall use him as the excuse for talking about certain forms of life …
[ … ]
For the definition and eulogizing of Sainte-Beuve’s method I have looked to the article by M. Paul Bourget, because the definition was short and the eulogy authoritative. I could have cited twenty other critics. To have written the natural history of minds, to have looked to the biography of the man, to the history of his family, to all his peculiarities, for an understanding of his work and the nature of his genius, that is what everyone recognizes to have been his originality, and what he recognized himself, in which moreover he was right. Taine himself, who dreamt of a more systematic and better codified natural history of men’s minds and with whom as it happens Sainte-Beuve did not agree over questions of race, says no differently in his eulogy of Sainte-Beuve: ‘M. Sainte-Beuve’s method is no less valuable than his work. In this he was a pioneer. He imported into moral history the procedures of natural history.’
[ … ]
Now, in art there are no initiators or precursors (at least in the scientific sense). Everything is in the individual, each individual starts the artistic or literary endeavour over again, on his own account; the works of his predecessors do not constitute, unlike in science, an acquired truth from which he who follows after may profit. A writer of genius today has it all to do. He is not much further advanced than Homer.
But those philosophers who have been unable to find what is real and independent of all science in art have been forced to imagine art, criticism, etc., to themselves as sciences in which the predecessor is necessarily less far advanced than whoever follows after him.
But why trouble anyway to name all those who see in this the originality and excellence of Sainte-Beuve’s method? One need only let him speak for himself.
‘For me,’ said Sainte-Beuve, ‘literature is not
