Banished, exiled, laden with honours, this man who had starved in the
streets will dine at the table of kings; he will be an ambassador and a
minister, will try to save the tottering monarchy, and after seeing the
ruin of all his beliefs, he will witness his own glorification as if he
were already counted among the dead.
Born during the decline of one period and at the dawn of another, he was
to be its transition and the guardian of its memories and hopes. He was
the embalmer of Catholicism and the proclaimer of liberty. Although he
was a man of old traditions and illusions, he was constitutional in
politics and revolutionary in literature. Religious by instinct and
education, it is he, who, in advance of everyone else, in advance of
Byron, gave vent to the most savage pride and frightful despair.
He was an artist, and had this in common with the artists of the
eighteenth century: he was always hampered by narrow laws which,
however, were always broken by the power of his genius. As a man, he
shared the misery of his fellow-men of the nineteenth century. He had
the same turbulent preoccupations and futile gravity. Not satisfied with
being great, he wished to appear grandiose, and it seems that this
conceited mania did not in the least efface his real grandeur.
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