seems to have acquired an
irregular but considerable education, and, establishing himself early in
Paris, he became an indefatigable author. About fifty separate works of
his exist, some of which are of great extent, and one of which, _Les
Contemporaines_, includes forty-two volumes and nearly three hundred
separate articles or tales. Restif, whose entire sanity may reasonably
be doubted, was a novelist, a philosopher, a social innovator, a
diligent observer of the manners of his times, a spelling reformer. His
work is for the most part destitute of the most rudimentary notions of
decency, but it is apparently produced in good faith and with no evil
purpose. His portraiture of manners is remarkably vivid. It is in this,
in his earnest but eccentric philanthropy, and in his grasp of
character, not seldom vigorous and close, that he chiefly resembles
Defoe. He has been called in France the Rousseau of the gutter, which
also is a comparison not without truth and instruction, despite the
jingle ('Rousseau du ruisseau') by which it was no doubt suggested.

The law which seems to have ordained that, though the eighteenth century
in France should produce no masterpiece in fictitious literature, or
only one, all the most distinguished literary names should be connected
with fiction, extended to the long and, in a literary sense, dreary
debateable land between the eighteenth century itself and the
nineteenth. Of this period the two dominant names are beyond question
those of Chateaubriand and of Madame de Stael. Both attempted various
kinds of writing, but some of the most important work of both comes
under the heading of the present chapter, and both as literary figures
are best treated here.

[Sidenote: Chateaubriand.]

Francois Auguste de Chateaubriand was born at Saint Malo, where he is
now buried, in 1768, and died in 1848. He belonged to a family which was
among the noblest of Britanny and of France, but which was not wealthy,
and he was a younger son. Intended at first for the navy, he was
allowed, at the outbreak of the Revolution, to indulge his fancy for
travelling, and journeyed to North America. There he learnt the
anti-monarchical turn which things had taken in France. He at once
returned and joined the emigrants at Coblentz. He was seriously wounded
at the siege of Thionville, and had some difficulty in making his way,
by Holland and Jersey, to England, where he lived in great poverty.
Chateaubriand's acceptanc