youth,
and his most famous work, the _Voyage autour de ma Chambre_, was
published in 1794. The national extinction of Savoy and Piedmont, at
least the annexation of Savoy and the effacement of Piedmont, made
Xavier de Maistre an exile. He joined his brother in St. Petersburg,
served in the Russian army, fought, and was wounded in the Caucasus;
attained the rank of general, and died at St. Petersburg, in 1852, at
the great age of eighty-nine. His work consists of the _Voyage_, an
account of a temporary imprisonment in his quarters at Turin, obviously
suggested by Sterne, but exceedingly original in execution; _Le Lepreux
de la Cite d'Aoste,_ in which the same inspiration and the same
independent use of it are noticeable; and _Les Prisonniers du Caucase_,
a vivid narrative rather in the manner of the nineteenth than of the
eighteenth century, with a continuation of the _Voyage_ called
_Expedition Nocturne_, which has not escaped the usual fate of
continuations, and a short version of the touching story of Prascovia,
which contrasts very curiously with Madame Cottin's more artificial
handling of the same subject. The important point about Xavier de
Maistre is that he unites the sentimentality of the eighteenth century,
and not a little of its _Marivaudage_, with an exactness of observation,
a general truth of description, and a sense of narrative art which
belong rather to the nineteenth. Although he was not a Frenchman, his
style has always been regarded as a model of French; and the great
authority of Sainte Beuve justly places him and Merimee side by side as
the most perfect tellers of tales in the simple fashion.

[Sidenote: Benjamin Constant.]

Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_, 1815, is a very different work, but an
equally remarkable one. It may be a question whether it is not entitled
to take rank rather as the first book of the nineteenth-century school
than as the last of the eighteenth. But its author (better known as a
politician) published no further attempt to pursue the way he had
opened; and though he himself denied its application to the persons who
were usually identified with its characters, there is every reason to
believe that it was rather the record of a personal experience than a
deliberate effort of art. It is very short, dealing with the love of a
certain Adolphe for a certain Ellenore and his disenchantment. The
psychological drawing, though one-sided, is astonishingly true, and
though _sensibilit