f
Public Instruction a man newly elevated to power, who honored me with an
enmity already of long standing. I have never in my life met M. Genin; I
have never once seen his face; but the fact is that he has always
detested me, has often in his writings made me the object of his satire,
and in his critical articles especially has ridiculed me to the extent
of his powers. I did not suit this writer, whom all his friends
pronounced a man of intellect; I appeared to him affected and full of
mannerisms; and to me, on the other hand, he perhaps appeared neither so
subtile, nor so refined, nor so original, as he seemed to others. Now M.
Genin, who had been intrusted, after the 24th of February, 1848, with
the distribution of the papers in the Bureau of Public Instruction, was
undoubtedly the person who had availed himself of the list in which my
name was said to figure, for the purpose of bringing an accusation
against my honor. He was himself a man of probity, but one who, in the
violence of his prejudices and the acerbity of his disposition, could
hardly stop short of actions positively bad.

"If M. Genin had lived in the world, in society, during the fifteen
years previous to 1848 which I had passed in it, he would have
comprehended how a man of letters, without fortune, without ambition, of
retiring manners, and keeping strictly to his own place, may yet--by his
intellect perhaps, by his character, by his tact, and by his general
conduct--obtain an honorable and agreeable position, and live with
persons of every rank, the most distinguished in their several
walks,--persons not precisely of his own class,--on that insensible
footing of equality which is, or which was, the charm and honor of
social life in France. For my own part, during those years,--happy ones
I may call them,--I had endeavored, not without a fair degree of
success, to arrange an existence combining dignity with ease. To write
from time to time things which it might be agreeable to read; to read
what was not only agreeable but instructive; above all, not to write too
much, to cultivate friendships, to keep the mind at liberty for the
intercourse of each day and be able to draw upon it without fear of
exhausting it; giving more to one's intimates than to the public, and
reserving the finest and tenderest thoughts, the flower of one's nature,
for the inner sanctuary;--such was the mode of life I had conceived as
suitable to a literary knight, who should not