y of remark that the assault was directed, not
against the censures which had been passed upon Chateaubriand,--M. de
Pontmartin took good care not to aim at his adversary's shield,--but
against the motives which had led to their suppression while the object
was alive, and to their publication after he was dead. Now there are in
the book on Chateaubriand some disclosures which might better have been
spared. But in determining motives we shall go utterly astray if we
leave character out of sight; and the whole career of M. Sainte-Beuve
rises up against the implication that he was prompted in this instance
by any other impulse than that spirit of investigation, that desire to
penetrate to the heart of his subject, to unveil truth and dissipate
illusions, which has grown stronger and more imperative at every step of
his advance. We pass over his immediate replies. When, in the regular
course of his avocation, he found an opportunity for expressing his
opinion of M. de Pontmartin, he did it in a characteristic manner. There
is not a particle of temper, not the slightest assumption of
superiority, in the article. It is not "scathing" or "crushing,"--as we
have seen it described. It has all the keenness, merely because it has
all the simplicity, of truth. The playful but searching satire which the
author has ever at command just touches the declamation of his opponent,
and it falls like a house of cards. He sums up with a judgment as fair
and as calm as if he had been speaking of a writer of some distant
period. Astonished at the sleight of hand which had disarmed, and at the
generosity which had spared him, M. de Pontmartin, in the first moment
of his defeat,--before he had had time to recover his (bad) temper, to
arm himself for more fiery assaults to be followed by fresh
overthrows,--declared that, in spite of the susceptibility of his
friends, he himself was well satisfied with a criticism which "assigned
to him nearly all the merit to which he could pretend," and in which,
"for the first time in his literary life, he had seen himself discussed,
appreciated, and valued without either the indulgences of friendship or
the violence of hatred."

One point still remains to be touched upon. M. Sainte-Beuve has been
from the first a steady supporter of the present Empire. This of course
accounts for a portion of the enmity with which he has been "honored."
In 1852 he received the appointment of Professor of Latin in the College
d