. The publisher was politeness and cordiality itself, complimented
his guest on his successes at the Ecole Normale, and after dinner took
him aside and said: "M. Taine, we want a book written on the Pyrenees,
and we think you are the best man we can get to do it. If you accept our
offer you will start at once for that region, you will deliver us the
manuscript in six months, and we will pay you for it six thousand
francs; of which I have the pleasure of offering you half to-day." This,
the first of Taine's books, duly appeared, and was a great commercial as
well as literary success, so that the publisher had no cause to regret
his generosity.

One might suppose that a friendship founded and sustained in this
fashion would be tolerably secure against the wear and tear of life,
especially if no personal difficulties intervened. And so it might in
any other land; but literary Frenchmen are too much sentimentalists and
doctrinaires to allow friendship or anything else to stand in the way of
the expression of their opinion, in season or out of season, in regard
to what, from their individual standpoint, constitutes the public weal.
Love me, love my dog; subscribe to all my opinions; follow all my
political changes or I disown you,--when people guide their conduct by
this principle all pairs of friends, except such a one as Boswell and
Dr. Johnson's, sooner or later must separate. Taine is an observer, an
investigator, a critic; and having devoted himself in turn to travel and
to the study of metaphysics, of art and of literature, he has now turned
his attention to recent French history; and the book he has written is
not at all to the taste of sentimental politicians of the About type.
The reader will not need to be reminded that there is no country in the
world so favorable to the growth of "legend" as France: the petite
bourgeoisie of Paris, as I found by personal experience, has already
fabricated a complete legendary history of the Commune, and there is no
subject on which the average Frenchman is so ignorant, and on which his
ignorance is so precious to him, as the real character of the Great
Revolution. As France is the guide of nations; as it represents, and
always has represented, the summit of civilization; as it has ever
possessed the greatest hearts, the purest spirits, as well as the most
brilliant intellects of the time,--why, it is nothing less than high
treason for a Frenchman to turn round and begin to show up