was born among shepherds; but you, you were born
among citizens, among proletaries." Beranger loved the country as people
love it on a Sunday at Paris, in walks just without the suburbs. How
different from Burns, that other poet of the people, with whom he has
sometimes been compared! But, on the other hand, Beranger loved
the dweller in the city, the mechanic, the _ouvrier_, industrious,
intellectual, full of enthusiasm and also of imprudence, passionate,
with the heart of a soldier, and with free, adventurous ideas. He loved
him even in his faults, aided him in his poverty, consoled him with his
songs. Before all things he loved the street, and the street returned
his love.

His father was a careless, dissipated man, who had tried many
employments, and who strove to rise from the ranks of the people without
having the means. His mother was a pretty woman, a dress-maker, and
thorough _grisette_, whom his father married for her beauty, and who
left her husband six months after their marriage and never gave a
thought to her child. The little Beranger, born with difficulty and only
with the aid of instruments, put out to nurse in the neighborhood of
Auxerre, and forgotten for three years, was the object of no motherly
cares. He may be said never to have had a mother. His Muse always showed
traces of this privation of a mother's smile. The sentiment of home, of
family, is not merely absent from his poems,--it is sometimes shocked by
them.

Returning to his grandparents in Paris, and afterwards sent to a school
in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, where, on the 14th of July, 1789, he saw
the Bastille taken, he pursued his primary studies very irregularly. He
never learned Latin, a circumstance which always prejudiced him. Later
in life, he sometimes blushed at not knowing it, and yet mentioned the
fact so often as almost to make one believe he was proud of it. The
truth is, that this want of classical training must have been felt
more painfully by Beranger than it would have been by almost any other
person; for Beranger was a studied poet, full of combinations, of
allusion and artifice, even in his pleasantry,--a delicate poet,
moreover, of the school of Boileau and Horace.

The _pension_ in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, even, was too much for the
narrow means of his father. He was taken away and sent to Peronne, in
Picardy, to an aunt who kept an inn in one of the suburbs, at the sign
of the Royal Sword. It was while he was wit