he fat king in small-clothes, his legs as big as posts and round as
pin-cushions, to appreciate all the point of the epigram.

Beranger had been very intimate since 1815 with the Deputy Manuel, a man
of sense and courage, but very hostile to the Bourbons, and who, for
words spoken from the Tribune, was expelled from the Chamber of Deputies
and declared incapable of reelection. Though intimate with many
influential members of the opposition, such as Laffitte the banker, and
General Sebastiani, it was only with Manuel that Beranger perfectly
agreed. It is by his side, in the same tomb, that he now reposes in Pere
la Chaise, and after the death of Manuel he always slept on the mattress
upon which his friend had breathed his last. Manuel and Beranger
were ultra-inimical to the Restoration. They believed that it was
irreconcilable with the modern spirit of France, with the common sense
of the new form of society, and they accordingly did their best to goad
and irritate it, never giving it any quarter. At certain times, other
opposition deputies, such as General Foy, would have advised a more
prudent course, which would not have rendered the Bourbons impossible
by attacking them so fiercely as to push them to extremes. However
this might have been, poetry is always more at home in excess than in
moderation. Beranger was all the more a poet at this period, that he was
more impassioned. The Bourbons and the Jesuits, his two most violent
antipathies, served him well, and made him write his best and most
spirited songs. Hence his great success. The people, who never perceive
nice shades of opinion, but love and hate absolutely, at once adopted
Beranger as the singer of its loves and hatreds, the avenger of the old
army, of national glory and freedom, and the inaugurator or prophet of
the future. The spirit prisoned in these little couplets, these tiny
bodies, is of amazing force, and has, one might almost say, a devilish
audacity. In larger compositions, breath would doubtless have failed the
poet,--the greater space would have been an injury to him. Even in songs
he has a constrained air sometimes, but this constraint gave him more
force. He produces the impression of superiority to his class.

Beranger had given up his little post at the University before declaring
open war against the government. He was before long indicted, and in
1822 condemned to several months' imprisonment, for having scandalized
the throne and the altar.