ted, he resolved upon leaving Paris for
some years, in order to escape this annoyance. He went first to the
neighborhood of Tours, and then to Fontainebleau; but the free,
conversational life of Paris was too dear to him, and he returned to
live in seclusion, though always much visited by his troops of friends,
and much sought after. In leaving Paris during the first years of Louis
Philippe's reign, and _closing_, as he called it, _his consulting
office_, his chief aim was to escape the questions, solicitations, and
confidences of opposite parties, in all of which he continued to have
many friends who would gladly have brought him over to their way of
thinking. He did not wish to be any longer what he had been so
much,--a consulting politician; but he did not cease to be a practical
philosopher with a crowd of disciples, and a consulting democrat.
Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Lamartine,--the chiefs of parties at first
totally opposed to his own,--came to seek his friendship, and loved to
repose and refresh themselves in his conversation. He enjoyed, a
little mischievously, seeing one of them (Chateaubriand) lay aside his
royalism, another (Lamennais) abjure his Catholicism, and the third
(Lamartine) forget his former aristocracy, in visiting him. He looked
upon this, and justly, as a homage paid to the manners and spirit of the
age, of which he was the humble but inflexible representative.

When the Revolution of 1848 burst unexpectedly, he was not charmed
with it,--nay, it made him even a little sad. Less a republican than
a patriot, he saw immense danger for France, as he knew her, in the
establishment of the pure republican form. He was of opinion that it was
necessary to wear out the monarchy little by little,--that with time and
patience it would fall of itself; but he had to do with an impatient
people, and he lamented it. "We had a ladder to go down by," said he,
"and here we are jumping out of the window!" It was the same sentiment
of patriotism, mingled with a certain almost mystical enthusiasm for
the great personality of Napoleon, nourished and augmented with growing
years, which made him accept the events of 1851-2 and the new Empire.

The religion of Beranger, which was so anti-Catholic, and which seems
even to have dispensed with Christianity, reduced itself to a vague
Deism, which in principle had too much the air of a pleasantry. His
_Dieu des bonnes gens_, which he opposed to the God of the congregation
a