works, and has trade in grain and timber. It dates from the 3rd century, when the relics of Bishop St Didier (whence the name of the town) were brought thither after the destruction of Langres by the Germans. It sustained a memorable siege against Charles V. in 1544.
STE ANNE DE BEAUPRE, a post-village of Montmorency
county, Quebec, Canada, at the junction of the Ste Anne river
with the St Lawrence, and on the Quebec, Montmorency &
Charlevoix railway, 22 m. below the city of Quebec. It stands
in a rolling agricultural country, with hills in the background;
and near by, on the Ste Anne river, are beautiful falls and
excellent fishing. For over two centuries Ste Anne has been
known as a Roman Catholic place of pilgrimage, and many
miracles are still said to be performed through the intercession
of the saint, the mother of the Virgin. In the basilica, an over ornate building, are ever-increasing piles of crutches and other
aids, cast aside by the cured. The resident population is about
1500, chiefly composed of hotel-keepers and members of religious
orders, but throughout the year many pilgrimages are made,
and on such days as the feast day of Ste Anne (26th of July)
30,000 people are often present. The total number of pilgrims
in 1905 was 170,000. In addition to the basilica the village
contains numerous religious edifices, the chief being the Scala
Santa, built in imitation of the Holy Stairs at Rome.
SAINTE-BEUVE, CHARLES AUGUSTIN (1804–1869), French
critic, was born at Boulogne-sur-Mer (No. 16 Rue du Pot d' Etain)
on the 23rd of December 1804. He was a posthumous child,
his father, a native of Picardy, and controller of town-dues at
Boulogne, having married in this same year, at the age of fifty-two.
The father was a man of literary tastes, and used to read,
like his son, pencil in hand; his copy of the Elzevir edition
of Virgil, covered with his notes, was in his son’s possession,
and is mentioned by him in one of his poems. Sainte-Beuve’s
mother was half English, her father, a mariner of Boulogne,
having married an Englishwoman. The little Charles Augustin
was brought up by his mother, who never remarried, and an
aunt, his father’s sister, who lived with her. They were poor,
but the boy, having learnt all he could at his first school at
Boulogne, persuaded his mother to send him, when he was
near the age of fourteen, to finish his education at Paris. 'He
boarded with a M. Landry, and had fora fellow-boarder and
intimate friend Charles Neate, afterwards fellow of Oriel College
and member of parliament for the city of Oxford. From Landry’s
boarding-house he attended the classes, first of the Collège
Charlemagne, and-then of the College Bourbon, winning the head
prize for history at the first, and for Latin verse at the second.
In 1823 he began to study medicine, attending lectures on
anatomy and physiology and walking the hospitals. But meanwhile
a Liberal newspaper, the Globe, was founded in 1827 by
Paul Francois Dubois, one of Sainte-Beuve’s old teachers at
the College Charlemagne. Dubois called to his aid his former
pupil, who, now quitting the study of medicine, contributed
historical and literary articles to the Globe, among them two,
which attracted the notice of Goethe, on Victor Hugo’s Odes
et ballades. These articles led to a friendship with Victor Hugo
and to Sainte-Beuve's connexion with the romantic school of poets, a school never entirely suited to his nature. In the Globe appeared also his interesting articles on the French poetry of the 16th century, which in 1828 were collected and published,[1]
and followed by a second volume containing selections from Ronsard. In 1829 he made his first venture as a poet with the Vie, poésies, et pensées de Joseph Delorme. His own name did not appear; but Joseph Delorme, that “Werther in the shape of Jacobin and medical student, ” as Guizot called him, was the Sainte-Beuve of those days himself. About the same time was founded the Revue de Paris, and Sainte-Beuve contributed
the opening article, with Boileau for its subject. In 1830 came
his second volume of poems, the Cousolations, a work on which
Sainte-Beuve looked back in later life with a special affection. To himself it marked and expressed, he said, that epoch of his life to which he could with most pleasure return, and at which he could like best that others should see him. But the critic in him grew to. prevail more and more and pushed out the poet.[2] In 1831 the Revue des deux morzdes was founded in rivalry with
the Revue de Paris, and from the first Sainte-Beuve was one of
the most active and important contributors. He brought out
his novel of Volupté in 1834, his third and last volume of poetry,
the Peusées d'aout, in 1837. He himself thought that the
activity which he -had in the meanwhile exercised as a critic,
and the offence which in some quarters his criticism had given,
were the cause of the less favourable reception which this volume
received. He had long meditated a book on Port-Royal. At
the end of 1837 he quitted France, accepting an invitation from
the academy of Lausanne, where in a series of lectures his work
on Port-Royal came into its first form of being. In the summer
of the next year he returned to Paris to revise and give the final
shape to his work, which, however, was not completed for twenty years.[3] In 1840 Victor Cousin, then minister of public instruction, appointed him one of the keepers of the Mazarin Library, an appointment which gave him rooms at the library, and, with the money earned by his pen, made him for the first time in his life easy in his circumstances, so that, as he afterwards used to say, he had to buy rare books in order to spend his income.
A more important consequence of his easier
circumstances was that he could study freely and largely. He returned to Greek, of which a French schoolboy brings from his lycée no great store. With a Greek teacher, M. Pantasides, he read and re-read
the poets in the original, and thus acquired, not, perhaps, a philological scholar's knowledge of them, but a genuine and invaluable acquaintance with them as literature. His activity in the Revue des deux mondes continued, and articles on Homer, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes, and Meleager were fruits of his new Greek studies. He wrote also a very good article in 1844 on the Italian poet Leopardi; but in general his subjects were taken from the great literature which he knew best, that of his own country—its literature both in the past and in the contemporary present. Seven volumes of Portraits, contributed to the Revue de Paris and the Revue des deux moudes, exhibit his work in the years from 1832 to 1848, a work constantly increasing in range and value.[4] In 1844 he was elected to the French Academy as successor to Casimir Delavigne, and was received there at the beginning of 1845 by Victor Hugo.
From this settled and prosperous condition the revolution of February 1848 dislodged him. In March of that year was published an account of secret-service money distributed in the late reign, and Sainte-Beuve was put down as having received the sum of one hundred francs. The smallness of the sum would hardly seem to suggest corruption; it appears probable that the money was given to cure a smoky chimney in his room at the Mazarin Library, and was wrongly entered as secret-service money. But Sainte-Beuve, who piqued himself on his independence and on a punctilious delicacy in money matters, was indignant at the entry, and thought the proceedings of the minister of public instruction and his officials, when he demanded to have the matter sifted, tardy and equivocal. He resigned his post at the Mazarin and accepted an offer from the Belgian government of a chair of French literature in the university of Liége. There he gave the series of lectures on Chateaubriand and his contemporaries which was afterwards (in 1860) published in two volumes.[5] He liked Liége, and the Belgians would have been glad to keep him; but the attraction of Paris carried
- ↑ Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française au XVI e siècle (2nd ed., 1842).
- ↑ Sainte-Beuve was at this time a devoted Catholic and a little later for a very short period a disciple of Lamennais. But he gradually separated from his Catholic friends, and at the same time a coldness grew up between him and Victor Hugo. He became the lover of Madame Hugo, and a definite separation between the former friends ensued in 1834. [Ed.]
- ↑ Port-Royal (1840–1848, 5 vols.; 3rd and revised ed., 1866; 5th ed. with index, 1888–1891).
- ↑ He was a friend of Madame Récamier, at whose house he met Chateaubriand. He became an especially close friend of Louis Mathieu, Comte Molé, for whose niece, Mme d’Arbouville, he conceived a lasting attachment. [Ed.]
- ↑ Chateaubriand et son groupe litléraire sous l’Empire.
