sinuated itself at Court, and assumed to govern as in the high times of the confessors of Louis XIV. It was hoped to conquer the spirit of the Revolution, and to drive modern France back to the days before 1789; hence thousands of hateful things impossible to be realized, and thousands of ridiculous ones. Towards 1820 the liberal opposition organized itself in the Chambers and in the press. The Muse of Béranger came to its assistance under the mask of gay raillery. He was the angry bee that stung flying, and whose stings are not harmless; nay, he would fain have made them mortal to the enemy. He hated even Louis XVIII., a king who was esteemed tolerably wise, and more intelligent than his party. "I stick my pins," said Béranger, "into the calves of Louis XVIII." One must have seen the fat king in small-clothes, his legs as big as posts and round as pin-cushions, to appreciate all the point of the epigram. Béranger 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 reëlection. Though intimate with many influential members of the opposition, such as Laffitte the banker, and General Sebastiani, it was only with Manuel that Béranger perfectly agreed. It is by his side, in the same tomb, that he now reposes in Père la Chaise, and after the death of Manuel he always slept on the mattress upon which his friend had breathed his last. Manuel and Béranger 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. Béranger 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 Béranger 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.
Béranger 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. His popularity became at once boundless; he was sensible of it, and enjoyed it. "They are going to indict your songs," said some one to him. "So much the better!" he replied,—"that will gilt-edge them." He thought so well of this gilding, that in 1828, during the ministry of M. Martignac, a very moderate man and of a conciliatory semi-liberalism, he found means to get indicted again and to undergo a new condemnation, by attacks which some even of his friends then thought untimely. Once again Béranger was impassioned; he declared his enemies incurable and incorrigible; and soon came the ordinances of July, 1830, and the Revolution in their train, to prove him right.
In 1830, at the moment when the
