“Oh, walls of Notre Dame! sacred arches which have borne my words to so many intelligences deprived of God! altars which have blessed me! I will never separate from you!” he cries, his heart moving within him as he recalls his past life, and all that has happened there, since, young and in the dawn of his fame, he made his first appearance in the metropolitan church. But he never again entered the pulpit thus endeared by the labours of a life; once more only he preached in Paris, and once again, in 1854, delivered, at the request of the Archbishop, six discourses in Toulouse. His career as a preacher had come to an abrupt and unexpected conclusion: for in the mean time that virtuous republic, which Lamartine and his brethren had begun so mildly, had fallen into desperate troubles, and the sharp and sudden stroke of the _coup d’état_ had shocked society in France into a new mood. Freedom of speech, eloquence itself, went suddenly out of fashion. Silence was best when there was so little to say that could be anyhow consolatory to the people or satisfactory to the ruler. With a delicate but indignant reticence, M. de Montalembert indicates thus the reason of his friend’s sudden withdrawal from the pulpit:— “I do not think that any formal interdiction emanating even from the temporal authorities had ever been pronounced against him; but there was a general sentiment that this bold and free language which he had used for twenty years, under all changes, without meeting any obstacle, without recognising any curb but that of orthodoxy, was now out of date. Evil days had come for the struggles and the triumphs of eloquence. It was universally repudiated, and made responsible for all the misfortunes of the country, for all the dangers of society, by a triumphant revenge of those who had never been able to make any man listen to them. The prince of sacred eloquence had thus to be silent. He said afterwards, ‘I left the pulpit in a spontaneous fear of my liberty before an age which was no longer free. I perceive,’ he added, ‘that in my thoughts, in my language, in my past, in what remains to me of future, I also was a kind of freedom, and that my hour had come to disappear like the others.’”