There is Beranger, his whole secret, summed up in small by a masterhand. What Beranger, then, did was to choose wisely, with long heed, some single, simple, obvious sentiment, appealing to every body's experience, shut that sentiment up into a short, neat, striking, rememberable form of words suited to be sung, make of that form of words a refrain to recur at intervals, and finally on that refrain build up, one after another to the end, the stanzas of his song. He worked slowly and painfully. His genius was never very prolific. The time of his chief fruitfulness was short, covering only fifteen years, the fifteen years between Waterloo (1815) and the elevation of Louis Philippe to the throne of France (1830). During this time his largest product hardly exceeded a dozen songs a year. Beranger's first discipline to his art may be considered to have been a certain favorite diversion of his childhood, the carving of cherry-stones. This exercise of skill he practiced sedulously with delight when a boy, and in it learned the long, minute patience of art. The man's songs were cut gems laboriously finished, like the boy's carvings in cherry-stones. Beranger became immensely popular. He remained so to the end. When he died, and it was after prolonged silence on his part--if one can call silence a period marked, indeed, by non-production, but filled with the singing, from land's end to land's end, of his songs in every mouth--when he died the empire buried him and the nation attended his funeral. He had been born poor, and he was reared in poverty. Rich he would not be, when a man. He took infinite pains to be of the people, and he succeeded. The people were loving and honoring themselves in loving and honoring Beranger. Sainte-Beuve, with that critical incredulity of his, thought that Beranger carried his demonstrative cultivation of the "people" to the point of something like affectation. Perhaps; but the affectation, if it was such, had a sound basis in it of real instinctive popular sympathy. Still, Beranger's emphasized identification of himself with the people was not all a matter of instinct with him. It was in part a matter of deliberately adopted policy. He said: The people wanted a man to speak to them the language they love and understand, and to create imitators to vary and multiply versions of the same text. _I have been that man._ Beranger was quite willing to make any moral descent that might seem to him necessary in order to reach his audience. He may have been instinctively, but he was also deliberately, low and lewd in some of his songs. Without their help [said he, that is without the help of such immoral songs] I am disposed to think that the others would not have been able to go so far, or so low, or even so high; no offense in this last word to the virtues of good society.