Sainte-Beuve, with whom the art of female biography seems to have died, and who has given us so many softly touched and profoundly understood portraits, is here engaged with one of his own personal friends and contemporaries. This is no study of a heroine long dead, and draped in the obsolete and winning costume of the Empire or the Revolution, but of an anxious woman concerned with the hardship and grime of our own day, "amid the dust and defilement of the city, on the highway, always in quest of lodgings, climbing to the fifth story, wounded on every angle." Only sympathy and a poetic touchstone could bring out the essence and sweetness of a nature so unhappily disguised; but Sainte-Beuve, discarding with a single gesture her penitential mask and hood, finds Madame Desbordes-Valmore "polished, gracious, and even hospitable, investing everything with a certain attractive and artistic air, hiding her griefs under a natural grace, lighted even by gleams of merriment." The poor details of her life he contrives to lose under a purposed artlessness of narrative and a caressing superfluity of loyal eulogy. We learn, however, that Mademoiselle Desbordes was born at Douai in 1786, and died in Paris in 1859. Daughter of a heraldic painter, the necessities of her family obliged her to make a voyage, as a child, to Guadeloupe, in the hope of receiving aid from a rich relative, and a little later to go upon the stage. In the provinces, and occasionally at Paris, she played in the role of _ingenue_ with an exquisite address, succeeding because such a part was really a natural expression of herself: she thus won the abiding friendship of the great Mars, who turned to the young comedienne a little-suspected and tender side of her own character. Mademoiselle Desbordes' artistic charm was infinite, and she controlled with innocent ease the fountain of tears, whitening the whole parterre with pocket-handkerchiefs when she appeared as the Eveline, Claudine and Eulalie of French sentimental drama. But she felt keenly the social ostracism which was still strong toward the stage of 1800, and bewailed in her poetry the "honors divine by night allowed, by day anathematized." In 1817 she married an actor, M. Valmore, who subsequently disappeared into obscure official life, accepting with joy a position as catalogue-maker in the National Library. Her relatives, and even her eldest daughter, received small government favors, while her own little pension, when it came, was so distasteful that for a long time she could not bring herself to apply for the payments. She was a confirmed patriot, shrank from the favors of the throne, was ill for six weeks after Waterloo, and hailed with delight the revolution of '48, which for some time stopped her pension and impoverished her. After twenty years of the stage she retired into the greater privacy of literature, and published various collections of verse which struck a