The short period during which all meet and combine is the blossoming time of literature. Before many years pass Nodier is in his grave, Hugo is living in exile in Jersey, Alexandre Dumas is turning literature into a trade, Sainte-Beuve and Gautier are to be found in Princess Mathilde's circle, Mérimée is presiding over the Empress Eugenie's courts of love, De Musset sits solitary over his absinthe, and George Sand has retired to Nohant. One and all in their riper years made new connections, connections which aided their development; but their boldest and freshest, if not always their most refined and beautiful work was done at the time when they were holding their first meetings in Charles Nodier's quarters at the Arsenal, or in the apartments in the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs where Hugo and his pretty young wife kept house on their 2000 francs a year, or in Petrus Borel's garret, where the host's Hernani cloak decorated the wall in company with a sketch by Devéria and a copy of a Giorgione, and where, owing to lack of chairs, at least half of the company had to stand. These young Romanticists felt like brothers, like fellow-conspirators; they felt that they were the sharers in a sweet and invigorating secret; and this gave to the works of the school a flavour, an aroma like that of the noble wines of a year when the vintage has been more than ordinarily good. Ah! that bouquet of 1830! There is no other in the century that can be compared with it. In all the arts a break with tradition was aimed at and demanded. The inward fire was to glow through and dissolve the old musical forms, to devour lines and contours and transform painting into colour symphonies, to rejuvenate literature. In all the arts colour, passion, and style were aimed at and demanded--colour with such urgency that the most gifted painter of the period, Delacroix, neglected drawing for it; passion with such ardour that both lyric poetry and the drama were in danger of degenerating into hysteric foolishness; style with such artistic enthusiasm that some of the younger men, such as those two opposite poles, Mérimée and Gautier, neglected the human groundwork of their art and became devotees of style pure and simple. The original, the unconscious, the popular was sought after and demanded. "We have been rhetoricians," men cried; "we have never understood the simple and the illogical--the savage, the people, the child, woman, the poet!"