The amiable, clever man, whose house was for a number of years the rendezvous of the men of letters who made their _début_ about 1830, the place where all the talented young beginners repaired to seek encouragement and, if possible, permission to read a ballad or a little piece of prose before the select company which assembled there on Sunday afternoons, this man in his proper person represents the extreme of Romantic fantasticality in the literature of the period. The fantastic supernaturalism which was the main characteristic of German Romanticism, is only one of the poles of French Romanticism; or, to speak more correctly, it is merely one of its elements--in some of the most notable men of the school a weak and subordinate, in others an important element, but an element always present. In Victor Hugo's case it announces itself at once, in his _Ronde du Sabbat_, and makes itself forcibly felt in the great _Légende des Siècles_, though in this latter the legend is only naïve history; we have a glimpse of it even in the rationalistic Mérimée (half explained away in _La Vénus d'Ille_, more distinct in _La Vision de Charles XI._ and _Les âmes du purgatoire_); it reigns, half-seraphic, half-sanguinarily sensual, in Lamartine's _La chute d'un ange_; it pervades Quinet's pantheistically vague _Ahasvère_; it appears in George Sand's old age in the pretty fairy-tales she writes for her grandchildren; it occupies even the plastic Gautier in the many tales in which he allows himself to be influenced by Hoffmann; and, as Swedenborgian spiritism, it actually, in a romance like _Séraphitus-Séraphita_, completes Balzac's great _Comédie Humaine_. But in no other author has it the naïve originality and the poetic force which distinguish Nodier. [1] Nodier's youth and first literary efforts are described in _The Emigrant Literature_. V RETROSPECT--FOREIGN INFLUENCES The new literary and artistic movement had both foreign and indigenous sources. The foreign are the more clearly evident. As has already been observed, the older foreign literature which had hitherto been kept out of France, and the new, which was captivating men's minds by its novelty, were simultaneously seized on and assimilated by the young generation, with an eagerness exactly proportioned to the vehemence with which the works in question repudiated the rules adhered to in earlier French literature. Before the eyes of the young school there was, as it were, a prism, which refracted all rays in a certain uniform manner. The rays which passed through changed their character in the process.