Literature also had its serious mission, and the battle of the romanticists shook Paris almost as violently as a political revolution. Through it all science was marching with steady gaze, waiting for the hour when it should lay its cold hand on the heart of society. And with all these movements Sainte-Beuve was more or less intimately concerned. As a boy he brought with him to Paris the pietistic sentiments of his mother and an aunt on whom, his father being dead, his training had devolved. Upon these sentiments he soon imposed the philosophy of the eighteenth century, followed by a close study of the Revolution. It is noteworthy that his first journalistic work on the _Globe_ was a literary description of the places in Greece to which the war for independence was calling attention, and the reviewing of various memoirs of the French Revolution. From these influences he passed to the _cénacle_ of Victor Hugo, and became one of the champions of the new romantic school. Meanwhile literature was mingled with romance of another sort, and the story of the critic's friendship for the haughty poet and of his love for the poet's wife is of a kind almost incomprehensible to the Anglo-Saxon mind. It may be said in passing that the letters of Sainte-Beuve to M. and Mme. Hugo, which have only to-day been recovered and published in the _Revue de Paris_, throw rather a new light on this whole affair. They do not exculpate Sainte-Beuve, but they at least free him from ridicule. His successful passion for Mme. Hugo, with its abrupt close when Mme. Hugo's daughter came to her first confession, and his tormented courtship of Mme. d'Arbouville in later years, were the chief elements in that _éducation sentimentale_ which made him so cunning in the secrets of the feminine breast.