BARON DUDEVANT, husband of GEORGE SAND, the French papers lately declared had died in an obscure apartment in Paris; but it appears, on the contrary, that he is still living, in true baronial style, at his chateau on the Garonne. A correspondent of the _Tribune_ says, "he never reads his wife's romances, and that his decease was believed in Paris, for several literary gentlemen of eminence are said to have laid their hands and fortunes at the feet of the large-hearted woman" who was supposed to be a widow. * * * * * AUGUSTE COMTE has just published the first volume of a new work, his _Systeme de Politique Positive_. In his great work, _Philosophie Positive_, he was forced by his method to proceed objectively--from the world up to man; he now proceeds subjectively--from man to the world. This system of Positive Polity he calls a Treatise of Sociology, instituting the Religion of Humanity. * * * * * EMILE DE GIRARDIN announces a new pamphlet, the title of which sets one thinking, _La Révolution Légale par la Présidence d'un Ouvrier_. (The Revolution Legal through the Presidency of a Workman.) * * * * * LAMARTINE has published the first volume of _The History of the Restoration of the Monarchy in France_. It is intended as a sequel to his History of the Girondins, and this initial volume comprises the closing days of the Empire, the last great struggle of Napoleon with the combined armies in 1814, and the abdication at Fontainbleau. The tone throughout is derived from the partizan feelings of the present time. Its characteristic is an elaborate and determined depreciation of the emperor. The author's apparent ambition is to be striking, and he sometimes is successful: to be just or wise is scarcely in his nature. For ourselves, we are so well acquainted with the life of Napoleon--with the workings of that most powerful practical intelligence that God has yet suffered to exist among mankind--that we are not in any way affected by these efforts of a hungry rhetorician to disparage him. In his new book, as in his _Girondins_, M. Lamartine has not chosen to give us any authorities. What he says as to facts may be true, but we have only his word for it; and long ago, before M. Lamartine became a great man in affairs, we learned from his _Pilgrimage to the Holy Land_, that his word is of very little value. We confess an admiration for parts of his _Elvire_ and for some of his minor poems, but it is the youthful poet we admire, not the author of the sickly sentimentalism in his recent romantic memoirs, far less the historian, who to get himself out of difficulties induced by early extravagancies can play marketable tricks with the most awful shade that moves in the twilight of men's memories about the world. * * * * *