_Growth after Death._--Those few daring words about moral matters which Fontenelle threw into his immortal _Dialogues of the Dead,_ were regarded by his age as paradoxes and amusements of a not unscrupulous wit; even the highest judges of taste and intellect saw nothing more in them,--indeed, Fontenelle himself perhaps saw nothing more. Then something incredible takes place: these thoughts become truths! Science proves them! The game becomes serious! And we read those dialogues with a feeling different from that with which Voltaire and Helvetius read them, and we involuntarily raise their originator into another and _much higher_ class of intellects than they did.--Rightly?' Wrongly? 95. _Chamfort._--That such a judge of men and of the multitude as Chamfort should side with the multitude, instead of standing apart in philosophical resignation and defence--I am at a loss to explain this, except as follows:--There was an instinct in him stronger than his wisdom, and it had never been gratified: the hatred against all _noblesse_ of blood; perhaps his mother's old and only too explicable hatred, which was consecrated in him by love of her,--an instinct of revenge from his boyhood, which waited for the hour to avenge his mother. But then the course of his life, his genius, and alas! most of all, perhaps, the paternal blood in his veins, had seduced him to rank and consider himself equal to the _noblesse--_for many, many years! In the end, however, he could not endure the sight of himself, the "old man" under the old _régime,_ any longer; he got into a violent, penitential passion, and _in this state_ he put on the raiment of the populace as _his_ special kind of hair-shirt! His bad conscience was the neglect of revenge.--If Chamfort had then been a little more of the philosopher, the Revolution would not have had its tragic wit and its sharpest sting; it would have been regarded as a much more stupid affair, and would have had no such seductive influence on men's minds. But Chamfort's hatred and revenge educated an entire generation; and the most illustrious men passed through his school. Let us but consider that Mirabeau looked up to Chamfort as to his higher and older self, from whom he expected (and endured) impulses, warnings, and condemnations,--Mirabeau, who as a man belongs to an entirely different order of greatness, as the very foremost among the statesman-geniuses of yesterday and to-day.--Strange, that in spite of such a friend and advocate--we possess Mirabeau's letters to Chamfort--this wittiest of all moralists has remained unfamiliar to the French, quite the same as Stendhal, who has perhaps had the most penetrating eyes and ears of any. Frenchman of _this_ century. Is it because the latter had really too much of the German and the Englishman in his nature for the Parisians to endure him?--while Chamfort, a man with ample knowledge of the profundities and secret motives of the soul, gloomy, suffering,