I did not meet the Abbé Delille[253] until 1798, in London, and I never saw Rulhière[254], who lives through Madame d'Egmont[255] and makes her live, nor Palissot[256], nor Beaumarchais[257], nor Marmontel[258]. The same with Chénier[259], whom I never met, who has often attacked me, to whom I never replied, and whose place at the Institute was to be the cause of one of the crises of my life. [Sidenote: Eighteenth-century writers.] When I read over again the majority of the writers of the eighteenth century, I am amazed to think of the renown which they achieved and of my former admiration for them. Whether it be that the language has made progress, or that it has gone backward, or that we have advanced in civilization or retreated towards barbarism, it is certain that I find something threadbare, antiquated, grizzled, cold, and lifeless in the authors who were the delight of my youth. I find even in the greatest writers of the Voltairean age things that are poor in sentiment, thought, and style. Whom am I to blame for my disappointment? I fear the chief guilt lies with myself; born innovator that I am, I may perhaps have communicated to younger generations the malady with which I was seized. Terror-stricken, in vain I cry to my children, "Do not forget your French!" They reply in the words of the Limosin to Pantagruel, that they come "from alme, inclyte and celebrate academy, which is vocitated Lutetia[260]." This habit of latinizing and hellenizing our language is not new, as we see: Rabelais cured it, it reappeared in Ronsard[261]; Boileau attacked it. In our time it has been revived by science; our revolutionaries, great Greeks by nature, have compelled our merchants and farmers to calculate in hectares, hectolitres, kilometers, millimeters, decagrams: politics have "ronsardized" everything. I might have spoken here of M. de La Harpe, whom I knew at that time, and to whom I will return; I might have added M. de Fontanes' portrait to my gallery; but although my acquaintance with that excellent man began in 1789, it was not until we met in England that I became united to him in a friendship which ever increased with bad, and never diminished with good fortune: I will tell you of him later in all the effusion of my heart. I shall have no talents to depict but those which no longer console the earth. The death of my friend has occurred at the moment when my recollections were leading me to trace the commencement of his life[262]. So great a flight is our existence that, if we do not write down in the evening what has happened in the morning, our work obstructs us, and we no longer have the time to keep it posted up. This does not prevent us from wasting our years, from flinging to the winds the hours which are for men the seeds of eternity. *