Near the Barrière des Martyrs, below Montmartre, you see the Rue de la Tour-d'Auvergne. In this half-built, half-paved street, in a little house hiding behind a little garden and calculated upon the modesty of present-day fortunes, you will find the illustrious song-writer. A bald head, a somewhat rustic, but keen and voluptuous air announce the poet. I love to rest my eyes on that plebeian countenance, after looking at so many royal faces; I compare those so greatly different types: on the monarchical brows one sees something of an exalted nature, but blighted, impotent, effaced; on the democratic brows appears a common physical nature, but one recognises a lofty intellectual nature: the monarchical brow has lost a crown; the popular brow awaits one. One day I asked Béranger (I beg him to forgive me for becoming as familiar as his fame), I asked him to show me some of his unknown works: "Do you know," he said, "that I began by being your disciple? I was mad on the _Génie du Christianisme_, and I wrote Christian idylls: scenes in the life of a country priest, pictures of religious worship in the villages and in the midst of the harvest." M. Augustin Thierry has told me that the Battle of the Franks in the _Martyrs_ suggested to him a new manner of writing history: nothing has flattered me more than to find my memory occupying a place at the commencement of the talent of the historian Thierry and the poet Béranger. Our song-writer has the several qualities upon which Voltaire insists for the ballad: "To succeed well in these little works," says the author of so many graceful poems, "one needs refinement and sentiment of intellect, to have harmony in one's head, not to lower one's self over much, and to know how not to be too long." Béranger has many muses, all of them charming; and, when those muses are women, he loves them all. When they betray him, he does not turn to elegiacs; and nevertheless there is a feeling of sadness at the bottom of his gaiety: his is a serious face that smiles; it is philosophy saying its prayers. My friendship for Béranger earned me many expressions of astonishment on the part of what was called my party. An old knight of St. Louis, personally unknown to me, wrote to me from his distant turret: "Rejoice, sir, at being praised by one who has slapped the face of your King and your God." Well said, my gallant nobleman! You are a poet too. [Sidenote: Béranger.] At the end of a dinner at the Café de Paris which I gave to Messieurs de Béranger and Armand Carrel before my departure for Switzerland, M. Béranger sang us his admirable printed song: Chateaubriand, pourquoi fuir ta patrie, Fuir son amour, notre encens et nos soins[360]? In it occurred this stanza on the Bourbons: Et tu voudras t'attacher à leur chute! Connais donc mieux leur folle vanité: Au rang des maux qu'au ciel même elle impute, Leur cœur ingrat met ta fidélité[361].