“His enemies pretended that you had but to mention Michelet, Balzac, and Victor Hugo to see Sainte-Beuve in three degrees of rage. He had, it is true, distinct expressions on hearing those authors discussed. The phrase then much used in speaking of an original personality, ‘He is like a character out of Balzac,’ always threw my master into a temper. I cannot remember, however, having seen him in one of those famous rages which made Barbey d’Aurévilly say that ‘Sainte-Beuve was a clever man with the temper of a turkey!’ The former was much nearer the truth when he called the author of _Les Lundis_ a French Wordsworth, or compared him to a lay _bénédictin_. He had a way of reading a newly acquired volume as he walked through the streets that was typical of his life. My master was always studying and always advancing. “He never entirely recovered from his mortification at being hissed by the students on the occasion of his first lecture at the Collège de France. Returning home he loaded two pistols, one for the first student who should again insult him, and the other to blow out his own brains. It was no idle threat. The man Guizot had nicknamed ‘Werther’ was capable of executing his plan, for this causeless unpopularity was anguish to him. After his death, I found those two pistols loaded in his bedroom, but justice had been done another way. All opposition had vanished. Every student in the ‘Quarter’ followed the modest funeral of their Senator, who had become the champion of literary liberty in an epoch when poetry was held in chains. “The Empire which made him Senator gained, however, but an indocile recruit. On his one visit to Compiègne in 1863, the Emperor, wishing to be particularly gracious, said to him, ‘I always read the _Moniteur_ on Monday, when your article appears.’ Unfortunately for this compliment, it was the _Constitutionnel_ that had been publishing the _Nouveaux Lundis_ for more than four years. In spite of the united efforts of his friends, Sainte-Beuve could not be brought to the point of complimenting Napoleon III. on his _Life of Cæsar_. The author of _Les Consolations_ remained through life the proudest and most independent of men, a bourgeois, enemy of all tyranny, asking protection of no one. And what a worker! Reading, sifting, studying, analyzing his subject before composing one of his famous _Lundis_, a literary portrait which he aimed at making complete and final. One of these articles cost him as much labor as other authors give to the composition of a volume.