Lamartine spent two winters at Paris after the Restoration. His former acquaintances were scattered, and he had new ones to make. He was for a time solitary and little occupied. He was, nevertheless, resolute in his quest for an opening into public life. His friend Virieu and others introduced him to persons of distinction and one step led presently to another. The passion for literature served to place him on a friendly footing with others of similar tastes, and he became able after a while to enumerate among his acquaintances Chateaubriand, the “Napoleon of French literature,” Lamennais, the French Savonarola, Rocher, Aimé Martin, De Vigny. The epoch of the Restoration was also the epoch of the Revival of Letters in France. The Revolution had sent scholars and literary men to the scaffold or driven them into exile, and Bonaparte had attempted to level all learning and philosophic culture to the plane of physical and mathematical science. Whatever might elevate the human soul was not tolerated. He aspired to restore the Sixteenth century at the end of the Eighteenth and required literature to be adapted to that end. Louis XVIII. was always broad and liberal in his sentiments, and even before the Revolution he had cherished familiar relations with literary men and men of learning. His long term of enforced leisure, during his absence from France, and a weakness in his limbs which compelled him to sedentary life, had tended to deepen his interest in such pursuits. He was emphatically a king of the fireside. The emigrants that returned with him to France, had but imperfectly apprehended the change. Those most bigoted formed a coterie around the Count D’Artois; others endeavored to qualify the action of the King. Hence the court was a combination of old royalty with a new order of things. A galaxy of stars of the first magnitude was now shining in France. Naturally Lamartine was dazzled by them when he came to Paris. Observing that several young men were recognized in the literary world, he again cherished the notion of publishing. While himself without employment he conceived the plan of a long poem and actually wrote several cantos. It was to be the history of a human soul and its migrations through successive terms of existence and forms of experience till its eventual reunion to the Centre of the Universe, God. He also projected and began several other compositions. He labored incessantly to perfect his style, till it became, though diffuse, a model of elegance, energy and correctness.