Faith, as for me, Ilaugh!
        Oh! but the Little Grey Man loves chaff!"

or, better still, that of the famous King of
Yvetot:

      "Pour toute garde il n'avait rien
          Qu'un chien.
      Oh! oh! oh! oh! ah! ah! ah! ah!
      Quel bon petit roi c'était là!
          La, la!"

       "Whose only guard was a dog—
          Queer dog!
      [Quite a Punch with Toby!]
      Oh! oh! oh! oh! ah! ah! ah! ah!
      What a funny little king was that—
          La, la!"

His pensive and purely meditative songs,
however, must always be regarded as amongst
his most eminently beautiful. The exquisite
little poem about The Shooting Stars,
especially, with its closing couplet:

                "Ce n'est qu'une étoile qui file,
                Qui file, file, et disparaît."

                "'Tis only a star that shoots,
                That shoots, shoots, and disappears!"

Daintiest among the daintiest of these
particular compositions of his, moreover, being his
far-famed song, If I were a little Bird! That
graceful freak of fancy, in which he exclaims
continually, like a voice from the boughs,

            "Je volerais vite, vite, vite,
                Si j'étais petit oiseau."
            "I would fly quick, quick, quick,
                 If I were a little bird."

Several of these world-renowned chansons
are nevertheless, in reality strange to tell,
about mere abstractions. But how much
Béranger could make of themes thus
apparently vague and impalpable, those will very
well remember, who are familiar with his
songs on Fortune and on Happiness. Yet
to understand thoroughly that he loves to
deal in something better than mere abstractions,
it is only necessary to contemplate for
a moment, his celebration of such exceedingly
substantial personages as Roger Bontemps,
or Madame Grégoire; or to look at his
ingenious delineation of Jean de Paris and
Monsieur Judas; to say nothing of that
wonderful scapegrace Paillasse. Sometimes, as
in the half-playful, half-pathetic equivoque
about The Blind Mother—wherein Lise, with
inimitable effrontery, attributes the opening
window to the heat! and the opening door
to the wind! and the sound of kisses to
the bird in its osier cage! (Colin, the rogue,
all the while at her elbow, invisible to La Mère
Aveugle, but suspected!)—Béranger
compresses within half-a-dozen sparkling stanzas,
the interest of a little romance, and, with the
interest also, the resistless fascination.

His chief glory as a song-writer, however,
springs incontestably from his wondrous
identification of himself with the patriotic ardour,
and the national enthusiasm, and the warlike
splendour, of his Fatherland. Especially, and
beyond all, from his intimate, it should rather
be said, his inextricable, interweaving of his
own poetic fame with the heroic renown of
Napoleon. Henceforth their names will live
together in the popular remembrance—
celebrities so strangely contrasting, and yet at
the same time so curiously harmonious! The
founder of an empire and of a dynasty,
conqueror at once and lawgiver: and, side by
side with that new Sesostris, the homely
poet who sang of his glory, who loved to
call himself simply by his one enviable but
unpretending title of Chansonnier. Béranger,
more even than Manzoni, has acquired for
himself the right of being designated the
Poet of Napoleon. Already that right has,
during a very long interval, been
universally recognised—already!  and yet there
are some fifty songs, relating exclusively to
the memories of the Empire, which have
never yet appeared. Fifty original chansons
written by Béranger about Napoleon;
deposited several years ago by their author in the
hands of a Paris notary, with an ulterior
view to their posthumous publication. Need
any one hint with what eagerness that
posthumous publication is at this moment anticipated?
Scarcely; to those at least, who
know familiarly the glorious songs chanted
long since to the memory of Napoleon the
Great by the thrilling voice of Pierre Jean
de Béranger! Songs in which it is curious
to note that never once is the name of Napoleon
articulated. He is only spoken of in
them as "le grand homme," or "le bon
empereur," or by some such phrase—lovingly
and reverently. The merest allusion is
enough; the Hero shines forth through the
verse of the Songwriter too distinctly to
require one solitary syllable with a view to
his identification. Besides which, the
catastrophe of Mont Saint Jean and the sorrowful
exile in Saint Helena were altogether too
freshly and too painfully in the popular
remembrance when Béranger wrote, to admit of his
articulating without a pang, through such
cries of homage and affection as rang out
wildly in those impassioned songs, the name
of all others consecrated to the love and
admiration of France: first of all by many
unparalleled achievements: afterwards, and
yet more, by sufferings profound and
overwhelming. His evidently intentional
suppression of Napoleon's name in all the
war-songs, appears indeed to be born of the
same profound emotions of grief, dictating, in
one of his songs, the avowedly intentional
suppression of the name of Waterloo.
Remembering the anguish with which it is
associated, he cries out that "by that name
his verse shall never be saddened." Is not
the reticence as significant in regard to
Napoleon as in regard to Waterloo?

        "Son nom jamais n'attristera mes vers."

Yet, though he sings of him thus merely