inferentially, with what fervour he sings,
nevertheless! His words ring through these
noble war-songs as with the resonance of a
trumpet. What a tender and elevated pathos
there is in the commemoration of the Hero's
Death, Le Cinq Mai, eighteen hundred and
twenty-one, at Longwood! What a tenacity
of love and admiration in the colloquy
between the old soldiers of the grand army,
les Deux Grenadiers! How evidently the
old man delights to sing of the Old Times in
respect of the Old Flag, and the Old
Sergeant, and the Old Corporal! The Old Flag
treasured up in secret, dusty and faded, under
the mattress; the Old Sergeant talking
rapturously of the ensanguined past, to his
pretty daughter; the Old Corporal marching
to death, with the pipe between his teeth,
muttering to the young troopers through the
puffs of tobacco, as they move on with
measured tread towards the place of execution:—

                    "Conscrits au pas;
                    Ne pleurez pas,
                    Ne pleurez pas;
                    Marchez au pas,
        Au pas, au pas, au pas, au pas!"

                "Recruits—march free!
                Weep not for me,
                Weep not for me,
                Keep step—march free!
Keep step, keep step, keep step, keep step!"

The grandest of all these heroic chansons,
however, yet remains to be particularised,
the glorious Recollections of the People,
called simply Souvenirs du Peuple, in which
(as usual, without a whisper of his name)
the historic form of Napoleon gleams forth
vividly before the popular imagination,
transfigured! An old grandame is the
narrator; and a party of villagers, clustered
around her as she sits in the evening
twilight, are the listeners and interlocutors.
The refrain of this song in particular
has something wonderful in its strange
and scarcely definable blending of variety
with monotony. Monotony in effect as all
tending to the one purpose; variety of treatment
as helping to keep alive, at its utmost
intensity, the interest first awakened. The
villagers entreat the old grandame to talk to
them about the Great Man, whose deeds
long past, still, like events of yesterday,
captivate the popular heart in their
remembrance. And she talks—talks of her
own personal recollections. She has seen
him herself: they are full of wonder. He
has given her Good-day at her cottage door,
as he passed through the village with a
retinue of kings. "What!" they exclaim.
"He has spoken to you, mother? He has
spoken to you?" Everything is described
by the old grandame minutely, with all the
particularity of a photograph. The grey
great-coat, the three-cornered hat, the smile
which she says was so sweet, "était bien
doux." They hang upon every syllable,
exclaiming again, "What brave days for you,
mother! What brave days for you!" Her
recollections now change in their tone; she
talks no longer of his glory, but of the disasters
portending his downfal. One evening,
"as it might be this," she tells them, he came
again to her cottage, and entered. No
retinue of kings at his heels then, but a feeble
escort, weary and dejected. "Seated in this
very chair," she says, he sighed, "Oh! War,
War!" "What!" they exclaim. "Then
he sat there, mother? Then he sat there?"
It ends, this apotheosis of a popular hero in
song—as such a song should end—with tears
and words of benediction. In every way it
is Béranger's master-piece.

It was not, of course, by a single bound
that Pierre Jean de Béranger attained this
conspicuous elevation, or rather this absolute
pre-eminence as a song-writer. As might
be said in the instance of almost every
self-made man on record, his were indeed but
very small beginnings. At the outset, a boy-waiter
at a little tavern or auberge kept by
a prim old aunt of his at Péronne. Afterwards,
like Franklin, or our own gifted and
lamented Jerrold, a compositor; this also at
the town of Péronne, at a M. Laisney's
printing establishment. Here, handling the
type, he seems to have caught from them
the old ineradicable disease of writing, the
cacoëthes scribendi, and to have instinctively
aspired to the dignity of authorship.
Animated by his new-born ambition, Béranger
hastened from the provinces to his native
capital, and there, in that "golden and
miserable Paris," boldly tried his fortunes in
literature. It was at this most critical period
of his history that he passed through
many and bitter hardships. Hardships from
which he was only extricated by means
of the sole patronage he is known to have
ever accepted—patronage coming to him
appropriately from the First Consul's
brother, afterwards known as the Prince
di Canino, M. Lucien Bonaparte. Having in
eighteen hundred and three, by a fortunate
inspiration, enclosed some of his MS. verses
to this amiable cultivator of the fine arts
and of letters, the young, unfriended, and
impoverished adventurer, received three days
afterwards the exquisite consolation of the
verbal, and, with it, the substantial sympathy
of his new-found Mecænas. How amply and
abundantly he repaid the author of the epic
of Charlemagne for that sympathy, every
one knows who has chanced to read the
grateful note of eighteen hundred and thirty-three,
in most eloquent prose explanatory of
his ever-memorable Dedication.

It has been observed in reference to Béranger,
as something in every way most remarkable,
that he of all men remained to the last
without the cross and ribbon of the Legion
of Honour, in a land where merit, however
insignificant—sometimes, indeed, de-merit