Otherwise they would be too extreme—and too susceptible in their delicate constitution: and they await the reader who is capable of delving under their skin, of recognizing the hidden vibration. But time has reaped its revenge on this caution by Sainte-Beuve; the eye skims the surface of his writings, there’s a certain irritation about his deafness to writers he doesn’t know, writers he doesn’t wish to acknowledge (this is Proust’s claim), and meanwhile we forget to consider his work with the same farsightedness that he is accused of denying to the work of others.

No one had greater respect for the conventions of literary life than Sainte-Beuve. As he lay dying, he was still dictating a few polite lines of reply to an article by Elme-Marie Caro (“What sweetness! what comfort! how many filtered truths that bring light, not without some small remorse!”).⁷⁵⁶ In no one else did those conventions produce so much venom. Part of this venom went into his posthumous Cahiers, bitter accumulations of color. Another part of it, for three years between 1843 and 1845, went to Switzerland, where Juste Olivier’s Revue suisse published the scurrilous “Chroniques parisiennes,” written anonymously by Sainte-Beuve. In any event, the author insinuated wryly, “Paris only gets worried about what is printed in Paris.”⁷⁵⁷ And so, two weeks after having loyally praised Chateaubriand’s La Vie de Rancé in the Revue des deux mondes (“When it comes to M. de Chateaubriand, the critic is no longer such: he limits himself to collecting flowers along the way and filling his basket with them”), the same pen greeted it with sarcasm in the Revue suisse.⁷⁵⁸ Sainte-Beuve well recalled how the hollow sounds of Chateaubriand had echoed through his literary youth, how he used to see him beside Madame Récamier, who “each day had a thousand charming inventions for offering him new and fresh praise,” of which the melancholy old man never grew tired: “she gathered friends, new admirers on every side.⁷⁵⁹ She had us all bound to the feet of his statue with a golden chain.” Sainte-Beuve had long been a timid acolyte at the pretty sanctuary of the Abbaye-aux-Bois: the chairs were arranged in circles, like planetary orbits, and Chateaubriand used to enter with the manuscript of Mémoires d’outre-tombe wrapped in a silk handkerchief. During those years, awed by the fame of the master and by Madame Récamier, the young critic could never have suggested what to him seemed evident: that Chateaubriand didn’t have as much to do with religion, with politics, with thought as he had with the corrosive cult of just two, jealous powers: literature and women. And Sainte-Beuve shuddered all the more, since he recognized a similar vocation in himself: but closed up inside his study, or in a room of the Bibliothèque Mazarine, or lost in the forays of an anonymous Parisian rôdeur, though always camouflaged in a studious grisaille, with his housekeeper in the background holding his bag. And this vocation was carried on there for years, without American forests, or solid aristocratic walls, or journeys to the Holy Land and foreign lagoons. His soul, inspired by the prematurely wizened verses of Joseph Delorme, possessed “as its only journey that from Amiens to Paris, with perhaps the occasional excursion to Rouen during vacations from the École de Médicine.”⁷⁶⁰ But the moment had come when the English newspapers described Chateaubriand as “the good old man.” Sainte-Beuve translated it mischievously as “vieux bonhomme—simple old soul,” adding cruelly: “This means being crowned with laurel and with a nightcap at one and the same time.”⁷⁶¹