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Etext by Ian Hillman
I HAVE BEFORE me three volumes which I have read with extraordinary pleasure. They are the records of the lives of a father and a son; they contain a complete family history. In 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville made in this country that tour which was to be the prelude to the publication of his “Democracy,” the most serious book written on America up to that moment by a foreigner. De Tocqueville and Jean-Jacques Ampère were united by a passionate friendship (an amitié passion Sainte-Beuve calls it), and the latter, twenty years afterward, in 1851, followed in the footsteps of the author of the “Democracy,” and made a rapid journey from Canada to Mexico. He, too, of course wrote a book, and his “Promenade en Amérique” is a very genial and kindly composition. We bestow at present a very much less irritable attention upon the impressions of the foreign promenader than at the very distant date of M. Ampère's tour. I should say, indeed, that the European optimist on our shores would at present find it convenient, as a general thing, to keep watch upon his enthusiasm. But M. Ampère's amiable book was certainly disinterested; it was the expression of an eminently appreciative and sociable mind, and one makes no exaggerated claim for it in saying that it introduces the author agreeably to American readers. They may be advised, after a glance at it, to pass on to the volumes whose titles I have transcribed, and which embody a mass of literary matter more entertaining, at the present moment, to people in general than the author's formal compositions. Jean-Jacques Ampère was an accomplished scholar and a very clever man, but he seems to me a rather striking illustration of the common axiom that between two stools one falls to the ground. He was at once a man of books and a man of the world; an ardent savant and an indefatigable traveller. “He could read,” says Sainte-Beuve, “a hieroglyphic phrase on the sarcophagus of a Pharaoh; it befell him one evening before going to sleep, to read a Chinese book among the ruins of Ephesus. We must agree that these are high dilettanteisms of the mind, and within the reach of a very select few.” He wrote so much, on questions of learning, that you wonder he should ever have found a moment to leave his study; and he travelled so much, moved so much in the world, formed so many personal and social ties, had such a genius for conversation, for society, and for friendship, that you wonder he found time to open a book or mend his pen. The verdict of competent criticism has been that Jean-Jacques Ampère sacrificed erudition to observation, and observation to erudition; that he lacked exactness as a savant, and that he lacked frankness as a tourist. Scholars find his “Histoire Romaine à Rome” superficial, and, for what it attempts to be, the profane find it dry. “In the middle of June,” he writes in 1862, “I went with Hébert to Subiaco, a wild spot to which the artist-poet loved to go in search of models. It was during this little journey, on the road to Tivoli, while the horses were resting, that I read to Hébert the first lines of 'L'Histoire Romaine à Rome,' and he then told me frankly that my picture of the Roman Campagna left him cold.” Ampère endeavoured to infuse a little more colour into his sketch; but the opinion of the picturesque painter Hébert has, I imagine, remained that of the general reader, while it is probable, on the other hand, that the author's lighter touches have done little to mitigate the severity of such an authority as Professor Mommsen when, for instance, he finds his confrère exclaiming with emotion, “I believe in Romulus!” Sainte-Beuve, in one of his invaluable foot-notes, applies to Ampère's style a judgment which he had heard passed upon another writer with whom expression erred to excess upon the safe side. “He is like a man who has made a drawing in black lead. When he has done he thinks it still too sharp, and he passes his coat-cuff over it.” But if Ampère as a historian falls short of being a first-rate authority (as a philologist I believe he is considered much sounder), and if, as a describer, he is less brilliant and incisive than some men of greater genius and (possibly) scantier conscience, he recovers his advantages in his letters, in the things that reveal the man himself. Then we see how intelligent, how accomplished, how sympathetic, how indefatigable he was. His letters are always entertaining and always perfectly natural. But what completes their charm here is their graceful and harmonious setting—-the fact that they are offered us in alternation with a hundred other memorials of a singularly pleasing and interesting circle. We gather from it all the complete picture of a society—-a society which by this time has pretty well passed away, and can know no more changes. It is motionless in its place; it is sitting for its likeness. Best of all, the picture has one episode as charming as any that was ever ingeniously devised by an idyllic poet. André-Marie Ampère, the father of Jean-Jacques, was an eminent man of science; he was the first French mathematician of his time and the inventor of the electric telegraph in so far as the following statement, made in the presence of the French Academy of Sciences, entitled him to the name. “As many magnetized needles as letters of the alphabet, put in movement by conductors communicating with the electric battery by means of a keyboard which might be lowered at will, would make possible a telegraphic correspondence which would traverse all distances, and be more prompt to transmit thought than either writing or speech.” Why this idea was merely enunciated, and never applied, I am unable to say; if it had been at that early day put into practice, André-Marie Ampère would now enjoy a renown which would render these few words of introduction quite superfluous. Invented in time to be used at the battle of Waterloo, the electric telegraph might have been the source of a very different current in the affairs of mankind. But this contingency having failed, we are reduced to considering the elder Ampère in the comparatively humble light of the extremely diffident lover of Mlle. Julie Carron. He was the most candid and artless of men, and the history of his courtship is one of the prettiest love stories I know.
“Journal et Correspondance de André-Marie Ampère.” Publics par Mme. H. C. Paris, Hetzel, 1873. “André-Marie Ampère and Jean-Jacques Ampère. Souvenirs et Correspondance.” Recueillis par Mme. H. C. Paris, Hetzel, 1875.Jean-Jacques Ampère, as has been said, had a genius for friendship. He never married, but in the course of his life he had two extremely characteristic affections for women. The object of the first was Mme. Récamier, whose acquaintance he made in his twentieth year (in 1820), and to whom he remained devoted until her death, in 1849. The object of the second was a certain Mme. L——, with whom he became intimate in 1853, in Rome. This lady was a young widow, in feeble health, obliged to spend her winters in the south, where she was accompanied by her parents and her little girl. Ampère had spent much of his life in Rome, and it was about this time that he entered upon that long sojourn of which the principal aim was the composition of a history of the ancient mistress of the world in relation to the present aspect of the localities, and which terminated only with his death. Mme. L——died in Rome in 1859, in a temper of mind which, as Ampère said, made him “touch with his finger the immortality of the soul.” His friendship with her parents was intimate, and his affection for her little girl almost paternal. Ampère died at Pau, in March, 1864, leaving a will by which he bequeathed all his literary remains to M. and Mme. Cheuvreux, and his private papers (those especially relating to his father) to their little granddaughter. It is in this way that the volumes before us have come to be put forth by Mme. Cheuvreux, for the benefit at once of Mlle. L—— and of the public at large. I do not know what this young lady has thought of this mass of literature, but the public has given it a very cordial welcome. Mme. Cheuvreux is a most graceful and intelligent commentator, and her publication has rapidly passed through several editions.
It is unjust to say that we have here simply the history of a father and a son. The Ampère stock was apparently an excellent one, and the reader is interested in taking it a degree further back. The father of André-Marie Ampère was a retired merchant at Lyons when the French revolution broke out. Lyons in 1793 revolted from its terrorist government, and was besieged by the National Convention. The victory of the Convention was of course a harvest for the guillotine, and Jean-Jacques Ampère the elder was one of the most admirable of its victims. In prison, before his death, he wrote his wife a letter, which I regret not having space to quote; it gives one a better opinion of human nature. “Do not speak to Josephine,” he says at the end, “of her fathers misfortune; take good care that she does not know it; as for my son, there is nothing I do not expect from him. So long as you possess them and they possess you, embrace each other in memory of me. I leave my heart to all of you.” For so pure an old stoic as this to say on the edge of the scaffold that there was nothing he did not expect from his only son, left the sole support of two desolate women—-this was a great deal. André was at first stupefied with sorrow, but in time he justified his father's confidence. It seems most singular that in this blood-drenched soil an episode so tender, so redolent of youthful freshness, as the story embodied in the earliest of these letters should so speedily have bloomed—-that, with the hideous shadow of the scaffold still upon him, André Ampère should make so artless, so ingenuous, so innocently awkward a figure. His “adorable bonhomie “—-that is the quality the editor chiefly insists upon, and it certainly must have been of the purest strain not to have been embittered by the contact of wholesale massacre. It was indeed most genuine, and the young man's notes and letters are full of it. The story is a very simple one: he encountered Mlle. Carron, he fell in love with her, he was put upon probation, he married her, she bore him a child, she died. The charm is in the way the tale is told—-by himself, by the young girl, and by her sister (the latter an admirably graphic letter writer).
At twenty-three André Ampère, stuffed with algebra and trigonometry, felt in his own small way the lassitude, the nameless yearnings of Faust. He had given the measure of his scientific genius and his universal curiosity. We have his own word for it that by the time he was eighteen he knew as much mathematics as he ever knew; he had also pushed far into chemistry, and he had cultivated the muse. He had begun various tragedies, and he had placed upon the stocks an epic poem with Columbus for hero and the “Americid” for title. Many years afterward his son found among his papers an ancient yellow scrap, on which the following lines were written: “Having reached the age at which the laws rendered me my own master, my heart sighed in secret at my still being so. Free and insensible up to that time, it wearied of its idleness. Brought up in almost complete solitude, study and reading, which had long been my dearest delights, let me fall into an apathy which I had never felt, and the cry of nature diffused through my soul a vague, insupportable unrest. One day as I was walking after sunset beside a lonely brook . . . . “ But here the fragment ends. What did he see beside the brook? Mlle. Carron, perhaps. If this is so it was on a Sunday in April, 1796, that he took that momentous stroll. He kept a record of his meetings with the young girl, and either then or later he superscribed it in large letters—-Amorum. It is filled with small entries like this, which means little to us now, but which meant much to the poor, trembling, hoping, fearing young mathematician: “26th September. I found her in the garden, without daring to speak to her.—-3d October. I went there. I slipped in a few words more to the mother.—-6th October. I found myself alone with her, without daring to speak to her; they gave me the first bouts-rimés.—-10th October. I filled them out, and slipped them adroitly into her hand.—-13th October. I had carried back the seventh volume of Sévigné; I forgot the eighth and my umbrella.—-2 d November. I went to get my umbrella.—-7th November. I didn't speak that day, on account of the death of M. Montpetit.—-9 th November. I spoke again; Julie told me not to come so often.—-12 th November. Mme. Carron was out; I said a few words to Julie, who regularly blew me up and went off. Elise told me to spend the winter without speaking again.—-16th November. . . . Julie brought me with grace the “Lettres Provinciales.”—-9th December. She opened the door for me in her nightcap, and spoke to me a moment, tête-à-tête, in the kitchen.” He stands there before us like an effigy of bashfulness, tongue-tied, with his heart in his throat, a book under his arm, and the simple good faith of unspotted youth upon his brow. Mlle. Julie was a trifle difficult, as the phrase is; she had already had an excellent offer of marriage, but she had declined it because she thought nothing could make up to her for leaving her parents and her sister. These were plain people, with little money, but what one may call an excellent family tone. They lived in the country, close to Lyons. They thought well of Jean-Jacques, but they thought also that there was no hurry, especially as he had as yet no avocation, and it was their idea to keep him rather at arm's length, though certainly not to let him go. Elise Carron was Julie's elder, and a girl who seems to have combined an excellent heart with the keenest, frankest wit, and with a singular homely felicity of style. She is shrewd, impulsive, positive, humorous, and I should like to quote all her letters. During a part of the winter which followed the entries I have just transcribed, Julie Carron was absent from home, and Elise makes it her duty to entertain poor Ampère and to report of his condition to his mistress. She has a great kindness for him, and though she wishes to amuse her sister, she stops short of tempting her to laugh cruelly. “Poor A——is certainly frozen in some corner, or else he is thawing near you, for I have seen him neither through hole nor through window. . . . Will he come tomorrow? I look always from my place and I see nothing. If he comes and mamma goes out, he will call me to an account; I have prepared a thousand little answers—-always the same; I wish I knew some that would content him without bringing things on too fast, for he interests me by his frankness and his softness, and especially by his tears, which come out without his meaning it. Not the slightest affectation, none of those high-strung phrases which are the language of so many others. Arrange it as you will, but let me love him a little before you love him; he is so good I . . . Mamma insists that Providence will arrange everything; but I say that we must help Providence.” Elise's next letter is in its natural vividness almost a little genre picture. “At last he came yesterday, trembling with cold, and still more with the fear that mamma would be displeased at his having been to see you, or rather to get letters for us. But this is how the thing happened: I see that you want details. You must know that mamma now sits in your place, because she has closed up the door, which used to freeze the room, and in consequence we don't see a bit too well, especially when the snow has been piled up. In short, he comes in and doesn't see the little Pelagot who was behind the nose of the stove. As soon as Claudine went out he said: 'Madame, I saw mademoiselle your daughter.' I stopped him short off, making more and more signs; and he, thinking to plaster it up, replied, 'Claudine is gone out; no one can hear us, I will speak lower.' The child opened her eyes as wide as she was able; when I saw that signs didn't help me I spoke to the wench about her work, about her stocking that was not coming on. He was petrified and wanted to patch it up again, but the piece wouldn't fit the hole.” At last the little Pelagot goes out with her dilatory stocking, and Elise has a long talk with Ampère, which she relates, verbatim, to her sister. “He perceived the first that it was beginning to be late—-which he forgets so easily when you are here. He went off and left me quite amazed at his hat in lacquered cloth, at his fashionable breeches, and his little air, which, I assure you, will change again.” “Guess, dear Julie,” she writes later, “at what we pass our time. We make verses, we scratch them out, and then begin again.” And she goes on to narrate that M. Ampère has been with them and has filled them with the sacred fire. She must close, for she has to help her mamma to begin a play, a drama, perhaps a tragedy! It sounds, very odd, hearing of these two little rustic bourgeoises sitting down amid their pots and pans, at their snow-darkened windows, to literary compositions of his heroic magnitude, and there certainly can be no better illustration of the literary passion of the last century, or of the universal culture of what was called sensibility.
But the spring came, Julie was at home again, and in André's diary the idyllic strain is more emphasized: “24th March. Mlle. Bœuf came while I was reading the tragedy of Louis XVI.; we went into the orchard. Elise sat upon the bench; Julie upon a chair which I brought to her, and I at her feet; she chose my purse to her own taste.—-20th April. I went to carry back La Rochefoucauld; I found no one but Mme. Carron, and asked her leave to bring mamma. I received only a vague answer, but it was satisfactory enough. Julie, Elise, my aunt, and my cousin came to lunch; I served the white wine and drank in a glass which she had rinsed.” A couple of months later he prefixes to an entry a date in large capitals. The record deserved the honour, for it has a charming quaintness. “Monday, 3d July. They came at last to see us, at three-quarters past three. [His poor mother had called, and the Carron ladies were returning her visit.] We went into the alley, where I climbed into the great cherry trees and threw cherries to Julie. Elise, my sister, all of them, came afterward. I gave up my place to François, who lowered branches to us, from which we picked ourselves, to Julie's great entertainment. She sat on a plank on the ground with my sister and Elise, and I sat on the grass beside her. I ate some cherries which had been on her knees. We all four went into the great garden, where she accepted a lily from my hand, and then we went to see the brook. I gave her my hand to climb the little wall, and both hands to get over it again; I remained by her side on the edge of the brook, far from Elise and my sister. We went with them in the evening as far as the windmill, where I sat down near her again, while we all four observed the sunset, which gilded her clothes with a charming light. She carried away a second lily which I gave her in passing.” André Ampère was a man of genius and destined to be recognized as one; but he was a profoundly simple soul, and his naïveté seems to have been unfathomable. It would be impossible to enumerate with a homelier verity the enormous trifles on which young love feeds. André wrote verses; I don't know what they were; certainly there is as little attempt here as possible at elegance of form; the poetry is all in the spirit. There, however, it is deep. The little narrative I have just quoted might have been scratched with a clasp-knife on the windmill tower; but the passion it commemorates is of classic purity; extremes meet; the whole man is in it; it is the passion of Petrarch for Laura, of Danté for Beatrice, of Romeo for Juliet. Extremes meet, I say; and so it seems to me that this artless fragment is, by a happy chance, as graphic, as pictorial, as if a consummate artist had arranged it.
By the time the autumn had come round again Julie knew her mind. When a certain M. Vial comes in and urges André, if his family does nothing for him, to go and seek his fortune in Paris, she pushes him out by the shoulders, and tells him they have no need of his advice. The day apparently has come for Julie to feel the tumults of the heart; we have had no intimation until now that her pretty person (the editor is happily able to establish that it was pretty) was not even a trifle impertinently self-possessed. “26th October. I carried there a little basket of chestnuts. . . . Mme. Carron told me to go into the orchard, where they were. I found only Julie, who seemed as much embarrassed as I; she called Périsse, but I slipped in some words which had relation to my sentiments. . . . I wanted to go back a moment to the orchard, where she had gone to dry some linen, but she avoided me with even more earnestness than the first time. In the evening she told me to read 'Adèle,' and this led to our talking again upon the passions.” He adds a few days later: “We went into the orchard, where I helped to take up the wash; in sport, after some jest of Elise, Julie gave me a charming blow with her fist on the arm. We supped on chestnuts and we came home very late.” Upon this the editor comments very happily: “The orchard, the linen-drying, the reading of 'Adèle,' which provokes a conversation on the passions, André's basket of chestnuts, the charming blow with the fist that he gets in play, the frugal supper—-isn't the picture quite of another age? Only sixty-and-something years separate us from the moment when André wrote his journal, and yet we are far from that innocent idyl. Ah, messieurs the realists, you have made us grow old fast!”
At last, in the spring of 1799, poor André's probation terminates, and Julie bestows her hand upon him. We have some of his letters after the betrothal, in which he addresses his affianced ceremoniously as “Mademoiselle.” There is something very agreeable in this observance of high courtesy in circumstances amid which it might have been expected to be a trifle relaxed. Mlle. Carron was a poor girl; she helped in the family wash. But she conversed upon the passions, and she was familiar with an exact standard of manners. The young couple were married in the month of August of the same year, and André's friend M. Ballanche read a long prose rhapsody, by way of an epithalamium, at the simple wedding feast. André Ampère obtained some pupils in mathematics at Lyons, and his wife spent much of the first year of her marriage with her mother in the country. She was at times, however, with her mother-in-law, Mme. Ampère, at the latter's modest dwelling at Polémieux, near Lyons. While she is away her sister Elise writes to her, with inimitable vigour. Elise really makes the dead things of the past live again. The Carron ladies were hesitating as to where they should spend the winter. In their actual quarters, Mlle. Carron writes, “Mamma finds a great many diversions, and her health is better. Our good neighbours tell us that if we were to remain they wouldn't think of carting themselves over to Charelet, where nevertheless they have already hired lodgings and laid in a stock of wood, which they would quickly sell again. In short, they press us, offer us so heartily all the little distractions which they might share with us. Mme. Darsay makes much of her books and newspapers; her daughter puts forward all the people whom she would catch up in one way or another. She says to me: 'We will amuse our mothers, well both make little caps for the poor, and fritters and tarts, well pray God, well write, and then time passes so fast, so fast.' She makes a hotch-potch of all this, and then kisses me with such friendliness, and shows as much enthusiasm as if I were a being capable of inspiring it. Formerly I wouldn't have been surprised at such greetings; I used with these ladies to put in my little word in the talk; I was gay; we were something for them, because they didn't see many people. But at present it is the reverse.” I continue to quote Mlle. Carron for her extreme reality: “There are moments when we must not think of calculating—-very true. But there is a time for everything. Apropos of calculations, I have reason to thank myself for the one which made me decide not to buy a grey dress. What should I have done with it? I would have spoiled it nicely if I had wished to put it on on Sundays on our pretty roads and among the peasant women at mass, who mount atop of you and surround you with galoshes and muddy sabots. Mme. Mayeuvre herself wouldn't have been so fine as I, and yet she always comes to church in a carriage, but in such simple gowns that I wouldn't have dared to wear mine. I never saw her so much dressed as last evening at the Darsay ladies'. She had been making visits in the afternoon, and had exchanged her little dyed mourning dress for a very pretty blue calico, with white sleeves and a hood like ours. Mme. Courageau is also very simple, and if on Sundays I only put on a muslin apron over my old petticoat in green cloth (I wear it with my black spencer) they already cry out that I am dressed up. Yet, since the cold weather, it is only what I wear every day. All this, my sister, may very well not interest you. So much the worse! I must write to you and talk to you as if you were here. Haven't I told you that my scribblings don't oblige you to write a line? I send them to you for nothing, and out of it all you can take your choice; you can fish out some things you may be glad to know, as, for example, about our health.” In December, 1801, André Ampère obtained the post of professor of mathematics at the central school of the department of Ain, the seat of which was at Bourg. Julie, who had a baby several months old, and whose health had begun visibly to decline, remained, for economy and comfort, with her mother. The most charming part of this volume is perhaps the series of letters which passed, during this separation, between the ailing, caressing, chiding, solicitous, practical young wife and the tender, adoring young husband, whose inadvertences and small extravagances and want of worldly wisdom are the themes of many a conjugal admonition. Poor Ampère was forever staining his clothes with chemicals; he had his coats and breeches doled out to him like a boy at school. He begins his career at Bourg by deciding not to lodge at the inn, on account of the bad company that frequents it, and then makes himself the joke of the town by going to live with a certain M. Beauregard, whose wife was notoriously disreputable. “I think you very pastoral, “ Julie writes, “to go reading my letters in the fields; I'm afraid that you scatter them along the road, and that the first people who pass pick them up. If I knew you were more careful, how many pretty things I would confide to you! You would know that I love you, that I have a great desire to see you again, that every evening I have a thousand things to say to you that don't come out, save in sighs; you would know, in short, that when one has gone so far as to take a husband one loves him too much to be separated from him, and that your absence vexes me.” Her injunctions about taking care of her letters seem to have little effect; for shortly after this André writes to her gleefully of another “pastoral” day: “How sweet your letters are to read! One must have your soul to write things which go so straight to the heart—-without trying to, it would seem. I remained till two o'clock sitting under a tree, a pretty meadow on the right, the river, with some amiable ducks floating on it, on the left and in front of me; behind was the hospital building. You will understand that I had taken the precaution of saying to Mme. Beauregard, when I left my letter to go on this tramp, that I wouldn't dine at home. She thinks I am dining in town; but as I had made a good breakfast, I only feel the better for dining upon love. At two o'clock I felt so calm, and my mind so at ease, in place of the weariness that oppressed me this morning, that I wanted to walk about and botanise. I went up along the river, in the meadows, and arrived within twenty steps of a charming wood that I had seen in the distance at a half hour from the town, and had desired to go through. When I reached it the river, by suddenly coming between us, destroyed every hope of going further, so I had to give it up, and I came home by the road from Bourg to Cezeyriat—-a superb avenue of Lombardy poplars.”
This gentle strain is intermingled with sadder notes—-allusions to the extreme scarcity of money with the young couple, and to Julie's constantly failing health. She had an incurable malady, and her days were numbered. But in the midst of her troubles she is tenderly vigilant and practical. “Be careful to close your bureau, your room, and my letters, or I shall not dare to write to you. I know nothing of M. Roux. Don't you open yourself too much to M. Clerc? He's a very new acquaintance; suppose he were to take your ideas. Send me your cloth trousers, so that the rats don't eat them.” “I don't burn my things,” he answers, “and do my chemistry only in my breeches, my grey coat, and my green velvet waistcoat I beg you to send my new trousers, so that I may appear before MM. Delambre and Villars. I don't know what I shall do; my nice breeches smell still of turpentine. . . . You'll be afraid of my spoiling my nice trousers, but I promise you to return them as clean as I get them.” Julie too visibly declines, and the downright Elise, writing to André, breaks out into an almost passionate appeal. “What a happiness if among all the plants whose properties you know there were one that could put all in order again in her nature! What is the use of science if there is none that can restore health to Julie? Make inquiries, talk to the learned, to the ignorant! Simple people often have remedies as simple as themselves—-light which God gives them for their preservation . . . .Ah, why, why did I push self-sacrifice so far as to advise Julie to marry? I admired myself then as I shed my tears; they were for me the triumph of reason; whereas it was to feeling alone that I ought to have listened!” Julie sank rapidly, and died in the summer of 1803.
We have many of André Ampère's letters after the death of his wife, but as he grows older, they naturally lose much of their quaintness and freshness. He becomes absorbed in scientific research and embarks upon metaphysics, and it is with a certain sadness we learn that the image of Julie Carron fades from his mind sufficiently to enable him, in 1807, to marry a second time. There is a note from his sister-in-law Elise upon this occasion, in which, beneath the expression of an affectionate sympathy with his desire to make himself happy again, one detects a certain proud disappointment in his not finding the memory of her sister a sufficient source of happiness. There is some poetic justice in his second marriage proving a miserable delusion; he was obliged to separate from his wife after a few months. He had gone up to Paris after Julie's death and become instructor in the Polytechnic School, and from this time opportunity, prosperity, and fame began to wait upon him. He was a signal example of the almost infantile simplicity, the incorruptible moral purity, that so often are associated with great attainments in science, and the history of his courtship was worth sketching because it shows this temperament in its flower. After the death of Jean-Jacques Ampère's young mother, the interest of these volumes is transferred to her son. The boy grew up among all-favouring influences, surrounded by doting grandmothers and aunts, in an atmosphere of learning and morality. As he is revealed in his own early letters and those of his friends (there are many of these), he is quite the type of the ingenuous and intelligent youth who feels, in an easy, general way, that he is heir of all the ages. More than anything else Jean-Jacques Ampère is sympathetic; he is versatile, spontaneous, emotional; in 1820 the days of “sensibility” were hardly yet over, and the accomplished young man possessed this treasure. The world was all before him where to choose. His father, when he had resigned himself to his not being a mathematician, wished him of all things to write a tragedy; for next after algebra and chemistry, verses were what the elder Ampère most prized. Jean-Jacques, nothing loath, looked about for a subject, and meanwhile he fell in love with Mme. Récamier. His devotion to this illustrious lady was the great fact of thirty years of his life, and it is possible, in the letters before us and in those of the lady herself, published with a commentary by her niece, who was so many years at her side, to trace even in detail the history of the affair. It is difficult at this time of day to know just how to speak of Mme Récamier, and it is a tolerably plausible view of the case to say that there is no need of speaking at all. History has rendered her enthusiastic justice, and in her present reputation there is perhaps something a trifle forced and factitious. She was very beautiful, very charming, and very much at the service of her friends—-these are her claims to renown. To people of taste and fancy at the present day, however much they may regret not having known her, she can be little more than a rose-colored shadow. To hear her surviving friends say to each other with a glance of intelligence, “Ah, there was a woman!” simply makes us uncomfortably jealous; we feel like exclaiming, with a certain asperity, that there are as good fish in the sea as ever were caught. To know her by literature is, moreover, not really to know her. We cannot see her beauty, we cannot hear the divine inflections of her voice, we cannot appeal to her for sympathy; we can only read her letters, and her letters are not remarkable. They have no especial wit or grace; they have only great good sense, and, in certain express directions, an immense friendliness. Her history certainly is a remarkable one. Born in the middle class, she married into the middle class, and lost early in life the wealth that her marriage conferred upon her. She was never perceived to push or strive; no process, no machinery was ever observable in her career, and yet for fifty years she was literally a social sovereign. She distributed bliss and bale; she made and unmade felicity. She might have unmade it, that is, but fortunately she was incorruptibly kind; her instincts were constructive, not destructive. In 1829, for instance, Prosper Mérimée, then a young man upon the threshold of life, had a fancy that he would like to embrace a diplomatic career, and, as a first step, be appointed secretary of legation in London. The simplest way to compass his desire seems to him to be to apply through a friend to Mme. Récamier. Mme. Récamier can apply to the ambassador with the certainty of not meeting a refusal. The striking thing is that it is a question not at all of her doing what she can and taking what comes, but of her simply uttering her gentle fiat. Of course her remarkable influence was not simply an accident; she had exquisite gifts, and circumstances favoured her; but it seems rather a mistake to attempt to make a woman whose action in the world was altogether personal, and destined to expire with her person, an object of lasting interest. None of the various ministers of her renown—-not even the possessor of the infallible memory of Sainte-Beuve has to our knowledge repeated any definite utterance of the “incomparable Juliette” which seems at all noticeable. To write about her is like attempting to describe a perfume, and her clever niece, Mme. Lanormant, in the volumes she has devoted to her memory, has perhaps run the risk of making her the least bit of a bore.
But of course she appeals to our imagination, and if we are well-disposed that way she may live yet awhile by her picturesqueness. Seated every evening in her little economical secular cell at the convent of the Abbaye-au-Bois, or, of a summer morning, under the trees at the Valléi-aux-Loups, the natural accessories in her portrait are the figures of the people who formed the best society in continental Europe. In her relations with Jean-Jacques Ampère she is perhaps especially picturesque, for they contain just that element of potential oddity which is considered essential to picturesqueness. Mme. Récamier was forty-three years of age when young Ampère was presented to her, he himself being just twenty; she was exactly of the age which, had she lived, his mother would have reached. Jean-Jacques then and there fell in love with her. It was one evening in her little drawing-room, which was full of great people. She was, as Mme. Cheuvreux says (seeming in feminine fashion to have exactly divined it), “sitting, almost reclining, half hidden in a cloud of muslin, on a sofa of sky-blue damask of the old 'Empire' form, with the neck of a gilt swan for its arm.” It is not necessary to accuse Mme. Récamier of coquetry—-a charge which, although one is bound to believe that she enjoyed her sway, there is no other evidence to support—-to explain the fact that two years later, when she was forty-five, his passion was still burning. Might she have quenched it? These are of course mysteries; but it is our duty to suppose that what she did was wisely done. The event, in fact, proved it. She was an expert in these matters, and she had learned the prudence of sacrificing a part to save the whole. Ampère's flame flickered down in time to the steady glow of friendship; and if Mme. Récamier knew when the golden age ended and the silver began it is very likely that, under her exquisite direction, the young man himself never did. But there was certainly a prepossessing boldness in a young fellow of two-and-twenty writing in this fashion to an extremely distinguished woman of middle age: “Oh, tell me with truth that there are moments in which it seems that your soul is touched by my fate and takes an interest in my future; sometimes I have even thought that the sentiment so pure and tender with which you inspire me was not without a certain charm for yourself. But I am so afraid of being in error! Day by day my life centres itself in this affection. How cruel would it be to take the expression of your compassion for that of your interest! It is now especially, while I am away from you, that I am agitated by these fears. A few words, I entreat you, by way of consolation; but in heaven's name take care that in order to calm me you don't let yourself go beyond that which you really feel. What have I done, indeed, that you should love me? Ah, I have loved you with all my soul, with out deceiving myself about our situation, without entertaining for an instant the thought of disturbing the tranquillity of your existence. I have given myself up to a hopeless sentiment, which has filled all my heart. I cannot live either without you or for you; I see all that is impossible in my fate, and yet how can I renounce that which is my only joy?” Mme. Récamier quietly devised a modus vivendi for her ardent young friend, and he adopted it so successfully that three years later, she being at Rome and in the first glow of a friendship with Mme. Swetchine, the famous ultramontane pietist, he found it natural to write to her, in allusion to this lady: “In good faith, madame, is it not true that my place is taken in your heart? I have no right to complain of it; it is not your fault if I have not that sort of religious and romantic imagination which it would be so natural to have. But I have it less than ever; the desire to please you makes me force my nature; solitude and the law of sacrilege have sent me back to it. . . Mme. Swetchine is worth much more to your imagination than I. Bring me back some friendship; it is all that I deserve, and all that I exact of you.” It seems an anomaly that five months after this Ampère, taking fire at a few words uttered on a certain evening by Mme. Récamier, should be writing to her to ask almost passionately whether their union is after all impossible. M. Récamier is still living, but there had apparently been some allusion to a divorce. Ampère demands an assurance that if, on being at liberty, she were to decide to marry, she will bear him in mind. He wishes to feel that there is no one else between them. The thing seems to be less a serious proposal than a sudden, rather fantastic desire on his part to fill out a certain intellectual ideal of the situation. In the way of ideals that of the reader, at this point, is that there should be a record that Mme. Récamier, forty-eight years old, and with a husband in excellent health, was annoyed at having this marrying mood attributed to her.
In the autumn of 1823 she had gone to Italy with a little retinue of friends, of whom Ampère was not the least assiduous. She passed the winter in Rome, and the young man, remaining near her, formed, with the stimulus of her sympathy, that attachment for the Eternal City which was to increase from year to year and be the motive of his principal literary work. To be with Mme. Récamier was to be socially on a very agreeable footing, for wherever she established herself, she was speedily surrounded by brilliant people. This winter and the following summer, which the party spent at Naples, must have been for young Ampère a supremely happy season. To enjoy in Rome the society of the woman whom one considers the embodiment of everything admirable, to have that delightful city offer at every turn its happy opportunities and suggestions—-this is to an appreciative spirit a particular refinement of bliss. Mme. Récamier remained a second winter in Italy, and Ampère came home at the summons of his father, who appears at this time to have “worried” greatly, in vulgar phrase, about the young man's future, and who was especially impatient to see his tragedies coming forward at the Théâtre Français. During his son's absence in Rome the elder Ampère constantly writes to him on this theme and reports upon the MS. readings that have been given in his own circle—-one, for instance, of all places in the world, at the Veterinary School—-and upon the corrections and alterations that have been proposed. André Ampère, as he grew older, developed some rather uncomfortable eccentricities; he was in his private life and conversation the most unpractical and ill-regulated of men; and this persistent desire to make a third-rate playwright of a young man really gifted in other directions seems to indicate no little inconsequence of mind. Jean-Jacques's pieces were accepted, or half accepted at the great theatre, but they were never played, and they are sleeping at this day in its dustiest pigeon-holes. He had indeed a passion for writing verses, and produced, first and last, a prodigious quantity of indifferent rhyme. Often, after having hammered all day at recondite philology, he would sit up half the night scribbling at the dictation of a rather drowsy muse. He wrote in general, thanks to his roving habits, which made odd scraps and snatches of time of value, at all sorts of hours and in all sorts of places. He would begin a chapter of his “Histoire Romaine” on the edge of a table at a café in the Corso; in one of his later letters he speaks of having written a comedy in a railway carriage.
The editor of these volumes gives a great number of his letters to Mme. Récamier, both during the year which followed his separation from her at Naples, and at later periods. “It rains,” he writes to her from Rome on his way northward; “I am writing this in a dark room, looking out on a dismal little street. At Naples, at least, when it rains, you have before your eyes a great expanse. Instead of the sea and the island of Capri I see an ugly white wall, four feet off. I would have found a certain consolation in going to sit in the Villa Pamfili, on that rock on the edge of the lake where we read about the gardens of Armida and found them again, or on the grass, near Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, where we went on Easter day, or in wandering in Saint Peter's, in the Coliseum, or on the edge of the Tiber.” There is little I could quote from these letters, however, even if I had space; they are charming, they speak equally well for the writer and for the sweet sagacity of the woman who inspired them, they denote a delightful relation; but they lack salient points, and in their quality of love letters they are liable sometimes to weary the cold-hearted third person. Here, nevertheless, is a noteworthy paragraph: “You like me to tell you of my work—-to describe my studies as a schoolboy does to his mamma. Well, then, this is what seems to me at this moment the most delightful thing in the world, and an infallible means of arriving at almost universal knowledge. It's very simple. It is to note in every book I read the very important points, to concentrate all my attention upon these, and to try to completely forget all the rest—-and to join to this another observance, namely, that of reading on every subject and in every language only the best that there is. In this way, it seems to me, without uselessly overloading one's mind, one can acquire a deal of very positive and very various knowledge.” This was written in 1825, and it may at that moment have been true; it doubtless, indeed, will always have a certain measure of truth. But the march of mind has been so rapid these last fifty years that it is to be feared that no particular method of study, however ingenious, will carry one very far on the way to “universal knowledge.” To read even the best only, nowadays, is a task beyond the compass of individuals. But in one way or another Ampère was bent upon superior science, and in pursuit of it he went in the autumn of 1826 to Germany, and spent the winter at Bonn, under the inspiration of Niebuhr and Wilhelm von Schlegel. Mme. de Staël had discovered Germany, earlier in the century, for the French at large—-Ampère discovered it afresh for the younger generation. Schlegel was an old adorer of Mme. Récamier, and a word from her ensured her young friend a prompt and impressive greeting. “At our first interview, “ Ampère writes, “I admit I was rather disconcerted by his affectation of fine manners and of the French tone; he seemed to avoid speaking of literature, as if it were pedantry. This was not in my account, but I was not discouraged; I let him play the fine gentleman, and now that he has fairly set himself up before me as a man of the world, that I have seen his livery and his yellow order of Sweden, he begins to talk of Sanscrit and the middle ages. By a happy chance he is going to begin a course on the German language and literature. What a master of German. This attraction, and that of a magnificent country, will keep me here some time. The mountains which edge the Rhine before reaching this place,” he adds—-and the writer of these lines has made the same observation—-"recall in a striking manner the horizon of Rome.” From Niebuhr he got what he could. “I have done very well,” he says, “to take no great trouble to learn the old history of Rome; I would have to begin it afresh.” For the rest of Ampère's life, it was always a feather in his cap that on leaving Bonn he paid a visit to Weimar and spent three weeks with Goethe. He must himself have recalled this episode complacently, for the great man had made much of him and of the intelligent articles which Ampère had written about his works in the “Globe” newspaper, the organ of serious young France at that time. Wherever he went Mme. Récamier's recommendation was of service to him; she had ci-devant admirers stationed here and there on purpose, as it were. In Berlin it was the Prince Augustus of Prussia—-he who in 1811 had very seriously wished to marry her. Here, in conclusion, are Ampère's impressions of the German mind: “Up to this time Germany inspires me with the greatest respect for its superior men, but with little interest in the common life. Their true superiority resides in imagination and learning; the men who are without these two gifts, who make neither systems nor poems, appear to me plain good people, with little cleverness or sensibility; you need to make an effort of will to talk with them. But a German in whom learning has not extinguished imagination, in whom imagination does not lead learning astray, if good luck wills it that he has lived in Italy to thaw out his senses, and that he has gained experience of practical life by affairs—-that man is a man such as one can find only in Germany. There is such a one here—-Niebuhr, of whom you must not speak in your letter to Schlegel.”
On leaving Germany Ampère went to Sweden and Norway, and for the rest of his life he usually spent half the year in foreign lands. To travel was a passion with him, and though he had little money and was famous for his awkward management of his personal affairs, he appears to have been able to satisfy every impulse of his restlessness. His father's house was not a comfortable home, not because André Ampère was not an extremely affectionate parent, but because extreme naïveté, when the character has taken a melancholy turn, is not always identical with geniality. Jean-Jacques once posted back to Paris from a distance in response to an urgent summons from his sire. The two sat down to dinner, and in a moment—-"It's very odd,” cried the elder, “but I should have thought that it would give me more pleasure to see you!” This was the lover of Julie Carron at fifty. From the third of these volumes I have left myself space to quote nothing. I can only recommend the whole work to curious readers. The letters contained in the third volume are more and more the record of a busy life. Ampère was professor at the Collège de France, member of the Academy of Inscriptions and the Académie Française, and frequent contributor to the “Revue des Deux Mondes.” He was no politician, but he was a consistent anti-imperialist. The letters which Madame Cheuvreux has gathered together throw light here and there on many agreeable and interesting figures—-the most pleasing, perhaps, being that very superior man and, in temperament and turn of mind, half Anglican Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville. But the whole society represented here—-the cultivated liberal France of before the empire—-of outside the empire—-makes, intellectually and morally, a very honourable show. I said just now that it seemed to be sitting for its likeness; I only meant that the portrait was not blurred. We see it at all its hours and in all its moods, and we may believe that, taken by surprise, observed unawares, no group of people could, on the whole, have supported publicity more gracefully than the two Ampères and their many friends.