As a young man, he had been taken to the house of Madame
Recamier, and had there seen Chateaubriand, an honoured and adored old
man, and Sainte-Beuve an eager and attentive listener, somewhat
overlooked on account of his ugliness, in whom there was developing that
lurking envy of the great, and of those women clustered round, which he
ought to have combatted, to produce just criticism.
Chasles had known personally Michelet and Guizot, the elder Dumas and
Beyle, Cousin and Villemain, Musset and Balzac; he knew the Comtesse
d'Agoult, for so many years the friend of Liszt, and Madame Colet, the
mistress, first of Cousin, then of Musset, and finally of Flaubert, of
whom my French uncle, who had met her on his travels, had drawn me a
very unattractive picture. Chasles was on terms of daily intimacy with
Jules Sandeau; even as an old man he could not forget George Sand, who
had filched the greater part of his name and made it more illustrious
than the whole became. Sandeau loved her still, forty years after she
had left him.
Chasles was able, in a few words, to conjure up very vividly the images
of the persons he was describing to his listener, and his anecdotes
about them were inexhaustible. He took me behind the scenes of
literature and I saw the stage from all its sides. The personal history
of his contemporaries was, it is quite true, more particularly its
chronicle of scandals, but his information completed for me the severe
and graceful restraint of all Taine said.
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