lived was particularly distressing to one of his unquiet spirit. There is a passage in his book on "The Priest" which well describes what he suffered and what he yearned for:

"The man of to-day-a victim of the division of labor, confined too often to a narrow specialty where his personal emotions become atrophied, and he loses all sense of life in general, ought to have beside him a serene and youthful mind, not specialized and balanced like his own, but fit to divert him from his daily business, and to restore his feeling for the sweet harmonies of the universe. . . . There must ever be a woman at the fireside to bathe the burning brow of man. . . . She it is who must lead him back to the living fountain of beauty and goodness-to God and nature. Uplifted by her he will, in his turn, raise her by his powerful hand, introduce her to his world, lead her into the paths of prayers and discovery, set her feet in the ways of the future."

...

Not long after writing this he received a letter from a young girl who was a school-mistress in Austria. She had read "Le Prêtre," the book had made her anxious, and she wanted advice. Michelet answered her letter, and when the young girl returned to Paris she felt impelled to go and see the illustrious historian. He was tremendously struck by her appearance:

"She was white as death, and the effect of her strange pallor was enwas hanced by the fact that she dressed in black, and wore in her black velvet bonnet a single rose, as colorless as her cheek."

Within a fortnight he had, to use his own expression, "already made her his wife, though she did not suspect it." Upon reflection he perceived that it was Fate in person who had thrown in his way a being formed to be his life-long companion. In short, it was a case of predestination.

When the nervous tension was relaxed under which he had been laboring, and his long-smouldering passion found an object in Mlle. Mialeret, Michelet at once became a prey to the most violent paroxysms of feeling:-" a word from you, a single touch of your lips, is enough to kindle a fire capable of consuming the whole world. I am at this moment working, nominally, at the Archives, but I keep my eye fixed upon the clock and count the minutes until I can go to you. . . . Oh, my child, we will live together like two joyous and blameless children-without a touch of pride, a fictitious dignity of any kind. Adieu! I am dying to see you! I shall do so in an hour, but how can I wait so long?"

His letters are "steeped in tears:"tears of love-tears of pain-tears of anxiety. It is useless for him to try to work; he is not sufficiently master of himself; he is too entirely at the mercy of the sentiment which has invaded his being. He has with difficulty "scratched off" some fifty pages of his history; and he thinks them very bad indeed; but if he could only have been inditing love-letters to her, he would have needed but to let his pen go,-and how original, how eloquent would have been the result! Such transports are not so very rare. They occur continually among men who fall in love too late. But this man was Michelet; and all the world is familiar with the aggravated sentimentality of his later books, and the importance which he attached to this kind of inflammatory declaration.

Every one of Michelet's letters to this young woman was an ode, a dithyramb, a transcription from the Song of Songs -by a professor of history. He salutes her as a queen. "A queen you were born; a queen you are and ever will be. Say what you will I shall erect an altar to you and bear you upon my heart

with none but God to see."

But he is not satisfied with this form of expression. It seems to him weak and inadequate. Mlle. Mialeret is more than a queen. "The pitiful sovereigns of this world reign only upon its surface; but you—you reign in the deepest depths of the abyss. Could you fathom it you would find only yourself and your own power therein." None but a hero or a man of genius would be worthy of her; and as for Michelet, he derives his so-called genius from her alone. "The course which I am now giving," he says, "is yours. I might almost say that it is you who give it." All this lyric madness appears the more remarkable by contrast with the calm, the moderation, the reserve of the young girl, who accepts the man's amazing homage, and is deeply touched by it, but is under no illusion concerning the true value of these glaringly disproportionate expressions. She is not a queen and she knows it. She is Mlle. Mialeret who has been teaching in Austria, and who has come back to France hoping to find employment there, and all the more grateful to the eminent professor who has given her so extraordinary a welcome, because she is quite alone in the world, and confronted by all manner of difficulties. If Michelet wants to make her his wife, she understands perfectly that it is not she who will "deign," and that so glorious a destiny will be highly honorable to her. All does not run quite smoothly, however. Families always object to second marriages, and Michelet's family finds a powerful argument in the disparity of age between these two. Between the professor's infatuation and the hostility of his children, there is need of much coolness and tact. There is need also of good-will, but of that Mlle. Mialeret has plenty. She wastes no time in idle revery. Serious and self-possessed, she puts before everything the success of M. Michelet's work, and she feels, with good reason,

that his work has been suffering of late. So far from being a drag upon him in his high pursuits, she desires above all things to assist and facilitate them. She wins him back to the studies from which it has pained her to see him distracted, and their union will be to all intents and purposes a business partnership. Woman's kingdom is the home: the interior, the kitchen, the garden. Mlle. Mialeret takes pains to ascertain their probable income. It will be modest, but it will admit of their taking a small house outside of Paris. Through the haze of Michelet's own letters, we discern the singular good sense and practical wisdom of the young girl. Simplicity and serenity like hers are, doubtless, among the best qualities a woman can possess; only they are not those which Michelet extols in his bride to be. The reason is that he sees in the maid, whose pallor so impressed him on their first meeting, the typical woman of his dreams charged with a mystic mission. The love which he lays at her feet is that love whose overflow from the surcharged heart of man is to submerge the world and regenerate humanity.

Woman, for Michelet, is a religion. The world is kept alive by womankind. Woman lends it grace, and it is grace that saves. It is through love alone that human society can make progress. Little by little, love will wipe out the enmities of race and class, put an end to war, and inaugurate the era of universal peace and fraternity. It is, however, needful for the working of these miracles that love should be born from the union of two perfectly sympathetic hearts, and the transference to the spheres of society and politics of that infinite sweetness, that inevitable generosity of interpretation which naturally exists between two loving souls will constitute the salvation of the race. Such was the humanitarian dream which Michelet believed

himself about to realize when he met Mlle. Mialeret.

"What can I give you, my beloved, in return for the initiation which I owe to you? It is through woman that we find entrance to eternal life;-but how to find the woman? Before I knew you, I had met separate feminine qualities in different individuals:-beauty in one, wit in another, strength in another, but never a complete woman. Now that perfect woman has come to me!"

He sincerely believed that the undersentiment which possessed him could be communicated to others and gradually diffused over the whole bleeding earth, like a sea of love and consolation. It is this conviction, repeated on every page of the correspondence, which constitutes its originality, but the apocalyptic language in which it is expressed would be perfectly unintelligible to one unacquainted with the subsequent works of Michelet. "The one good gift that I would bestow on you-the only one worthy your acceptancewould be this:-that through me the whole world should become more loving, its blind and violent enmities subside, the hatred of nation against nation, and class against class, decline and eventually disappear. As yet, we can but hope for a diminution of these evils, for the beginnings of reconciliation, and that not in our own hearts only, but all over the world, the Great Friendship may be born. But that mighty friendship must begin in the heart of a single man; and the sacred fire which is to warm the whole universe one day-everywhere substituting love for hate-must be kindled at a humble private fireside. . . . Is that heart mine? Am I the man of destiny? ... Alas! I know that I am unworthy! I am sentimental and artistic, rather than good." Such was Michelet's idea of how all human history might culminate, and the new future of the race

begin with his own espousal of Mlle. Mialeret. It remains to be determined whether the second marriage of the philosopher did have the mighty consequences which he foresaw, and what was the exact worth of that theory of love which he clothed, or rather veiled, in the language of theological mysticism. But this is a question too large to be treated incidentally and on the basis of a few private letters. My purpose has merely been to show how early Michelet formed the opinions which he subsequently developed in "L'Amour" and "La Femme."

It would be useless to deny the marked influence exercised by Mme. Michelet upon her husband's views, and the later development of his genius. All the world knows how considerable, nay, how enormous, a place was assigned in the books produced by Michelet after 1850, to what we may call amorous considerations. Mme. Michelet had been brought up in the country, and loved it, and was devoted to the study of nature. She could not understand her husband's ignorance of such pursuits, and did everything in her power to win him from "the brutalities of human history" to the healing contemplation of natural harmonies. It was she who directed his attention to the soul which informs not animals and plants alone, but the all-pervading elements, and she assisted him in all manner of ways in preparing his treatises on "The Bird," "The Insect," "The Mountains," and "The Sea."

Thus the intellectual attachment in which the writer revelled was returned by a like intellectual attachment on the part of his Egeria. It was not the real woman whom chance had thrown in his way, that the author loved, but an imaginary being of his own creation, incarnated in her by virtue of that glorious capacity for illusion, which artists only know.

On the other hand, she evidently

loved in him less the man than the author; less the person than the talent, the mind, all that partially fictitious individuality, which is what a man puts into his books. She loved him sincerely indeed-fervently-at times almost with the impassioned devotion which characterizes a genuine attachment. She was truly womanly; and since woman's main vocation is to be a mother, she mingled with her literary devotion a shade of maternal tenderness. Involuntarily, inevitably, she guided and protected him. It would never have occurred to her to compare herself with the man whose genius she admired, of whom it would be little to say that she fully understood the superiority. Yet she gives him advice,

Revue des Deux Mondes.

she never hesitates to influence him, it is her sweetest reward to feel that she has been, to some extent, associated with his work. This kind of influence is less powerful than it is commonly supposed to be, because an author, after all, can only bring out what was already in him. And sometimes Mme. Michelet's influence was unfortunate, though at others it was most beneficent. She gives proof, at all events, of a remarkable intelligence and extreme cerebral activity. The wife of Racine did not know what a verse was. This did not prevent Racine from writing "Athalie," but it prevented his wife from having a place in the literary history of France.

René Doumic.

The remotest spot in the old world where human beings live,-that sounds very far off indeed. Yes, this most northern settlement in the world is a long pilgrimage for you and me; and yet a few of us have been there and can tell you what we saw. But how can this far outpost of life in Nova Zembla be reached? Well, just in this way and no other.

First of all, you sail across the North Sea and then up that great inner lead of Fiords which runs along the whole of the coast of western Norway, and so round the North Cape under the light of the Midnight Sun. You have now marked off nearly two thousand miles on your chart. Then from the North Cape you sail east along the Lapland coast, with schools of Finner whales spouting all round you, and pass into the dreaded White Sea (which is free of ice for barely three months in the year) and, safely crossing the treach

erous bar of the Dwina, you reach Archangel in Northern Russia. That makes some seven hundred miles more. Then at Archangel you find the stout little steamer, built for battling with the ice, which annually sails for the two settlements,-Karmacula, the southern and Matotchkin Schar the northern-in far Nova Zembla, and you beseech the British Consul there (kind, energetic and diplomatic official that he is, and for three weeks my most considerate host,) to leave no stone unturned to procure you the privilege of a berth on this Government steamer. The Governor-General of the Archangel province is the model of a good administrator, and red-tape does not tie his hands. After a painful suspense you at last get the necessary permission, together with a big sheet of paper bearing his august signature and seal, and containing directions to his officials to help you, whenever and

wherever possible, under pain of his displeasure,-and, mind you, he has the power of life and death, this genial, pleasant, blue-eyed Governor.

Then at last you hear that the steamer is ready to start, and you go on board to find what accommodation you can, and a great mass of stores for the uncivilized inhabitants on Nova Zemblaall useful stores such as potatoes, cabbages, onions, rye-flour, fishing-nets, timber, and tools. And you further find several potential brides and bridegrooms who have been brought hundreds of miles from the Samoyads of the frozen tundra and are destined for certain Nova Zemblans known to be of age and willing to marry. They are so few on that far island that the Russian Government is almost comically paternal in the way in which it enters into every detail of their life. And so you sail out of the White Sea, turn northward and eastward, and ploughing through the stray outliers of the summer ice-pack, you go up into the Arctic Ocean, and leaving the island of Kolguef far behind, you skirt the long jagged edge of the pack and slip through this or that lane in the ice, and finally, after some nine hundred miles of anxious navigation, you drop anchor off Matotchkin Schar-the strait which cuts Nova Zembla in half and on the shores of which is the most northerly outpost in the world. You have now marked off some thirty-six hundred miles on your chart. and at last you have reached your goal.

What an odd scene of welcome it is as you row to the shore and jump out on the gritty beach! Never were there such rough little bundles of humanity, such shaggy specimens of man. About five feet high and apparently four feet wide. it is really surprising how nimble these Samoyads are upon their feet. More often than not, they wear nothing on their heads but their long, matted, and indescribably filthy hair, which

streams out into the wind some ten or twelve inches behind the yellow brows. These brows are seamed with the furrows of exposure, seams that are filled up with the grime of dirt which has never once been intentionally removed. Their body-clothing is merely a huge baggy tunic, closed behind and before and slipped over their heads. It is made of reindeer-skin, with the hair inside. A belt of thongs girds it tightly round the loins, and then the tunic is pulled up and allowed to fall over in great baggy folds. This is an ingenious device of the native who, taught by Nature and dire experience, has learned that it is easier to keep warm with a good big layer of heated human atmosphere between him and his outer covering than if he wore his garment tight against his skin. His breeches are also of deerskin, and so too are his long boots, or pimmis, the former with the fur inside and the latter with it outside. An inner tunic of dried deerskin completes his toilet.

Recol

But how unsavory it all is! lect that he seldom washes from the hour of his birth to the day of his death. Recollect, further, that these skin clothes are of material so tough, and sewn with deer-sinews so strong, that they often outlast the life of the wearer and thus, in a manner, become heirlooms in the family. Now, putting all things together,-the animal nature of the wearer, and the conditions under which he lives-you can get some idea of the verminous state of this Nova Zemblan. Are you fond of the Zoological Gardens? Are you a naturalist? Particularly, are you interested in minute animal life? Well, then, go to Nova Zembla, and when you weary of the white bear and the white fox, of the walrus and the seal, of the wild geese and the snowy owls, go into the skin-tents of the Samoyad and sit down with him cheek by jowl, and eat with him of the red meat of the rein