Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/67

SAINT-AMANT 5I the Great Revolution. For the quick French ever vibrate between the extremes of anarchy and tyranny : the golden mean, loved of our duller wits, is mean indeed in their logic. The cabaret in those days, like the coffee-house with us in Queen Anne's time, and like no place now that I know of in either France or England, was the really social resort of wit and genius, rank and fashion. There Racan long lodged while young and poor ; there the severe Boileau got help lessly drunk in preaching sobriety to the incorrigible Chapelle ; there Liniere lampooned this same Boileau, while spending rapidly the money Boileau had just lent him ; there Mezeray composed all his writings ; there the pious Racine, even in 1666, went two or three times a day; there Perron, before he was a cardinal, quarrelled with a stranger, whom he stabbed ; and there, above all, our Saint-Amant was king and high-priest, Abbot of Unreason, Lord of Misrule, rotund, rubicund, and Rabelaisian. Men vaunted him as their Master of the Revels, and boasted of drinking with him. Thus Vion Dalibray, the bitter epigrammatist, cries — " Thou who, like Bacchus, hast drunk through all the world, Teach me, Saint-Amant." And again — " I will make myself famous, at least in the cabaret ; They shall speak of me as they speak of Faret. What matters it, friend, whence our glory may swell? I can acquire it with trouble scant, For, thanks to my God, I already drink well, And I have been on the spree with Saint-Amant." " See him at the cabaret," writes M. Livet, " draped in his careless security. It is there that he finds that