Victor Cousin

“ Yet the chief author of this prosperity was calumniated, outraged, and menaced; and he knew not whether some officer of the guards or some one of the enthusiasts whom Madame de Chevreuse held at her disposal, was not reserving for him the fate of the Marshal d'Ancre. At the end of the month of June, he speaks in a letter to his friend, the Cardinal Bichy, just as he soliloquizes in the Carnets. "Every one sees," says he, "that I spare no fatigue, and that the crown has no more zealous, faithful, and disinterested subject than myself ”

“ Châteauneuf was the candidate of the Importants and of Madame de Chevreuse, but President Bailleul, the superintendent of the finances, coveted the place for himself, the Bishop de Beauvais feared such a colleague in the cabinet as Châteauneuf, and the Condés opposed him. Then Séguier had a sister who was very dear to the queen, the Mother Jeanne, superior of the convent of the Carmelites of Pontoise. The virtues of the sister pleaded in favor of the brother, and Montagu, who was wholly devoted to the Mother Jeanne, warmly defended the keeper of the seals. ”

“ She revived the correspondence which she had never ceased to maintain with England, Spain, and the Netherlands. Her principal support, the centre and medium of her intrigues, was Lord Goring, the English ambassador to the Court of France, who, like his master, and especially like his mistress, belonged to the Spanish party. [23] Craft, the English gentleman whom we have almost always met in the suite of Madame de Chevreuse, agitated noisily for her, while the Chevalier de Jars intrigued secretly for Châteauneuf. ”

“ While conducting herself guardedly towards Louis XIII. and his minister, Anne of Austria had not abandoned her former sentiments nor even her designs, and she may even have been compromised in the affair of the Count de Soissons, if we may believe these notable words from Alexandre de Campion to Madame de Chevreuse, dated the 15th of August, 1641: "Have no fear of the letters which speak of that person for whom of all others you have the greatest devotion ”

“ The ideal is the artist's object of passionate contemplation. Assiduously and silently meditated, unceasingly purified by reflection and vivified by sentiment, it warms genius and inspires it with the irresistible need of seeing it realized and living. ”

“ And we who have some time grovelled upon this earth, thinking only of ourselves, seeking only pleasure and a pitiable happiness, what sufferings nobly borne for justice, what generous efforts to maintain and develop the dignity of our soul, what virtuous affections for other souls, can we offer to the Father of humanity as titles to his merciful justice? ”

“ This is the difficulty of art, and its glory also. What bears us towards the infinite in natural beauty? The ideal side of this beauty. The ideal is the mysterious ladder that enables the soul to ascend from the finite to the infinite. The artist, then, must devote himself to the representation of the ideal. Every thing has its ideal. ”

“ The glorious, joyous boy, the brilliant, ardent child of genius and of fortune, crowned with the beauty of his early holiness, and overshadowed with the darkness of his hereditary gloom, and the soft and touching sadness of his early death—what a caution is there! ”

“ If you consider only the all-powerful God, master of heaven and earth, author and avenger of justice, you crush man beneath the weight of the grandeur of God and his own feebleness, you condemn him to a continual trembling in the uncertainty of God's judgments, you make him hate the world, life, and himself, for every thing is full of misery. ”

“ But if the object of love is only a symbol of the true beauty, only capable of exciting the desire of the soul without satisfying it, reflection breaks the charm which held the heart, dissipates the chimera that enchained it. ”

“ This sentiment, this need of the infinite, is at the foundation of the greatest passions, and the most trifling desires. A sigh of the soul in the presence of the starry heavens, the melancholy attached to the passion of glory, to ambition, to all the great emotions of the soul, express it better without doubt, but they do not express it more than the caprice and mobility of those vulgar loves, wandering from object to object in a perpetual circle of ardent desires, of poignant disquietudes, and mournful disenchantments. ”

“ The instinct of society is in the first cry of the child that calls for the mother's help without knowing that it has a mother, and in the eagerness of the mother to respond to the cries of the child. ”

“ I propose neither to attack nor to defend any of the three great schools that divide the eighteenth century. I will not attempt to perpetuate and envenom the warfare which divides them, complacently designating the differences which separate them, without taking an account of the community of method which unites them. I come, on the contrary, a devoted soldier of philosophy, a common friend of all the schools which it has produced, to offer to all the words of peace. ”

“ Truth enlightens the mind; sentiment warms the soul and leads to action. It is not cold reason that determines a Codrus to devote himself for his countrymen, a d'Assas to utter, beneath the steel of the enemy, the generous cry that brings him death and saves the army. Let us guard ourselves, then, from weakening the authority of sentiment; let us honor and sustain enthusiasm; it is the source whence spring great and heroic actions.
And shall interest be entirely banished from our system? No; we recognize in the human soul a desire for happiness which is the work of God himself. ”

“ To render evil for evil, to demand an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is the barbarous form of a justice without light; for the evil that I do you will not take away the evil that you have done me. It is not the pain felt by the victim that demands a corresponding pain; it is violated justice that imposes on the culpable man the expiation of suffering. Such is the morality of penalty. The principle of penalty is not the reparation of damage caused. ”

“ Let us ask in passing, Is it not unworthy of history to attribute the elevation of Luynes to the caprice of a king, who takes one of his pages, a petty gentleman, for his prime minister, solely because he finds him skilful in the art of training falcons? ”

“ Such is the great and holy image of liberty and equality, which has made the hearts of our fathers beat, and the hearts of all virtuous and enlightened men, of all true friends of humanity. Such is the ideal that true philosophy pursues across the ages, from the generous dreams of Plato to the solid conceptions of Montesquieu, from the first free legislation of the smallest city of Greece to our declaration of rights, and the immortal works of the constituent Assembly. ”

“ That body, whose forms are not interrupted by a vein, which is not agitated by a nerve, seems animated with a celestial spirit, which circulates like a sweet vapor in all the parts of that admirable figure. ”

“ To dream of such an equality is a strange mistake, a deplorable error. False equality is the idol of ill-formed minds and hearts, of disquiet and ambitious egoism. True equality accepts without shame all the exterior inequalities that God has made, and that it is not in the power of man not only to efface, but even to modify. ”

“ The landscape placed immediately under your eyes has nothing in it very rare, we can find such a one anywhere; but follow the perspective,—it leads you across flowering fields, a beautiful river, ruins, mountains that overlook these ruins, and you lose yourself in infinite distances. ”

“ I hope that your affection is proof against every thing. I ask this favor of you, that it may be so, and promise you that as long as Madame de Chevreuse shall live, you shall receive the same love from her. This letter was commenced yesterday. The Cardinal de La Valette has since sent me a thousand compliments in behalf of the Cardinal de Richelieu. ”

“ An emotion very different from these is necessary, which triumphs over us, in order to retain us by the shore; this emotion is the pure sentiment of the beautiful and the sublime, excited and kept alive by the grandeur of the spectacle, by the vast extent of the sea, the rolling of the foaming waves, and the imposing sound of the thunder. But do we think for a single instant that there are in the midst of the sea the unfortunate who are suffering, and are, perhaps, about to perish? ”

“ Because they have lost liberty. Why do we enchain the furious madman? Because he has lost knowledge and liberty. Why is slavery an abominable institution? Because it is an outrage upon what constitutes humanity. This is the reason why, in fine, certain extreme devotions are sometimes sublime faults, and no one is permitted to offer them, much less to demand them. There is no legitimate devotion against the very essence of right, against liberty, against justice, against the dignity of the human person. ”

“ Satisfied with having separated her from Anne of Austria, would Richelieu have left her free and tranquil in Touraine? Is he really sincere when he affirms it, or is the old charm still acting, and is this iron heart, this inexorable soul, which beauty, however, more than once found impressible, unable to shield itself from a reluctant tenderness for a woman who joined in her person in the highest degree, those two gifts so rarely found united—beauty and courage? ”

“ Do you suppose that the word liberty could ever have been formed, if the thing itself did not exist? None but a free being could possess the idea of liberty. Will it be said that the liberty of man is only an illusion? The wishes of the human race are then the most inexplicable extravagance. In denying the essential distinction between liberty and fatality, we contradict all languages and all received notions; we have, it is true, the advantage of absolving tyrants, but we degrade heroes. They have, then, fought and died for a chimera! ”

“ Its height is above that of man, and its attitude proclaims the divine grandeur with which it is filled. A perennial spring-time, like that which reigns in the happy fields of Elysium, clothes with lovable youth the beautiful body, and shines with sweetness over the noble structure of the limbs. In order to feel the merit of this chef-d'œuvre of art, we must be penetrated with intellectual beauty, and become, if possible, the creatures of a celestial nature; for there is nothing mortal in it, nothing subject to the wants of humanity. ”

“ The important post to which your majesty had appointed him, the hundred thousand crowns which he received each year from your liberality, the government of one of your provinces, all extraordinary marks of favor to a man in his position, were not considerations weighty enough to deter him from becoming the author of his own ruin. ”

“ Is it not necessary to be a slave of the senses and of appearances in order to stop at movements, at forms, at sounds, at colors, whose harmonious combinations produce the beauty of this visible world, and not to conceive behind this scene so magnificent and well regulated, the orderer, the geometer, the supreme artist?
Physical beauty serves as an envelope to intellectual and moral beauty. ”

“ That Landscape crossed by a river, where a peasant waters his herd, means nothing great at first sight. Contemplate it some time, and peace, a sort of meditativeness in nature, a well-graduated perspective, will, little by little, gain your heart, and give you in that small picture a penetrating charm. The picture called a Landscape represents a vast champagne filled with trees, and lighted by the rising sun,—in it there is freshness and—already—warmth, mystery, and splendor, with skies of the sweetest harmony. ”

“ Tell me what sentiment does not come within the province of the painter? He has entire nature at his disposal, the physical world, and the moral world, a churchyard, a landscape, a sunset, the ocean, the great scenes of civil and religious life, all the beings of creation, above all, the figure of man, and its expression, that living mirror of what passes in the soul. More pathetic than sculpture, clearer than music, painting is elevated, in my opinion, above both, because it expresses beauty more under all its forms, and the human soul in all the richness and variety of its sentiments. ”

“ I certainly admire Champagne as an historical painter, and even as a landscape painter; but he is perhaps greatest as a portrait painter. In portraits truth and nature are particularly in their place, relieved by coloring, and idealized in proper measure by expression. The portraits of Champagne are so many monuments in which his most illustrious contemporaries will live forever. Every thing about them is strikingly real, grave, and severe, with a penetrating sweetness. Should the records of Port-Royal be lost, all Port-Royal might be found in Champagne. ”

“ In fact, in order to relish the works of imagination, is it not necessary to have taste? Do we not need, in order to feel an author, not to equal him, without doubt, but to resemble him in some degree? Will not a man of sensible, but dry and austere mind, like Le Batteux or Condillac, be insensible to the happy darings of genius, and will he not carry into criticism a narrow severity, a reason very little reasonable—since he does not comprehend all the parts of human nature,—an intolerance that mutilates and blemishes art while thinking to purify it? ”