much noise in its day: "Racine est un polisson." The Revue de Paris was a joint stock company, with a capital of 80,000 francs, and Dr. Veron took 20,000 francs of shares; he was presented to the wealthy M. Aguado, Marquis de Las Marismas, who took some shares in the enterprise. We shall hereafter frequently find the Aguado family in relations with Dr. Veron. Some of our readers may remember that the latter years of the Restora'tion saw the commencement of the famous war of the Romantics and the Classics, which excited a great deal of passion, and occupied the public mind even in the midst of the crisis, which lasted during the last years of the Restoration and the first years of the Monarchy of July. Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Alfred de Vigny, were the leaders of this war waged on the dramatic unities enforced by Aristotle, and which were defended by the French Academy, with a great deal more bitterness than judgment. The foundation of the Revue de Paris rendered a great deal of service to the Romantic school, and indeed to French literature, as it was in its pages, and on the editor's annual budget of 40,000 francs, that MM. Prosper Merimée, Sainte-Beuve, Saint-Marc-Girardin, Casimir Delavigne, Arnault, Charles Nodier, Jules Janin, and Eugène Delacroix commenced, or increased their reputation. MM. de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Rossini were also among the contributors. Dr. Veron promises to speak in due time of all the eminent writers and artists, with whom he lived in a daily intimacy, and to give a great many of their letters, which will place in a new and a clearer light the secret history of French literature during the last twenty-five years. He gives us a taste of these future revelations by these letters:

FROM A. DUMAS.

"My dear Veron,-See how men of talent work. I send you a hundred and twenty pages of blank paper, have them stamped by your servant in the corner opposite to the numbers. Return them to me Thursday morning by the first train. You will find your volume commenced when you come to dine with me Thursday 14th, and I will return it to you finished when I go to dine with you Thursday the 21st.-Yours. A. DUMAS."*

FROM GEO. SAND.

"Monsieur, - You vex me extremely by asking for a novel a month earlier than our common engagements provide. It is a great inconvenience to my health, and a great danger for the merit of the story to work in this hurry, without having had the time to mature my subject, and to make the necessary researches; for there is no subject, however small it may be, which does not require a great deal of reading and of reflection. I think you treat me a little too much like a stop-gap; my amour propre does not suffer by it, and I have too much esteem and friendship for Eugène Sue to be jealous of all your preferences for him. But, if you give him the time necessary to develope fine and great works, time is also necessary to me to arrange my little studies, and I cannot engage to be ready whenever the suppressions of the Juif Errant may require it, nor to have it terminated when the Juif Errant is ready to commence his tour around the world. All that I can promise is to do my best, because I sincerely desire to serve you: I pass by in silence the annoyance of setting again to work, when I reckoned upon another month of very necessary repose. I have already abandoned it; I have been working since

yours

ALEXANDRE DUmas.".

formed some very efficient aids when he assumed the managership of the Grand Opera, or the Opera, as we believe it is the fashion in Paris to call it, while the guidebooks inform us that its official name is L' Academie Imperiale de Musique.

In 1831, Dr. Veron solicited and obtained the privilege of the Grand Opera. He owed this place, in a great measure, to the footing on which he stood with Count de Montalivet, then the Minister of the Interior, and who was under some obligations to Dr. Veron for the kind reception he had given to the former's lucubrations, while he was the editor of the Revue de Paris. M. Aguado seconded M. Veron in this enterprise with a great deal of zeal: he placed two hundred thousand francs in his hands as a portion of the collateral security the French government always requires from the manager of the Grand Opera; and, in return for this favor, besides paying the legal rate of interest for the use of this money, M. Veron gallantly insisted that M. Aguado should take the best box of the theatre (and which is now, we believe, the Emperor's box) and occupy it during his whole administration. We would remark, for the benefit of those readers who may be surprised at this zeal on the part of M. Aguado, that the purse-holder of a Paris theatre is reported to hold a very enviable position (and to whose mysterious advantages, we hope M. Veron will, in time, initiate us); it is certain that from 1831 to the present day the members of the Aguado family have found it so agreeable a position, they have not ceased to occupy it at some theatre or another. Rumor alleges they are now the purse-holders of the Italian Theatre. M. Veron made a great deal of money at the Grand Opera; and he promises us some very piquant details touching his managership. They cannot well be otherwise: he was thrown into almost hourly communication with Hérold (sometime maître de chant during his administration), Halévy (who succeeded Hérold in his functions, and brought out during his management La Juive), Cherubini (who also brought out there Ali Baba), Meyerbeer (whose Robert le Diable then coined money for the opera), Rossini and Auber, and especially during the three or four months of rehearsals of their operas, during all of which they are incessantly agitated by joy, or by fear, or by despair." And during his management Mme. CintiDamoreau, M. Nourrit, M. Duprez, Mlle. Falcon, Mlle. Taglioni, Mlle. Fanny Ellssler, were in all the beauty and the

force of their talents. M. Veron betrays the secret of his success:

"While I was manager of the opera, I enjoyed the most delicate perfumes of praise; all the newspapers celebrated with warmth my great administrative talents, and my intelligent passion for arts and for letters. The members of the then government, whom I saw a great deal of either at their houses or in my house, often said to me: 'How do you manage to make the newspapers such good friends of yours? they praise you so much, we feel jealous of you.' I was merely cordial and polite to every body; and I paid courteous attentions to every one. I never sent a box to a literary man, without writing him, myself, a note, and reproaching him for not coming to the opera more frequently."

We presume M. Veron will give us further confidences in his art of seducing the press of Paris, "the most fearful wild beast flying," into unanimous and unvaried applause. We have reason to believe M. Veron ascertained that dinners and suppers are as powerful friends as M. Carème urges they are to all difficult enterprises. We believe the tradition of his entertainments is still fresh in Paris; certain it is, distant as we are from the scene of his triumphs, we have heard of them. One day after Mlle. Fanny Ellssler had fulfilled a brilliant engagement, M. Veron gave a grand dinner in her honor; at the dessert a basket full of jewelry was handed around to all of the lady guests. Mlle. Ellssler modestly took a small ring worth perhaps a louis d'or, but a Mlle. Adeline from some of the minor theatres, whose face was her fortune, and who was invited to the dinner to ornament the table, impudently seized a bracelet of some five hundred louis d'or, and which was destined to the celebrated danseuse. She is said to have been shown the door immediately afterwards: Frenchmen do not relish jokes, whose cream is gold out of their pockets. And a supper given by M. Veron has been so famous as to reach even our ears: he assembled around him the most brilliant literary men of Paris, and the most beautiful actresses; after a luxurious supper, card-tables were brought out, and after groups were formed around each of the tables, a valet in livery handed around á silver waiter filled with louis d'ors; some of the vaudeville actresses helped themselves plentifully; the gaming went on briskly; Mlle. Page [an actress of the Variétés Theatre, as remarkable for her beauty as she is notorious for the use she makes of it] won a great deal of money,

and then lost more than she had won; she took the silver waiter and emptied its contents in her lap; which made M. Veron so angy, that he gave her a sharp lecture, and instantly retired to bed.

After M. Veron had made a fortune at the Grand Opera, he became ambitious. He had enjoyed so intimate a social commerce with political men, he felt a longing to be of them as well as with them; and perhaps a tribune surrounded by an applauding audience occupied a large hall in one of his castles in the air. "In 1837, I

set out for La Bretagne; I purchased estates there; I sent to them valuable stallions, I improved the land, I laid out money on them, to improve the condition of the laborers, le tout, pour ne pas être nommé deputé à Brest extra muros." M. Veron was unsuccessful. The passage we have quoted is none the less curious as showing the preliminary steps deemed necessary under the reign of Louis Philippe to reach the Chamber of Deputies. Buncombe is in France as well as in regions with which we are more familiar.

The 12th March. 1838, M. Veron at the suggestion of MM. Thiers and Etienne purchased two shares of the Constitutionnel, for which he paid 262,000 francs. That paper then reckoned 6,200 subscribers; its property was divided into fifteen parts. He was immediately admitted to the editorship of the paper; but, as he was not the principal editor he soon saw himself unable to enforce the measures he deemed necessary; the number of subscribers daily diminished, notwithstanding the public and the avowed patronage of M. Thiers; and it became so involved it was set up at public auction, and sold the 15th March, 1844. We have omitted to mention that M. Aguado purchased from M. Veron the half of one of his shares when the latter purchased the two shares of the Constitutionnel: and that before M. Veron became an editor and proprietor, M. Aguado proposed to him to become the editor of two newspapers he then owned.

M. Veron purchased the Constitutionnel, at auction, for 432,000 francs. A new stock company was formed; a deed made M. Veron absolute master of the political conduct of the newspaper; he abandoned this power to M. Thiers, and contented himself with being the administrator of the paper; indeed, he so completely abandoned all influence touching the politics of the paper, he received the sobriquet of le père aux écus. M. Thiers appointed M. Charles Merruau (now the Secretary General of the Prefecture of the Seine) the chief editor; and he regularly reported the de

M.

bates in the Chambers; he kept in intimate relations with all the deputies of his party; he consulted with M. Thiers every morning, and he admitted or rejected all political articles. Although M. Veron had, after three years of editorship, increased his subscription list to 25,000 subscribers, his losses had amounted to 290,000 francs, and consequently no dividends had been divided among his stockholders, who naturally were dissatisfied, and compelled him to limit his editorial expenses to 110,000 francs; they were in reality 160,000 francs. It may be curious to glance at these details of the domestic economy of a French newspaper. M. Veron announced to his editorial corps that he intended to diminish their salaries. Merruau replies by telling him that the party he represented (i. e. M. Thiers) had determined to place 100,000 francs in his, M. Veron's hands, and which would remain his property so long as the Constitutionnel followed the line of policy pursued by the Centre-Left Party, of which, as our readers will remember, M. Thiers was the leader; taking the care, however (and this artful precaution is eminently characteristic of M. Thiers's astuteness), to provide that M. Thiers alone should be the arbiter to decide whether and when the Constitutionnel deviated from the policy of the Centre-Left Party, and consequently to decide when M. Veron should return the 100,000 francs he was allowed to use. From the 12th March, 1838, until the 9th November, 1849, never had any public man so devoted a servant as M. Thiers found in the Constitutionnel. To borrow a low, but expressive phrase, it defended him through thick and thin: the 13th May, 1839, the morning after the émeute of Barbes, the Moniteur announced that the King had framed a new cabinet, the party of M. Thiers had reached power, but he was ostracized; yet the Constitutionnel even then remained faithful to him. Hippolyte Royer Collard had taken the pains, at no inconsiderable expense of time and labor, to assemble all the grammatical faults, and the mistakes of events and of dates in the first volumes of Thiers's History of the Consulate and the Empire; M. Thiers heard of it, and was alarmed; and, at his entreaty, the Constitutionnel engaged M. Royer Collard to suppress his criticisms. But the 9th November, 1849, M. Veron wrote, and published, in the Constitutionnel, notwithstanding the resistance of M. Merruau, a leading article, approving the message addressed by the President of the Republic to the National Assembly,

the 31st October, 1849. That very day M. Thiers declared he would cease all connection with the Constitutionnel, and he demanded the return of the 100,000 francs. They were returned. We understand the Count de Mornay (who played so active a part in the events of December, 1851), if indeed his name was not a mask of Prince Louis Napoleon himself, then advanced M. Veron 100,000 francs, and the Constitutionnel became the most zealous supporter of the Bonapartist cause. A letter we have quoted shows how those services were rewarded. From this time forth M. Veron took an active part in the editorial department of the Constitutionnel; and his editorials were always remarked (our readers are aware the French law on the press requires writers to sign their articles), and they were rudely attacked by the pen and by the pencil; it is the fashion among certain circles in Paris constantly to hold up M. Veron to ridicule. Another newspaper, Le Pays, was founded, and which, after wavering a very long time between the republic of M. Lamartine, and the republic of General Cavaignac, and the republic with Prince Louis Napoleon as the president, as soon as it was very evident the coup d'état of December was completely successful, became a zealous supporter of Prince Louis Napoleon, and one of the loudest petitioners for the re-establishment of the Empire. It injured the subscription list of the Constitutionnel a great deal: in six months it lost 10,000 subscribers; and the Constitutionnel determined to break down the rival paper; to do this it reduced its subscription price from 40 francs to 32 francs a year-a measure which added to its subscription list twenty thousand new subscribers, at a loss not only of all its profits, but of 80,000 francs of its reserved fund. Tired of this unsuccessful and costly warfare, M. Veron proposed to the proprietors of Le Pays to purchase it from them; or to agree to a common rate of subscription. This was declined; but the proprietors of Le Pays proposed to purchase the Constitutionnel for 1,900,000 francs; of this amount M. Veron received 776,000 francs. The sale, and its conditions, was no sooner made public, by rumor, than the Aguado family (the M. Aguado who hitherto figures in the preceding pages died some years before these events; and we are now speaking of his widow and his sons) brought a suit against M. Veron to recover more money than they received, as shareholders, on the ground that M. Veron had received more than his share. The suit was no sooner instituted than the

most odious libels were forged, and were applied to M. Veron: his character was attacked in every way; and none were more ardent and none were more embittered in these attacks than the press of which he had long been a faithful representative, and the literary men to whom he had always been a friend. Besides, M. Veron had never allowed his paper to stoop, and he has never stooped himself to any man; he has always preserved his dignity, and the dignity of his paper, even when in commerce with Prime Ministers, in the days when Prime Ministers were all-powerful in France: he obliged the haughtiest and the most powerful to treat him as their peer; and, under his management, the Constitutionnel was never a slave, potent aid as it might have been to its party.-It would seem to an impartial observer that these reasons alone, were none else wanting, would have, at the least, made writers so cautious as to examine the foundation of the charges made before they reported them.

But it is one of the most curious traits of French society, that envy is so prominent in every member of it, both in the capital and in the most secluded village. No country in the world offers such bitterness of feeling between the different classes, nor such obsequiousness of the lower to the higher classes, when they are brought immediately in contact. The habits of French life afford ample opportunity to envy, as, apart from the national obtuseness to all those principles of delicacy which with us flow from hospitality, the life on "flats," the custom of resorting to cafés and to restaurants, the frequenting of other public places, or, in a word, the excessive publicity of even the humblest particular life, and the absence of a censorious public opinion-that national conscience which avenges outraged laws, and outraged decorum, in those delicate cases for which the statutes cannot provide punishment, except at the risk of opening the door to graver offences-which encourages to post connections, which elsewhere men conceal in some obscure alley, and even from their nearest friends, advertises to the world one's tastes, and fortune, and character, with an abundance of details which startles our home-keeping, privacyloving notions. Few of our readers, be

sides those who have resided abroad for a long time, are aware of the gossiping in which the French newspapers indulge, and the ruthlessness with which they lay their hands on the most delicate details of domestic life, and blazon them to their readers. At this moment we have several