France is honoring the memory of such a man at this moment; one who for forty years sought the vital spark of his country’s existence, striving to resuscitate² what he called “the great soul of history,” as it developed through successive acts of the vast drama.  This employment of his genius is Michelet’s title to fame.

 

In a sombre structure, the tall windows of which look across the Luxembourg trees to the Pantheon, where her husband’s bust³ has recently been placed, a widow preserves with religious care the souvenirs of this great historian.  Nothing that can recall either his life or his labor⁴ is changed.

 

Madame Michelet’s life is in strange contrast with the ways of the modern spouse⁵ who, under pretext⁶ of grief, discards and displaces every reminder⁷ of the dead.  In our day, when the great art is to forget, an existence consecrated⁸ to a memory is so rare that the world might be the better for knowing that a woman lives who, young and beautiful, was happy in the society of an old man, whose genius she appreciated and cherished, who loves him dead as she loved him living.  By her care the apartment remains⁹ as it stood when he left it, to die at Hyères,—the furniture, the paintings, the writing-table.  No stranger has sat in his chair, no acquaintance has drunk from his cup.  This woman, who was a perfect wife and now fills one’s ideal of what a widow’s life should be, has constituted herself the

分享到：