Page 207 - les-miserables

opinion was that M. Charles Loyson would be the genius of
the century; envy was beginning to gnaw at him—a sign of
glory; and this verse was composed on him:—

“Even when Loyson steals, one feels that he has paws.’

As Cardinal Fesch refused to resign, M. de Pins, Arch-
bishop of Amasie, administered the diocese of Lyons.
The quarrel over the valley of Dappes was begun between
Switzerland and France by a memoir from Captain, after-
wards General Dufour. Saint-Simon, ignored, was erecting
his sublime dream. There was a celebrated Fourier at the
Academy of Science, whom posterity has forgotten; and in
some garret an obscure Fourier, whom the future will re-
call. Lord Byron was beginning to make his mark; a note
to a poem by Millevoye introduced him to France in these
terms: a certain Lord Baron. David d’Angers was trying to
work in marble. The Abbe Caron was speaking, in terms
of praise, to a private gathering of seminarists in the blind
alley of Feuillantines, of an unknown priest, named Felic-
ite-Robert, who, at a latter date, became Lamennais. A thing
which smoked and clattered on the Seine with the noise of a
swimming dog went and came beneath the windows of the
Tuileries, from the Pont Royal to the Pont Louis XV.; it was
a piece of mechanism which was not good for much; a sort
of plaything, the idle dream of a dream-ridden inventor; an
utopia—a steamboat. The Parisians stared indifferently at
this useless thing. M. de Vaublanc, the reformer of the Insti-
tute by a coup d’etat, the distinguished author of numerous

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