At the end of Sainte-Beuve's Portraits, as if to close their series, we find this advice: "As a critic, I've done enough of the lawyer, now let's do the judge." He has just returned from his "campaign" in Liège, and is about to embark on the Lundis series, whose aim is clear: to wage the "pitched battle" he has long been preparing against the Romantic generation, with which he is ready to break, in order to bring to light the spirit of vengeance that secretly animates the relationships of its members, and which he makes the essential key to reading the works of his time. In Rousseau, he finds everywhere "the ulterior motive of reprisals", and likewise in Vigny and Latouche, king of the snake.
Memoirs are the most vengeful of genres, and Chateaubriand the most exemplary condottiere or charlatan. All his work, literary and political, can be understood on the model of the Congress of Verona, a text of vengeance, or rather De Buonaparte et des Bourbons, which inaugurates a vengeful ethos that's impossible to shake off once you've tasted it. According to Sainte-Beuve, the Furies, not the Muses, presided over this author's entry into politics.
Sainte-Beuve dwells on the unfriendly relationship between Lamartine and Chateaubriand, who caressed each other in public. "Figure du faux grand homme", says Lamartine of Chateaubriand at mass. "Grand dadais", said Chateaubriand of Lamartine, in a comment reported by Sainte-Beuve, the day Lamartine came to Madame Récamier's to present a book about which Chateaubriand remained stubbornly silent. Elsewhere, however, he likes to point out that Chateaubriand certainly had far more self-interested reasons for not saving the head of his cousin Armand, who was condemned to death, and whose death Sainte-Beuve insinuates only needed a word from Chateaubriand to Bonaparte to save him. The height of his anger is undoubtedly reached in his unfortunate sentence about Decazes whose, he says, "feet slipped in his blood", suggesting that he may have been involved in the assassination of the Duc de Berry. Sainte-Beuve likes to point out that the sentence is only so strong - like many things in Chateaubriand - because it's someone else's: it was indeed suggested to its author that he truncate it so as not to fall too much into his usual grandiloquence.
But it is perhaps Balzac who attracts Sainte-Beuve's wrath most of all. The enmity between the two men goes back to Sainte-Beuve's novel Volupté, which Balzac appreciated. Hurt by an article in which Sainte-Beuve criticized him for being an ineffectual fighter for letters, Balzac decided to take revenge by "remaking Volupté " - Sainte-Beuve would return to the phrase again and again - in the form of his Lys dans la vallée. Sainte-Beuve regularly described Balzac as a "toilet trader", reproaching him for his novels written for women, rags lost amidst grease stains. Sainte-Beuve finds Balzac a poor literary strategist and a muddled genius, who needs many trial runs before producing a good work, like a general indignantly wasting the blood of his soldiers.
Balzac replies to Sainte-Beuve that his attacks are those of a coward and an impotent man, and remarks that it took him much longer to do Volupté than it did Le Lys dans la vallée. Sainte-Beuve continued to respond to Balzac right up to the obituary he wrote in 1850. Returning incessantly to this first scene in Volupté, he explains Balzac's entire attitude in terms of the need for revenge: " Hence his anger, his need for vengeance, and his intrusion on the lands of Port-Royal. "
The twentieth century saw no great rivalry like that of Veuillot and Hugo, or Sainte-Beuve and Balzac. Was it because the wars had calmed literary life? Is it because the State has finally conquered the monopoly of legitimate violence? Is it because literature itself is less lively?
