Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve: Théophile Gautier, lover of peace

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Théophile Gautier: One could imagine oneself in the Golden Age of Peace

Maxime du Camp: Gautier, war filled him with horror

====

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve
From Nouveaux Lundis
Théophile Gautier
Translator unknown

A lover of peace, with a shuddering horror of the barbarism and sacrilege of war, he lived through that last French reign of terror, but the shock mentally and physically was too great for him to bear. He never recovered from it. His last glance was doomed to rest upon France, the land of his love and pride and glory, conquered, humiliated, and at the mercy of a foreign foe. He died of hypertrophy of the heart. Neither himself nor his friends dreamed that his last hour was so near. The loving cares of his family smoothed his pathway to the grave. “He was all to us, – he was our entire universe,” said his sister to Ernest Feydeau. He had his faults and weaknesses, but never was man better loved by his friends.