Living up to his Rabelaisian mask, he is no enemy to good
cheer, though he never goes out of his way to find it; he is
melancholy and gay. His friends dubbed him the "Dog of the Regiment."
You could have no better portrait of the man than his nickname.
Three more of the band, at least as remarkable as the friends who have
just been sketched in outline, were destined to fall by the way. Of
these, Meyraux was the first. Meyraux died after stirring up the
famous controversy between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a great
question which divided the whole scientific world into two opposite
camps, with these two men of equal genius as leaders. This befell some
months before the death of the champion of rigorous analytical science
as opposed to the pantheism of one who is still living to bear an
honored name in Germany. Meyraux was the friend of that "Louis" of
whom death was so soon to rob the intellectual world.
With these two, both marked by death, and unknown to-day in spite of
their wide knowledge and their genius, stands a third, Michel
Chrestien, the great Republican thinker, who dreamed of European
Federation, and had no small share in bringing about the
Saint-Simonian movement of 1830. A politician of the calibre of
Saint-Just and Danton, but simple, meek as a maid, and brimful of
illusions and loving-kindness; the owner of a singing voice which
would have sent Mozart, or Weber, or Rossini into ecstasies, for his
singing of certain songs of Beranger's could intoxicate the heart in
you with poetry, or hope, or love--Michel Chrestien, poor as Lucien,
poor as Daniel d'Arthez, as all the rest of his friends, gained a
living with the haphazard indifference of a Diogenes.
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