Two of the arts were susceptible of inspiration by the spirit of the time--the art of the painter and the art of the actor. Gérard painted the battle of Austerlitz, Gros the plague scenes at Jaffa, the battle of Aboukir, and the battle of the Pyramids. Talma, who, as he himself tells, learned for the first time one evening when he was in company with the leaders of the Girondists to understand and to represent Roman Republicans, not as they exist in the imagination of school-boys, but as men--Talma learned from Napoleon to play the parts of Cæsars and of kings. According to the well known story, Bonaparte employed Talma to instruct him in the art of assuming imperial attitudes. The real truth is the reverse of this. It was from Napoleon that Talma learned the authoritative deportment, the short, commanding tone, the imperious gestures which he then reproduced on the stage. When, in 1826, the great actor lay consumed with raging fever, he carefully examined in a mirror the traces of madness and terror on his own face, and, half mad at the time, struck himself on the forehead and cried: "Now I have it! If I ever act again, I shall do exactly this when I play the part of Charles VI." Thus passionately did this man love his art. But from his sick-bed he was not to rise again.
One branch of literature alone acquired an influence which it had not before possessed--the youngest of all the branches, which had hitherto been of no importance, but which soon became a power--the newspaper. The well-known _Journal des Débats_ was started to begin the attack upon Voltaire and to provide the prevailing ideas of the day with an organ. The French clerical press employed every possible means to attain its end. In exactly the same spirit which led it, after the Franco-Prussian war, to dub Voltaire "the miserable Prussian," it now searched his letters for passages which might convict him of treachery to his country. In one of the letters to the King of Prussia the great Frenchman's detractors discovered the offensive phrase: "Every time I write to Your Majesty I tremble as our regiments did at Rossbach;" and they hoped with the aid of quotations such as this to irritate the victor of Jena with the philosophers of the school of Voltaire. They emphasised the fact that, according to the testimony of contemporaries, the principal cause of the faintheartedness shown by the French army in the war with Frederick was the fanatic admiration of its officers for that king, a feeling which actually prevented their believing in the possibility of defeating a general who shared and favoured the convictions by which they themselves were inspired. In place of drawing an inference from this favourable to the convictions or ideas in question, the clerical party drew one unfavourable to the persons who, like Voltaire, had promulgated these ideas in France; they denounced them as traitors to their country. The following utterance of the editor of the _Journal des Débats_ gives us some notion of the general tone of that paper: "When I say the philosophy of the eighteenth century, I mean everything that is false in legislation, morals, and politics." The Neo-Catholics had another newspaper entirely in their hands, the _Mercure de France_, the most notable contributors to which were Chateaubriand and Bonald. The authors who formed the remnant of the army of the eighteenth century attempted to combat the influence of these powerful journals, but with little success.