For twenty years he had been a resident of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Indeed, when he came to Paris for a while, in 1820, to see to the publication of his first poems, he found rooms on Quai d'Orsay. From there he went to make that call on young Hugo, to be narrated later. From 1835 to 1855 his apartment was in the grand mansion, "between court and garden," No. 82 Rue de l'Université. His reception-room was decorated with portraits and busts of Alphonse de Lamartine, we are told by Frederick Locker-Lampson, who visited him there. His host was a handsome and picturesque figure, he says, albeit with an over-refinement of manner. No keener criticism of the poet and his poetry, at this period, has been made than that by Locker-Lampson, in one curt sentence. His sane humor is revolted by that "prurient chastity, then running, nay, galloping, to seed in an atmosphere of twaddle and toadyism."
The desolate fallen idol was rescued from oblivion and poverty by the Second Empire, whose few honorable acts may not be passed over. In 1867, in its and his dying years, that government gave him money, and the municipality gave him a house. These gifts came to him in Rue Cambacérès, in a small hotel now rebuilt into No. 7 of that street. Where it meets with Rue de Penthièvre, just above, you will find the attractive old mansion, with its ancient number 43 cut in the stone over the doorway, in which, during the years after leaving the Faubourg Saint-Germain, he carried on his courageous struggle with his pen against debt and poverty. He had but few months' enjoyment of his last home, the gift of the people of Paris, for he died there in 1869. It was at Passy, not far from the square in Avenue Henri-Martin, named for him and holding his statue. The chair in which he is seated might be a theatrical property, perhaps humorously and fittingly so suggested by the sculptor; who has, however, done injustice to his subject, in robbing him of his natural grace and suavity, and in giving him a pedantic angularity that was never his.
When Lamartine writes to Sainte-Beuve, "I have wept, I who never weep," we are amused by the poet's naïve ignorance of his persistent lachrymose notes. The "smiling critic" accepted them simply as a pardonable overflow of the winning melancholy of that nature, in which he recognized all that was genuine and laudable. This wide-minded tolerance is perhaps the secret of Sainte-Beuve's strength as a critic. With his acute discernment of the soul of a book and of its author, his subtle appreciation of all diverse qualities, he was splendidly impartial. He could read anything and everything, with a keenness of appraisement that did not prejudice his enjoyment of that which was alive, amid much that might be dead. "A pilgrim of ideas, but lacking the first essential of a pilgrim--faith"--he gave all that he was to literature through all his life, and when near its end, he had the right to say: "Devoted with all my heart to my profession of critic, I have tried to be, more and more, a good and--if possible--a skilful workman."