St. Francis de Sales, was not only a missionary, but also a man of letters, and—especially—a patron of letters. Thirty years before Richelieu founded the French Academy, he founded the Florimontane Academy—with the motto Flores fructusque perennes—in Savoy, and thus forged one of the links between the literature of Savoy and that of France. More than one great writer, whom we carelessly class as French, was really of Savoyard origin. Vaugelas, described by Sainte-Beuve 'as the first of our correct and polished grammarians,' was the son of the Vaugelas who helped St. Francis de Sales in the formation of his literary society at Annecy. St. RÉal, the forerunner of Montesquieu, was also a Savoyard; and so were Count Xavier de Maistre, author of the widely-read 'Voyage Autour de ma Chambre,' and Count Joseph de Maistre, his more distinguished brother.

Joseph de Maistre, indeed, is the greatest of the literary sons of Savoy, and a worthy inheritor of the traditions of the saint, his predecessor. An aristocrat, and a senator, he was a man of forty when the revolutionary storm burst upon his country. For a season he took refuge in Lausanne, where he often met, and argued with, Madame de StaËl, whom he regarded as a woman with a good heart but a perverted head. His discussions with her, he said, 'nearly made the Swiss die with laughing, though we conducted them without quarrelling.' Afterwards he was sent to represent his sovereign at the Court of St. Petersburg, where, he complains, he had to get on as best he could, 'without a salary, without a secretary, and without a fur-lined overcoat.' Both there and at Lausanne he wrote.

His date and his circumstances class him with the literary ÉmigrÉs—with Madame de StaËl, ChÂteaubriand, and SÉnancour; but he lacks their melancholy and their sentimentalism. He and ChÂteaubriand, indeed, resemble one another as two champions of the Catholic religion; but they support that religion from widely different points of view. ChÂteaubriand is before all things the religious Æsthete. He deduces the truth of a creed from its beauty, and is very little concerned with its bearing upon moral conduct. Joseph de Maistre, on the contrary, seems to believe in the authority of the Church because he believes in authority generally. He is an Absolutist who hates all Radicals, and regards the schismatic as the worst kind of Radical. He makes a religion of the principle of 'keeping people in their place,' and he supports his religion with epigrams. The epigrams are very good, though the religion is very bad. The French, like the sound critics that they are, have proved themselves capable of enjoying the one while refusing to have very much to do with the other.