Thierry, Augustin (1795-1856)

Related Links:

Source: Augustin Thierry, History of the Conquest of England by the Normans; Its Causes, and its Consequences, in England, Scotland, Ireland, & on the Continent, translated from the seventh Paris edition, by William Hazlitt (London: H.G. Bohn, 1856). In 2 volumes. Vol. 1. Chapter: BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF M. AUGUSTIN THIERRY.

Copyright: The text is in the public domain.

Fair Use: This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE OF M. AUGUSTIN THIERRY.

L’histoire aura son Homere comme la poesie.—Chateaubriand, Preface des Etudes Historiques.

Si j’avais à recommencer ma route, je prendrais celle qui m’a conduit où je suis. Aveugle et souffrant, sans espoir et presque sans relache, je puis rendre ce temoignage, qui de ma part ne sera pas suspect: il y a au monde quelque chose qui vaut mieux que les jouissances materielles, mieux que la fortune, mieux que la santé elle-même; c’est le devouement à la science—Augustin Thierry, Dix ans d’Etudes Historiques, Preface, p. 25.

Of all the superior men I ever met, few have left so deep an impression upon my mind as M. Augustin Thierry.

I had long been acquainted with the mighty labours that have rendered him one of the leading representatives of the modern school of history; I had a vivid recollection of the enthusiasm that pervaded all the forms of our colleges, when, in utter disgust as we were with the meagre, monotonous, and mendacious narratives of Velly, or Millot, or Anquetil, we all at once saw new, grand, and comprehensive views unfolded before our dazzled and delighted eyes, by M. Augustin Thierry. I had long known that after having endowed his country with two masterpieces of literature, in which the erudition of a Benedictine is combined with the glowing style of a poet, M. Augustin Thierry had purchased with the loss of sight, worn out over old texts and manuscripts, the honour of having been one of the first to raise the standard of historical reform, and to teach France the true sources of her national origin. I knew also that, after this, as if to put the inflexible champion of learning to the utmost proof, fate had been pleased to accumulate for him affliction upon affliction; that having deprived him of sight, it next deprived him of movement; that having extinguished the light of those penetrating eyes, it had paralyzed his once robust limbs; that having for ever shut out from him the view of those monuments of the past, whose examination and study had constituted his joy, his happiness, his very life, it had not even left to his hand, mutilated with severest suffering, the power to hold a pen. But I knew, also, that M. Augustin Thierry had come victorious out of this fearful struggle; that never had his great mind striven with more vivid brilliancy than after he had, to use his own expression, become friends with darkness; that never had his march over the difficult ground of history been made with firmer and more assured step than when he was guided on his way by the brightness of the inward light alone; I knew that the author of the Recits des Temps Merovingiens had never been more lucid, more graphic, more graceful, and at the same time more vigorous in his style, than when it had become necessary for him to commit to other hands the transcription on paper of the works cast and elaborated in that powerful brain, as in a burning furnace.

I knew all this, and it was this that made me eager to witness a spectacle, to my mind the finest of all, the spectacle of a great soul struggling with physical pain, conquering it, prostrating it, reducing it to impotence, and deriving from a loftier sentiment than the world-pride of Epictetus the power and the right to say to it: “Pain, thou art but a word!

The happiness I so desired I obtained; and as it is impossible for me, within the limits of this sketch, to analyze as I could wish, works, that after all are in every one’s hands, I will at least endeavour, ere I succinctly relate the noble life of M. Augustin Thierry, to convey to the reader the impressions made upon my mind in a visit recently paid to the historian, in the company of a lady and two other friends.

On reaching the eminence which overlooks the charming valley of Montmorency, not far from the Hermitage immortalized by Jean Jacques, you perceive to the left a narrow winding road bordered with villas in the Italian style. About half way down this road, on the right, our carriage drew up at a little gate, the threshold of which we passed full of the respectful emotion, ever created by the thought of great talent dignified by a great calamity; for here, in the summer months, dwells Augustin Thierry; hither he comes with the return of spring, to seek strength from the fresh, pure air of the valley, enabling him to continue his labours. We found ourselves in an elegant garden: before us was a lawn varied with flower beds, and beyond it a sloping shrubbery. On the right were a green-house and a summer-house; in front of the latter, lay at full length a handsome Newfoundland dog, which, raising its head, gave us a look of welcome with its mild, well-natured eyes. To the left, on the opposite side of the lawn, rose a rectangular house, white, simple, and in good taste, consisting of two stories, the lower windows opening into the garden. The façade was adorned with a Canova Venus, a Bacchus, a head of Paris, and another of Helen, standing in niches in the wall. Before the door I observed a Bath chair, painted green; this was the carriage in which the illustrious invalid took the air.

Entering a small apartment on the ground floor, furnished with simple elegance, we were received by a lady attired in black; still young, of small stature, graceful manners, and an intellectual but pensive countenance. It was Madame Augustin Thierry, wife of the historian; she who has so appreciated the beauty and happiness of associating her name with a great name, her life with a life of glory and of suffering, of quitting the vain pleasures of the world to devote herself wholly to the noblest part in the drama of life that can be assigned to a woman, the part of a guardian angel, of a providence on earth for a great soul imprisoned in a suffering body. Even had I not known that Madame Augustin Thierry is endowed with faculties that qualify her to take a direct and active part in all the labours of her husband, even had I not read the pieces, so remarkable for thought and for expression, that, proceeding from her pen, have appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes, under the title of Philippe de Morvelle, the destiny that she has adopted would suffice in my eyes to manifest that liers is a noble heart, a noble spirit.1

Having been introduced to Madame Augustin Thierry by the lady under whose auspices we had come, I sat down in a corner of the apartment, and, while the reflections I have just expressed were passing through my mind, looked over a small round table, nearly covered with books, which stood at my side; upon the books lay some embroidery-work just commenced; here was a bronze sphynx paper-weight, and there, in the middle of the table, a vase filled with flowers in their early bloom.

Ere long, we were joined by M. Augustin Thierry’s brother, M. Amédée Thierry,2 a man of middle height, grave in speech as in countenance, wherein we may read the profound depression of his fraternal heart. On his arrival the conversation became more general; but, for my own part, I scarcely listened to it, absorbed as I was in expectation of him whom I was about to see, and in endeavours to picture to myself, beforehand, the extent to which evil is able to attain the soul through the medium of the body.

At length I heard the sound of approaching steps; a door on my right opened, and a domestic appeared, carrying on his back a man, blind, paralyzed, incapable of movement. We all rose: my heart was penetrated with emotion, at the sight of a being so powerful in intellect, so powerless in body; the domestic in his every motion exhibited a respectful solicitude that sensibly affected me; he seemed thoroughly to appreciate the value of him he bore. He bent gently back towards an arm chair, in which he deposited his charge, enveloping the lower part of the motionless frame with a wrapper. This done, in an instant the scene changed, and I at once recalled a passage in the Essai sur la litterature Anglaise, where M. de Chateaubriand describes the visit of a contemporary to Milton. “The author of ‘Paradise Lost,’ attired in a black doublet, reclined in an arm-chair; his head was uncovered, his silver hair fell upon his shoulders, and his fine dark eyes shone bright in their blindness upon his pallid face.” It was the same head, with the exception of the white hair, that I now saw before me; the same face, more youthful and vigorous, the noblest blind face that can be conceived. The head was firmly set upon broad shoulders; glossy hair, of the deepest black, carefully parted over an expansive forehead, ell in curls beside each temple; beneath their arched brows opened the dark eyes; but for the vagueness of their direction, I should have imagined them animated with sight; the nose was of the purest Greek form; the mouth, with lips fine, delicate, and expressive, seemed endowed with all the sensibility of which the eyes had been deprived; the finely turned chin had a slight dimple at its extremity; there was in the contour of the face, and in the general expression of the physiognomy, a remarkable combination of energy, subtleness, and sedate tranquillity; the tones of his voice were clear, well poised, and distinct, though, from his feeble health, not sonorous, his bearing was, in the highest degree, elegant; the lower portion of the frame, as I have said, was paralyzed, but the movement of the bust and of the arms was free; the hands, of which only the forefinger and thumb appeared capable of action, were gloved.

When the name of the lady who had introduced us was announced to him, the handsome blind man smiled, and like the smile of Chactas in Renè, “that smile of the mouth, unaccompanied by the smile of the eyes, partook of the mysterious and of the celestial.” The lady approached him, and Thierry kissed, with a chivalrous air, the fair hand placed in his own.

Conversation once fairly begun, that fine head seemed as it were radiant in the light of the intellect still finer within. I have been in the company of many persons who have the reputation of good talkers, and who do talk admirably, but I have perhaps never heard anything comparable with the colloquial language of M. Angustin Thierry, in facility, perspicuity, elegance. It is, doubtless, the habit of dictation, that has given so much of style to his conversation; but whatever the cause, it may indeed be said of him, that without any effort, without any affectation whatever, he really speaks like a book.

One of our party, M. Ampère, was preparing to depart for the East; he had no sooner mentioned the circumstance, than M. Augustin Thierry discoursed to us of the East, in what, for thought and language, was an absolute poem; this blind man knows everything, recollects everything; that which he has not seen with the eyes of the body, he has seen with the eyes of the spirit. Like Milton, he is acquainted with nearly all the European languages. One of his friends told me, that he has sometimes heard him in the evening, seated in his garden, beneath the pale rays of the setting sun, singing, with his feeble voice, a love song in modern Greek; and at such moments, added my informant, ‘he seemed to me finer than Homer, or than the unknown Klepht, who himself, perhaps also blind, had composed the verses he was reciting.’

Throughout the conversation, to which I was a silent and attentive listener, I could detect in M. Augustin Thierry not the slightest trace of selfishness, not the least self-reference; on the contrary, he who had been so cruelly tried by fate, spoke of the sufferings and infirmities of others with the most unaffected and touching commiseration. And thus, from day to day, does this martyr to science intrepidly pursue the task he has imposed upon himself; at times only, when his pains are most racking, he is heard to murmur: “Oh, that I were only blind!” Except in such moments of depression, which are short and far between, and discernible only by his most intimate associates, M. Augustin Thierry seems more a stranger to his own condition than are those who surround and listen to him; science, history, poetry, anecdotes, reminiscences of his youth—he applies to these and all other subjects the same full, rich, elegant, nervous, noble diction; every shade of thought is reflected on his lips. At times, when an idea of a more peculiarly grave and lofty character arises in his mind, you can discern a movement in the muscles of the eye; those blind eyes, the dark pupil of which stands out in bold relief from the cornea, open wide; the thought within seems essaying to make its way through the opacity of the ball, and, after vain efforts to effect this, returns within, descends to the lips, which receiving it, give it forth, not only in language, but with the expression of the look; from time to time, the blind man passes his poor weak hand over those, in every sense, so speaking lips, as if cherishing the precious organ, enriched for him with all the faculties that the other organs have lost. The two hours we spent with him seemed not a moment.

M. Augustin Thierry was born at Blois, on the 20th May, 1795, of poor and humble parents. He passed through his studies with distinguished success at the college of his native town, and judging from the first production of his youth,1 impressed with a singular energy and even enthusiasm, he must have been endowed by nature with an extreme sensibility, with an imagination highly vivid, and of such vigorous organization as must have necessitated enormous, pitiless toil to quell it. He himself relates, in the preface to his Recits des Temps Merovingiens, how the author of Les Martyrs, whom we find, as it were, a great lighthouse at the entrance to every new idea of our age, became, in a great degree, the primum mobile of his future vocation; how, one day, when alone in one of the school-rooms, reading, for the first time, Les Martyrs, and having come, in the sixth book, to the so dramatic picture of the battle of the Franks and the Romans in the marshes of Batavia, the young student suddenly felt within him, as it were, a revelation of historical truth falsified by the classic historians and restored by the powerful instinct of a great poet; how, seized with enthusiasm, he rose from his seat, and made the apartment resound, as he marched up and down its length, shouting the war-song of the terrible Franks of M. de Chateaubriand: “Pharamond, Pharamond, we have fought with the sword! &c.” and, lastly, how the memory of this electric impression remained stamped upon his mind in indelible characters.

In 1811, on quitting his college, M. Augustin Thierry entered the normal school; after passing two years there, he was appointed professor in a provincial college; the invasion of 1814 brought him to Paris. He was at this time in all the ardour of early youth; versed in the most various studies, he had as yet no particular predilection for any distinct branch of science, and his political ideas, though fervent, partook of the vagueness and confusion which characterized the period. He has himself described the condition of his mind at this time: “With a hatred of military despotism, part of the reaction of the general mind against the imperial regime, I combined a profound aversion for revolutionary tyranny, and, without any decided preference for one form of government over another, a certain distaste for the English constitution, or rather for the odious and absurd aping of it which at this period prevailed in France. I yearned for a future, I knew not exactly what; for a liberty whose definition, if I gave it any at all, assumed something of this form: a government with the greatest possible amount of individual guarantees, and the least possible amount of administrative action.

There was living at this time a celebrated political economist, then, indeed, obscure, but whom it has since been sought to elevate into a god. The daring scope of his views at first led away the ardent mind of the youthful Augustin, who, quitting the university, devoted himself with all the fervency of his nature to the study of the loftiest social problems, and attached himself to St. Simon in the capacity of secretary, and of disciple.2 It is unnecessary to say that at this period St. Simon had propounded no idea of constructing anything at all resembling a new religion. This was a notion which occurred to him much later, if, indeed, it be not altogether a posthumous crotchet, gratuitously attributed to him by his successors. However this may have been, though limited to questions of an entirely social, industrial, or political character, this co-operation of M. Augustin Thierry in the labours of a man, whose eminent qualities as a political economist and thinker are incontestable, was of short duration; the gloomy, narrow, and despotic tendencies of sectarianism could not but jar upon a mind essentially endowed with explicitness, precision, and independence; the disciple often rebelled against the views of the master, and, besides, he felt more and more attracted towards a sphere of studies more positive in their nature. M. Augustin Thierry left St. Simon in 1817, and joined the Censeur Europeén, which, under the editorship of MM. Comte and Dunoyer, enjoyed the reputation of the most important and most high-minded of the liberal journals of the period.

The new school of history had not at this time raised its head; Velly, Garnier, Millot, Anquetil, reigned sovereign supreme. The general aspect of our own history, more especially that of the first eight centuries, was utterly disfigured; in that dull and arid nomenclature of faits et gestes royaux, the Sicambrian Chlodowig is presented to us in flowing wig and laced ruffles, the leudes of Charlemagne in the guise of the courtiers of the Œil de Bæuf, Fredegonde in fontanges, and Hermangarde in hoopedpetticoat and red-heeled shoes. “These men,” observes M. de Chateaubriand, “carried in their heads the fixed form of a solemn monarchy, ever the same, from first to last, marching sedately onwards with three orders and a parliament of grave persons in black robes and powdered hair.” No historian had thought of moving out of this beaten track, when M. Thierry, having occasion to seek, in the history of the past, materials for the polemics of the day, first descended into the arena, and young, ardent, unconscious of his vocation and of his destiny, entered upon that grand struggle, the result of which was to be the establishment of new doctrines and new principles.

In his youthful fervour and the excess of his popular enthusiasm, M. Augustin began with rushing beyond the bounds of truth into the regions of paradox. And this was to be expected. Aristocracy, assailed and decimated under Louis XI., gagged and beaten down by Richelieu and Louis XIV., dishonoured under Louis XV., beheaded by the Convention, led in a string by Napoleon, sought once more to raise its head under the Restoration; it would, perhaps, to a certain extent, have attained its object, had it been better served, and more especially had it been less compromised by the majority of those who constituted themselves its organs. Listening to its political champions, you would have supposed that it desired to pass a sponge over four centuries of progressive decay: it did not content itself with assailing accomplished facts, it denied them; and feeble, weak, obscured, lost as it was in the grand social unity, the result of ’89, instead of quietly settling down in its position, and seeking, in self-renovation, an element of strength and duration, it aimed at nothing less than the annihilation of the past, the confiscation of history. In the nineteenth century, an eloquent voice ventured to say, in the very teeth of new France—“Enfranchised race, slaves wrested from our grasp, tributary people, new people, leave was granted you to be free, but not to be noble; for us, all is of right, for you, all is of favour.”1 Pretensions of this sort, wholly based upon the old right of conquest, naturally brought into the field of history a plebeian, proud of his plebeian birth, and ready to oppose pride to pride. When, a century before, the Comte de Boulainvilliers sought to construct an historical system of his own, by deducing false consequences from the false proposition already generally scouted, of the distinction of conquerors and conquered in Gaul, a man of the people, the abbé Dubos, stood forward to combat fallacy with fallacy; in reply to a book which abused the fact of conquest, he wrote a very learned work2 to prove that there had been no conquest at all; that there had been an alliance between the two races and nothing more; that, five centuries later, in the tenth century, in consequence of the dismemberment of the sovereignty, and the conversion of offices into seigneuries, a dominant caste had intrusively interposed itself between kings and people; and that it was feudalism and not the Frankish invasion which had enslaved Gaul.

In reproducing the aristocratic theories of M. de Boulainvilliers, M. de Montlosier encountered at the very outset an antagonist much less accommodating than the Abbé Dubos. Far from denying the fact of conquest, M. Augustin Thierry proudly accepted it, as a premises on which to found his claims in favour of the conquered; not content with establishing the original iniquity of the fact and its fatal consequences at the period, he traced its progress through fourteen ages, subsisting ever and everywhere, and denounced it as the source not merely of evils past, but of all present difficulties. Gravely adopting the assertions of M. de Montlosier, and his imaginary division of the France of 1815 into Gauls and Franks, combating menace with menace, and paradox with paradox, he in his turn exclaimed: “We think we are one nation, yet we are two nations in the same land; two nations, hostile in their recollections of the past, irreconcilable in their projects for the future. The genius of the conquest has made its mock of nature and of time, it still hovers over this unhappy country. It is under its influence that the distinctions of castes have succeeded to those of blood, those of orders to those of castes, those of titles to those of orders.”3 Hurried on in this manner, by the necessities of polemics, beyond the bounds of the true, it continued the fight in the void. Once engaged in supplying France with the reason and solution of all things in this permanent fact of conquest, he undertook to follow it out of France, and to combat it wherever, as he conceived, he should find it. He commenced by giving in the Censeur a sketch of the revolutions of England from the Norman invasion to the death of Charles I., and not content with metamorphosing the Cavaliers and Roundheads into Normans and Saxons, he carried the theory of the conquest, and subjection of the one race by the other, even beyond the reign of Charles II.

He has himself given an account4 of these exaggerations and gropings in the dark of a young and great mind feeling its way; he has told us, with the frankness which belongs to a superior man, that he soon saw he was carrying too far this, in itself, so true and fecund principle of the distinction of races, that he was falsifying history by applying to epochs entirely different forms entirely identical. But he has also described how to his aberrations as a journalist, who had at first lost his way, as it were, in the past, he owed the sentiment of his true vocation, how from the very day when he first touched upon the great problem of the Germanic invasions and the dismemberment of the Roman empire, he was drawn to it by an irresistible attraction; how, upon his first glance at history he said to himself; I will be an historian: and how deeply he became impressed with the essentiality of regulating and maturing by study the passion that had risen within him.

When the Censeur Europeen succumbed beneath the blows of a censorship altogether different from its own, M. Augustin Thierry, already more especially devoted to the labours of pure erudition, contributed to the Courrier Français a series of letters in which, sketching an outline of one of his future works, he expounded his plan of a reform in the manner of studying and writing history. The exigencies of daily polemics closing this arena to him, M. Thierry, who had hitherto divided his attention between the history of the past and the business of the present, sequestered himself from the world and its politics, and engaged in a pertinacious study of facts, reading, analysing, comparing, and extracting the marrow out of every book and every manuscript that could throw a light upon his investigations. Still under the influence of the grand problem of the Germanic invasions which had struck his imagination at the outset, he digested all the documents calculated to throw light upon it, to fathom it, to solve it; and from step to step, his ideas progressively matured and developed, by five years of solitary labours, resulted at length in two works, alike admirable in their matter and their manner, and which our epoch, so encumbered with futile and absurd productions, may well regard as memorable and glorious to it, destined as they are to a permanent existence among the proudest annals of learning. The first edition of the Histoire de la Conquête de l’Angleterre par les Normands appeared in the spring of 1825; the first edition of the Lettres sur l’Histoire de France about the close of 1827; a second edition, entirely revised and recast, was published in the following year.

The reader is aware of the immense sensation produced by the former of these works, the so cherished production of an historian of twenty-six. The author was enjoying all the triumph of success when he, too late, perceived that his eyes had failed under his intense labours, and that his strength was giving way. After a journey into Switzerland, he visited Provence, accompanied by his learned friend M. Fauriel, and on his return to Paris, in 1826, found his health somewhat improved, but his sight still declining. Almost blind, he resumed his labours; a young man, obscure at this period, but whose name was destined to take a brilliant position in literature, Armand Carrel, joined him, as secretary, and by his friendly earnestness of purpose rendered the necessity of reading with the eyes of others less painful to Thierry: relieved by this co-operation, he at one time formed, with M. Mignet, the project of writing in concert a great national history, but, after some experiments which seemed to show the futility of the attempt, the project was abandoned.

His next publication was the Letters sur l’Histoire de France, shortly after the appearance of which, in the spring of 1830, the Institute elected him a member of the Academie des Inscriptiones et Belles Lettres. He was ere long assailed by the most acute pains, and by a nervous malady of the gravest character. He had once more to renounce his beloved studies and to quit Paris. He lived, from 1831 to 1836, between Vesoul, with his brother the prefect of Haute-Saône, and the baths of Luxeuil. It was at the latter place that, in 1831, he became acquainted with and married the lady who was to alleviate his sufferings, by aiding him on his way through the evil days of premature old age. In the intervals of repose granted him by his maladies, he resumed with fresh ardour his task of historian. He first occupied himself with the revision of his Histoire de la Conquête de l’Angleterre, and then with selecting and correcting the various productions of his youth, which he collected into a volume, published in 1834, under the title of Dix Ans d’Etudes Historiques. Still full of the desire to complete his history of the Germanic invasions, he commenced in the Revue des Deux Mondes a series of letters, giving an exact and perfect picture of the civil, political, and religious life of the French of the sixth century.

These elegant, animated, and at the same time substantial productions, published in the next year under the title of Recits des Temps Merovingiens, obtained for their author the prize of 400l., founded by Baron Gobert, and awarded by the Academie Française. Almost at the same moment—in the autumn of 1835—M. Guizot recalled him to Paris, for the purpose of entrusting to him the superintendence of a great undertaking, honourable alike to the historian who conceived it and the historian who directed it. It was nothing less than to extract from the archives of every town and parish of France all the materials directly or indirectly bearing upon the history of the Third estate, so as to form a collection rivalling the great Benedictine compilations devoted to the nobility and the clergy, and to supply future genius with all the materials for a gigantic work, hitherto declared impossible—a general and complete history, namely, of the French nation. Should this splendid monument be ever constructed, on its base must be prominently inscribed the names of Francis Guizot and Augustin Thierry.

An illustrious philosopher, whose untimely death Germany still deplores, Edward Gans, writes thus:—

“It is Thierry who has triumphantly demonstrated the fallacy of those historical systems which see all France in a number of Frankish tribes; which, passing over in silence the element imported from the south, forget that up to the beginning of the thirteenth century the limits of the Frankish empire did not extend beyond the Isère, and that in the tongue of oc and no, the tongue of ouy and nenny, was likened to the barking of a dog; in a word, it is Thierry who has taught us to appreciate the true signification of what is called the fourteen centuries of the French monarchy.”1

I will add, that it is M. Augustin Thierry who, by his efforts to restore to proper names, under the two first races, their true orthography, has succeeded in fixing the moment of the metamorphosis of Franks into French; and it is M. Thierry who has demolished to its foundations the historical axiom inscribed at the head of the charter of 1814—namely, the pretended enfranchisement of the communes by Louis le Gros. He has created in our annals a glorious trace that will never be effaced; no historian, ancient or modern, has exhibited, in a higher degree than he, that human sense which is the very soul of history, I mean that comprehensive sensibility, synthetic without losing aught of the true, which leads a writer to attach himself to the destiny of a whole people as to the destiny of an individual; following this people, step by step, through ages, with an interest as earnest, emotions as vivid, as though he were following the steps of a friend engaged in a perilous enterprise; no one, in a word, has better realized than M. Thierry this conception of the ideal in history enunciated by himself: “La narration complete épuisant les textes, rassemblant les details epars, recueillant jusqu’aux moindres indices des faits, et des caractères, et de tout cela formant un corps, auquel vient le souffle de vie, par l’union de la science et de l’art.”1

[1 ] Madame Augustin Thierry, whose maiden name was Julia de Querangal, belongs to a distinguished Breton family. Besides the fragments mentioned above, she is the authoress of a charming production, entitled Adelaide, ou Memoires d’une fille.

[2 ] M. Amédee Thierry is himself, I need hardly say, a great historian; every one has read his Histoire des Gaulois. Science may well lament that important administrative occupations have prevented M. Amédee Thierry from wholly devoting himself to her service.

[1 ] Most of these have been since reproduced in the work entitled, Dix ans d’Etudes Historiques.

[2 ] Various pamphlets resulted from this association.

[1 ] Montlosier, De la Monarchie Française, ii.

[2 ] Histoire Critique de l’Etablissement de la Monarchie Française dans les Gaules.

[3 ] Censeur Europeen,2 ap. 1820.

[4 ]Dix Ans d’Etudes Historiques.—Preface.

[1 ] Das Erbrecht in Weltgeschiehtlicher Entwickelung, iv. 242.

[1 ] Récits des temps Mérovingiens, ii. 357.