I

Sismondi wrote and re-wrote with inconceivable rapidity the beginning of his History of the Italian Republics, “of that labyrinth of equal and independent states, where he saw displayed more great characters, more ardent passions, more rare talents, more virtue, courage, and true greatness, than in a number of indolent monarchies.” It seemed as if many lives were not enough to study the obscure annals of each of these states in particular. No one had dared to penetrate this intricacy, and he undertook to make these divers histories proceed together, and to unite them in one point of view.

His introduction had satisfied both Madame de Staël, who heard it read with lively interest, and Madame de Sismondi, who mixed with her praises the counsels of the most delicate taste. “Take care,” she wrote to her son, “to avoid every thing which approaches at ever so great a distance the manner of the philosophical haranguers of 1789, who thunder as soon as they open their mouths; warmth must come from development. It is agreeable to perceive the fire under the ashes before the explosion, and the reader more willingly shares the opinions of the author when they come to him by degrees.”

On the contrary, as he went deeper into these dark chronicles, Sismondi felt himself frozen. His father and grandmother had listened coldly to the first chapters of his history; Madame de Staël, so delighted with the Introduction, treated what followed as dry, and wanting life. The author began and began again with his indefatigable perseverance, but the impossibility of finding a publisher added painful disappointment to a fatiguing progress; a thousand apprehensions arose in the mind of the young man. He experienced at the entrance of this career all the agonies of that struggle in which a poor author, doubtful of his ability, can only be supported by the love of fame and the necessity of writing for his bread.

“I have never before attempted history, have I the necessary talent?” he asked himself. Then came that depressing discouragement, in which he complains, “Detached from the present and the future,” added he in his journal, “my life is only a series of moments not connected together; I perceive existence only by the continuity of suffering.” At last, attacked by fever, he wished to sink under it, forgetting the inexhaustible love of her whose letters were full of the most energetic exhortations, the most tender encouragement.

“I am afraid of every thing,” Madame de Sismondi wrote to him. “I am afflicted at the way in which your imagination is excited, is depressed. I should rather say why does it not gather something from the future, with such a fertile field before it. Come, my child, rouse yourself; electrify yourself by every means; all those, of course, that are sure and honourable. Dear child, I exhort you, I conjure you, do not let your heart be oppressed by the obstacles you experience; they are the natural and necessary consequence of the profession of an author; all begin by that. I will not suffer you to speak ill of the lot of a man of letters. Come, let me teach you to see things on their favourable side; when I say favourable side, it is a flower of rhetoric, for I only ask you to be just and consistent. No doubt the man of letters has his own little particular load, as every vocation has; but generally he carries a less heavy share than others of the common burden. Great shocks rarely touch him, except indirectly; trouble, that is to say labour, is one of his pleasures; its reward is double and often very attractive.—Indeed, if I had to live over again and to choose, I should adopt a literary life as the happiest.”