Eclairer et bruler a la fois est le
comble de la perfection
St. Bernard
The Goncourt Brothers tell of their visit, at two o'clock in the afternoon of 27 November 1862, to a sixth-floor apartment in the Rue Jacob where a voice rising as though from dream-like depths bade them enter a kind of “chambre de grisette, de couturière.” There, with an unlaced pair of men's boots on the floor and books heaped about everywhere, they were greeted from his bed by “un petit homme, maigre, maladif … un critique en mansarde, un homme d'un grand talent. C'est M. Montégut, l'écrivain de la REVUE DES DEUX MONDES.” He was thirty-seven then, having come from his native Limousin as a young man, already eccentric by virtue of his provincial education and Protestant background, to find his way into the Revue, where, except for brief service with other journals, he remained at his post of literary critic a long life, ending in December 1895.