Léon

IV

Gambetta, like the Duc de Broglie, had Gambetta inherited Italian blood. His father was born a Genoese, himself was only naturalised at the age of conscription. Born at Cahors on the 3rd of April, 1838, he belonged, by his maternal ancestry, education, and his first impressions, to that district of Toulouse which has more than once revenged itself upon Northern France for the Albigensian crusade, by imposing masters in law and politics upon its former enemy.

The characteristics which he derived from both sides of his family were strongly marked in him: a thick-set, full figure, dark and lively glancesin spite of the loss of one eye-abundance of black, curly hair on his face and head, a brown complexion, a fleshy, but prepossessing face; on the moral side, mettle, shrewdness, tenacity. As a Ligurian and Arvernian he belonged to the South; in his tastes, his love of the land, his facility

1 Gambetta frequently visited Genoa. He felt at home there. In February, 1882, the very year of his death, he was there again. Here is an extract from an unpublished letter which he dated "from this great marble city which I always feel to be my cradle": "I breathe here more freely than elsewhere, and, far from feeling out of my element, the whole of its history comes back to me like a family tradition. I give free rein to this brooding over the past, and lose myself in the admirable spirit of adventure, the audacious voyages of the Dorias" [we know that Gambetta at the beginning of his career showed a keen taste for nautical matters, and that he cherished for a time the idea of being a sailor]," the fine swordstrokes of Spinola, the gilded fancies of the Doges. Thorough Frenchman though I am, I feel a racial regret in again seeing all these great memories of the fortune of the superb Republic of Genoa-a Republic in which dignity and strength marched abreast with popular liberty."

of expression, his quick emotions and gestures, and a wonderful memory, both of mind and body, he was a Latin.

Moreover, he was himself; that is to say, a powerful, broad, abounding personality, such as overflows spontaneously and fertilises by overflowing. He possessed in the highest degree the social and political aptitudes which come from the heart, the indescribable human sympathy to which nothing human is ever a stranger, the insinuating grace which means to please, convince, and dominate, in the end, by that sense of conscious authority which in itself is imposing and compels obedience. Such is the secret of that dazzling and rapid career a joyous vitality spending itself without intermission, of which the rapid exhaustion was to cause the mournfully premature end, and the darkness of the last days.

Gambetta was a son of the Democracy: his father a grocer, his grandparents artisans and peasants. However, let us note carefully the following feature: born in 1838 under the full influence of the reign of Louis Philippe, educated at first in a junior seminary, then in the Public School of Cahors, a student in 1856, he belonged to the middle class; to the lower middle class, it is true; to that middle class the advent of whose new strata he announced.

In this too he belonged to the South. The change from the blouse to the frock coat means progress in those regions; the iron law which often crushes the working populations of the North, weighs but little upon the South. The Southerner, a small landowner who digs his little plot with scrupulous carefulness, diligently cleanses his vine, and idles about doorways and public places

chiefly sees in politics the organisation of a party, and an opportunity for free discussion. To him the State is a prey to be seized, and to be undermined when it is in the hands of others: such is the game for liberty and power.

Gambetta applied to the modern Fatherland the antique conception of the City; if he had a robust taste for contest, a genius for organisation, and grouping, a thirst for epic excitements, this was all in conformity with the tradition which Michelet expresses thus: "The Republican in France is a classic being." He was amazed by the mental shocks which loosen the modern world and social order. An absolute bourgeois in this characteristic, he opposed all innovators and ideologists. Less bold even than his masters the Latins, he was not attracted by the chapter on the Gracchi in Cornelius Nepos.1

To frame this broad expansive personality in the narrow limits of the paternal field would, however, be to belittle it. Gambetta came to Paris early in life, and it was in Paris that he acquired his training. He trained himself by serious studies, by vast reading, and at the same time by prolonged and sonorous peripatetics in that portal of eloquence and power which the Latin Quarter was in those days. The

1 The following works may be consulted: Anonymous, Gambetta (1869-1871), Paris, 1879, 8vo; J. Lafitte, Gambetta intime, 1879; A. Barbou, Gambetta, 1879; Joseph Reinach, Léon Gambetla, 1887; Bertol-Graivil et Plantié, Gambetta, Souvenirs, 1883; Desmarest, Gambetta, 1882; Depasse, Gambetta; Sirven, Gambetta et Chambord, 1883; Joseph Reinach, Discours et plaidoyers politiques, II vol., 8vo, 1881-1886; Henri Thurat, Gambetta, 1883. See also the singularly attractive pages which the Comte de Meaux has given to Gambetta in the Correspondant of June 10, 1903, pp. 844 and following.

Latin Quarter, which then hardly extended beyond the narrow pavement of the Rue de la Harpe, still resounded with the last echoes of romanticism and the Vie de Bohême. Vermorel, Vallès, Alphonse Daudet, Zola, Flaubert have described it. It was a world apart, a world full of passion and fire, confident in its youth, in its successive and aggressive prejudices, hissing at the lectures of Michelet, Quinet, Sainte-Beuve, Renan, indignant at the "two moralities" of Nisard, following simultaneously the sermons of Pêre Gratry at Notre-Dame, and the materialistic lessons of Robin at the Collège de France.

In the latter years of the second Empire, it might have been believed that the Latin Quarter was every evening big with a revolution. But everything went off in bursts of language. Gambetta, in his time, voiced that thunder. When the Misérables appeared, the epic of these grandiloquent passions, Gambetta, having learned the finest passages by heart, recited them in the presence of the habitués of the Café Procope: this scene is characteristic of the period.

Gambetta also knew the Châtiments by heart, and quoted verses of the Légende des Siècles; always in love with words, he recited the Olynthiacs in Greek, the Catilinarians in Latin, or passages of Rabelais. His inexhaustible memory, his bottomless fund of spirits, his bewildering eloquence, might fatigue his audience, but never himself; his youth spent itself in the exuberance of the "bouzingot."

1

1 A term applied to students who advertised their allegiance to the Romantic school by studied disregard of conventionality in dress and behaviour.-TRANSLATOR.

Meanwhile he went on with his law studies, took his degrees, attended lectures, was interested in everything, learned everything, gorged himself with. more or less well-digested notions, which he often disgorged on the spot like an over-fed child; he read Littré, Michelet, Proudhon, Diderot, Montesquieu, taking from each a colouring, perhaps superficial, but sufficient to secure a stock of ideas a rich vocabulary.

His pre-dominant tendency was towards politics. As a licentiate in law and a barrister he pleaded but little. He neglected the "bar," but he frequented the Hall of les Pas-Perdus to see the faces of the celebrated orators Berryer and Jules Favre. Thus he became secretary to Laurier and indirectly to Crémieux, but on terms of complete independence and equality, a disciple and guest in whom was perceived first the comrade, and then the master.

He frequented the galleries of the Chamber assiduously. When the sessions broke up, he resumed the debates on the pavement, button-holing good-natured auditors and even deputies. He knew the standing orders better than veteran parliamentarians; he made a disturbance in the galleries and constantly fastened his glance on Morny, who was embarrassed by that steady stare. He became a marked man, recognised by his accent, his voice, his spirits, and his neglect of conventionalities, by his soft hat, his open waistcoat, his ill-knotted, streaming tie. In the ardour of his gestures, a gap often showed above his waist-band. Baroche, when Keeper of the Seals, was unwilling to make him a magistrate: "Want of respectability" stands on his record. Later, one of Gambetta's former