ers; but that number was afterwards
enlarged. M. Dupin, who had been President of the Chamber of Deputies,
was made President of the Council (or prime minister); but the real
head of the Government and Minister for Foreign Affairs was Alphonse
de Lamartine. He was a Christian believer, a high-minded man, by
birth an aristocrat, yet by sympathy a man of the masses. "He was
full of sentimentalities of vainglory and of personal vanity; but
no pilot ever guided a ship of state so skilfully and with such
absolute self-devotion through an angry sea. For a brief while,
just long enough to effect this purpose, he was the idol of the
populace." With him were associated Cremieux, a Jew; Ledru-Rollin,
the historian, a Red Republican; Arago, the astronomer; Hypolite
Carnot, son of Lazare Carnot, Member of the Directory, father of
the future president; General Casaignac, who was made governor of
Algeria; Garnier-Pages, who a second time became, in 1870, member
of a Provisional Government for the defence of Paris; and several
others.

The downfall of Louis Philippe startled and astonished even those
who had brought it about. They had intended reform, and they drew
down revolution. They hoped to effect a change of ministry: they
were disconcerted when they had dethroned a king. There were about
thirty thousand regular troops in Paris, besides the National Guard
and the mounted police, or Garde Municipale. No one had imagined
that the Throne of the Barricades would fall at the first assault.
There were no leaders anywhere in this revolution. The king's party
had no leaders; the young princes seemed paralyzed. The army had
no leader; the commander-in-chief had been changed three times
in twenty-four hours. The insurgents had no leaders. On February
22 Odillon Barrot was their hero, and on February 23 they hooted
him.

The republicans, to their own amazement, were left masters of the
field of battle, and Lamartine was pushed to the front as their
chief man.

I may here pause in the historical narrative to say a few words
about the personal history of Lamartine, which, indeed, will include
all that history has to say concerning the Second Republic.

The love stories of the uncle and father of Alphonse de Lamartine
are so pathetic, and give us so vivid a picture of family life
before the First Revolution, that I will go back a generation, and
tell them as much as possible in Lamartine's own words.

His grandfather had had six child