body grew to be that of a tall, powerful man.
His appearance was by no means aristocratic or dignified if seen
from a distance, but his defects of person were redeemed by the
wondrous sparkle in his eyes. The family of his mother, on the
maternal side, was named Lhommaca, and was of Greek origin. It
came from the Levant, and its members spoke Greek among themselves.
Madame Thiers' father was named Arnic, and his descent was also
Levantine. Mademoiselle Arnic made a love-match in espousing Thiers,
a widower, who after the 9th Thermidor had taken refuge under her
father's roof. A writer who obtained materials for a sketch of
Thiers from the Thiers himself, says,--

"She pitied him, she was dazzled by his brilliant parts, charmed
by his plausible manners, and regardless of his poverty and his
incumbrance of many children, she insisted on marrying him. Her
family was indignant, and cast her off; nor did she long find comfort
in her husband. She was a Royalist, and remained so to the end
of her days; he was a Jacobin. Moreover, she soon found that his
tastes led him to drink and dissipation."

This man, the father of Thiers, was small of stature, mercurial
in temperament, of universal aptitudes, much wit, and a perennial
buoyancy of disposition. His weakness, like his son's, was a passion
for omniscience. Some one said of him: "He talks encyclopedia,
and if anybody asked him, would be at no loss to tell you what
was passing in the moon." He had been educated for the Bar, and
belonged to a family of the _haute bourgeoisie_ of Provence; but
everything was changed by the revolutionary see-saw, and shortly
before his son was born, he had been a stevedore in the docks of
Marseilles. His father (the statesman's grandfather) had been a cloth
merchant and a man of erudition. He wrote a History of Provence,
and died at the age of ninety-five. The Thiers who preceded him
lived to be ninety-seven, and was a noted gastronome, whose house
at Marseilles in the early part of the eighteenth century was known
far and wide for hospitality and good cheer. He was ruined by
speculative ventures in the American colonies.

Thiers' grandfather, the cloth merchant, was a Royalist, who brought
down upon himself the wrath of the Jacobins by inciting the more
moderate party in Marseilles to seize the commissioners sent to
them by the Convention, and imprison them in the Chateau d'If. His
son (Thiers' father), being himself a Jacobin, helped to rele