, did the parting words of his idolized mother ring in his ears,
"Try to come home a somebody!" Pinched for food and clothes, as he
often was, while he studied early and late in his bare garret near the
Sorbonne, the memory of that dear mother cheered and strengthened him.

He could still feel her tears and kisses on his cheek, and the tender
clasp of her hand as she pressed into his the slender purse of money
which she had saved to release him from the drudgery of an occupation
he loathed, and to enable him to become a great lawyer in Paris. How
well he remembered her delight in listening to him declaim the speeches
of Thiers and Guizot from the pages of the National, which she had
taught him to read when but a mere baby, and from which he imbibed his
first lessons in republicanism,--lessons that he never afterward forgot.

Such deep root had they taken that he could not be induced to change
his views by the fathers of the preparatory school at Monfaucon,
whither he had been sent to be trained for the priesthood. Finally
despairing of bringing the young radical to their way of thinking, the
Monfaucon fathers sent him home to his parents. "You will never make a
priest of him," they wrote; "he has a character that cannot be
disciplined."

His father, an honest but narrow-minded Italian, whose ideas did not
soar beyond his little bazaar and grocery store, was displeased with
the boy, who was then only ten years old. He could not understand how
one so young dared to think his own thoughts and hold his own opinions.
The neighbors held up their hands in dismay, and prophesied, "He will
end his days in the Bastile." His mother wept and blamed herself and
the National as the cause of all the trouble.

How little the fond mother, the disappointed father, or the gloomily
foreboding neighbors dreamt to what heights those early lessons they
now so bitterly deplored were to lead!

When at sixteen Leon Gambetta returned from the Lyceum to which he had
been sent on his return from the Monfaucon seminary, his wide reading
and deep study had but intensified and broadened the radicalism of his
childhood. He longed to go to Paris to study law, but his father
insisted that he must now confine his thoughts to selling groceries and
yards of ribbon and lace, as he expected his son to succeed him in the
business.

Poor, foolish Joseph Gambetta! he would confine the young eagle in a
barnyard. But the eagle pined and drooped in his cage,