ne of the half-yearly bulletins of the _lycee_, which has
been preserved in his family, records that he was "passionate without
being vindictive, and proud without arrogance." In time he became the
best Latin scholar at the school, and the most proficient in French
composition. When he was in his sixteenth year, however, an accident,
which destroyed his left eye, quelled for a time the exuberance of his
character and suddenly gave a new direction to his studies. Fearing lest
he should lose his sight altogether, he set himself to learn the
alphabet for the blind, in order that he might read in books with raised
letters; he also applied himself to the study of music and the violin.
During a whole year he was forbidden to open a book.

From Cahors Gambetta went to Paris to study law, and he quickly drew the
attention of the Imperial police upon himself by acting as ringleader in
those demonstrations which the students of the Latin Quarter were
accustomed to make in time of public excitement. Peaceful demonstrations
they always were, because the police would stand nothing like rioting,
but it was something to march at the head of a procession carrying
wreaths to the tomb of a Republican, or to lead cabals for hissing off
the stage of the Theatre Francais or the Odeon pieces by unpopular
writers, like M. Edmond About (for in those days M. About was a
Bonapartist).

Gambetta's first public speech was delivered in 1861, in defence of the
Marquis Le Guillois, a nobleman of facetious humor, who edited a comic
newspaper called _Le Hanneton_. He was seized with unexpected
nervousness as he began, but before he had stammered out a dozen
sentences he was stopped by the presiding judge, who told him mildly
that no big words were required in a cause which only involved a fine of
100 francs--"all the less so," added he, "as your client is acquitted."

Gambetta used to say after this that it took him years to recover from
the effect of the judge's quiet snub. Like many other young men of
talent, he had gone into court expecting to carry everything before him,
and had found that the art of forensic pleading is not to be acquired
without practice. He did practise most diligently, and the
speeches--some thirty in all--which he delivered in unimportant cases
during the next seven years, were conspicuous for their avoidance of
rhetorical flourish. Adolphe Cremieux had cautioned him that the secret
of oratory lies in mastering the subject o