people, on the widest extension
of the franchise. When his friend Courmenin drew up the Constitution
of 1848, it was Genoude who induced him to adopt the new practice of
universal suffrage, which was unknown to the Revolution. Having lost
his wife, he took orders. All this, he said one day, will presently
come to an end, not through the act of a soldier or an orator, but of
a Cardinal. And he drank to the memory of Richelieu.

The notion of a legitimate throne, restored by democracy, which was
borrowed from Bolingbroke, and which nearly prevailed in 1873, gives
some relief and originality to his work on the Revolution. You are not
likely to meet with it. When Talleyrand's _Memoirs_ appeared, most
people learnt for the first time that he went at night to offer his
services to the king, to get the better of the Assembly. The editor
placed the event in the middle of July. Nobody seemed to know that the
story was already told by Genoude, and that he fixed the midnight bid
for power at its proper date, a month earlier.

The history of Amedee Gabourd is a far better book, and perhaps the
best of its kind. Gabourd had previously written a history of France,
and his many volumes on the nineteenth century, with no pretension in
point of research, are convenient for the lower range of countries and
events. He writes with the care, the intelligence, the knowledge of
the work of other men, which distinguish Charles Knight's _Popular
History of England_. I have known very deep students indeed who were
in the habit of constantly using him. He says, with reason, that no
writer has sought truth and justice with more perfect good faith, or
has been more careful to keep aloof from party spirit and accepted
judgments. As he was a constitutionalist, the revolution of February
was the ruin of a system which he expected to last for ever, and to
govern the last age of the world. But Gabourd remained true to his
principles. He wrote: "I shall love the people, and honour the king;
and I shall have the same judgment on the tyranny from above and the
tyranny from below. I am not one of those who set a chasm between
liberty and religion, as if God would accept no worship but that of
servile hearts. I shall not oppose the results of the event which I
describe, or deny the merit of what had been won at the price of so
much suffering."

* * * * *

The Doctrinaires were of all men in the best position to understand