e father of M. Camille
Pelletan, the editor of _La Justice_, and first lieutenant to
M. Clemenceau, having severely criticized some passages in M.
Blanc's "Histoire de la Revolution," relating to
Marie-Antoinette, the author quoted a passage of Madame
Campan's "Memoires" in support of his writings. The critic
refused to admit the conclusiveness of the proof, whereupon M.
Blanc appealed to the Societe des Gens de Lettres, which, on
the summing up of M. Taxile Delord, gave a verdict in his
favour. M. Pelletan declined to submit to the verdict, as he
had refused to admit the jurisdiction, of the tribunal. M.
Blanc, who had at first scouted all idea of a duel, considered
himself obliged to resort to this means of obtaining
satisfaction, seeing that M. Pelletan stoutly maintained his
opinion. A meeting had been arranged when the Revolution of '48
broke out. The opponents having both gone to the
Hotel-de-Ville, met by accident at the entrance, and fell into
one another's arms. "Thank Heaven!" exclaimed Thiers, when he
heard of it. "If Pelletan had killed Blanc, I should have been
the smallest man in France."

M. Blanc's allusion to other "preux chevaliers" aimed
particularly at M. Cousin, who, having become a minister
against his will, resumed with a sigh of relief his studies
under the Second Empire. He was especially fond of the
seventeenth century, and all at once he, who had scarcely ever
noticed a pretty woman, became violently smitten with the
Duchesse de Longueville, who had been in her grave for nearly
two centuries. He positively invested her with every
perfection, moral and mental; unfortunately, he could not
invest her with a shapely bust, the evidence being too
overwhelmingly against her having been adorned that way. One
day some one showed him a portrait of the sister of the "grand
Conde," in which she was amply provided with the charms the
absence of which M. Cousin regretted. He wrote a special
chapter on the subject, and was well-nigh challenging all his
contradictors.--EDITOR.]

M. Blanc's boast that he would advance nothing except on proof positive
was not an idle one, as his contributors found ou