arily ends with a gendarme." "The republic
of '48," he used to say, "it had not even a Monk, let alone a Washington
or a Cromwell; and Louis-Napoleon had to help himself to the throne. And
depend upon it, if there had been a Cromwell, he would have crushed it
as the English one crushed the monarchy. As for Washington, he would not
have meddled with it at all."

"Yes," he said on another occasion, "I am proud of one thing--of the
authorship of the law on elementary education; but, proud as I am of
it, if I could have foreseen the uses to which it has been put, to which
it is likely to be put when I am gone, I would sooner have seen half of
the nation unable to distinguish an '_A_ from a bull's foot,' as your
countrymen say."

With Guizot died almost the last French statesman, "who not only thought
that he had the privilege to be poor, but who carried the privilege too
far;" as some one remarked when he heard the news of his demise. Towards
the latter years of his life, he occupied a modest apartment, on the
fourth floor, in the Rue Billaut (now the Rue Washington). Well might M.
de Falloux exclaim, as he toiled up that staircase, "My respect for him
increases with every step I take."

Since M. de Falloux uttered these words, and very long before, I have
only known one French statesman whose staircase and whose poverty might
perhaps inspire the same reflections and elicit similar praise. I am
alluding to M. Rouher.

M. de Lamartine's poverty did not breed the same respect. There was no
dignity about it. It was the poverty of Oliver Goldsmith sending to Dr.
Johnson and feasting with the guinea the latter had forwarded by the
messenger pending his own arrival. Mery had summed up the situation with
regard to Lamartine's difficulties on the evening of the 24th of
February, '48, and there is no reason to suspect that his statement had
been exaggerated. The dynasty of the younger branch of the Bourbons had
been overthrown because Lamartine saw no other means of liquidating the
350,000 francs he still owed for his princely journey to the East. I had
been to Lamartine's house once before that revolution, and, though his
wife was an Englishwoman, I felt no inclination to return thither. The
household gave me the impression of "Du Jellaby dore." The sight of it
would have furnished Dickens with as good a picture as the one he
sketched. The principal personage, however, was not quite so
disinterested as the future mother-in-law