of any sphere of life save that in which poverty held sway, he would put
his own heart into the work. The "Invisible Lodge" was written and sent
to the Counsellor of the town, asking, if the work pleased him, that he
would assist in its publication. At first Counsellor Moritz was annoyed
at the request; but as he read he became deeply interested, and said,
this is surely from Goethe, Herder, or Weiland. The book was soon
published, and two hundred and twenty-six dollars paid for it! The
moment Richter received the first instalment of seventy dollars, he
hastened to Hof, and there, late at night, found his mother spinning by
the light of the fire, and poured the whole of the gold into her lap.
The surprise, joy, and thanksgiving of the poor woman can well be
imagined. Her son immediately moved her into a small but more
comfortable home.
The new novel began to be talked about and widely read. Fame was really
coming. He began at once to work on "Hesperus," one of his most famous
productions, though when published he received only two hundred dollars
for the four volumes. Letters now came from scholars and famous people.
One admirer sent fifty Prussian dollars. What joy must have swelled the
heart of the poor schoolteacher! "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces"
followed shortly after, and Richter was indeed famous. Learned ladies of
Weimar wrote most enthusiastic thanks. With his reverence for woman,
and delight in her intellectual equality with man, these letters were
most inspiring. Request after request came for him to visit Weimar. Dare
he go and meet such people as Goethe, and Schiller, and Herder, and
Weiland, whom for twelve long years he had hoped sometime to look upon?
At last he started, and upon reaching Weimar, was made the lion of the
day. His warm heart, generous and unaffected nature, and brilliant and
well-stored mind made him admired by all. Herder said: "Heaven has sent
me a treasure in Richter. That I neither deserved nor expected. He is
all heart, all soul; an harmonious tone in the great golden harp of
humanity." Caroline Herder, his wife, a very gifted woman, was equally
his friend and helper. Noble and intellectual women gathered about him
to do him honor. Some fell in love with him; but he studied them closely
as models for future characters in his books, giving only an ardent
friendship in return. He was even invited to court, and gathered here
the scenes for his greatest work, "Titan." How grand all this seemed to
the poor man who had been hungering all his life for refined and
intellectual companionship! So rejoiced was he that he wrote home, "I
have lived twenty years in Weimar in a few days. I am happy, wholly
happy, not merely beyond all expectation, but beyond all description."
He was now thirty-four. The poor, patient mother had just died, but not
till she had heard the fame of her son spoken on every hand. After her
death, Paul found a faded manuscript in which she had kept the record of
those small gains in spinning into the midnight hours. He carried it
next his heart, saying, "If all other manuscripts are destroyed, yet
will I keep this, good mother." For weeks he was not able to write a
letter, or mention the loss of his parent.
His youngest brother, Samuel, a talented boy, was now ready for college;
so Jean Paul determined to make Leipzig his home while his brother
pursued his course. What changes the last few years had wrought! Then he
was stealing away from Leipzig in debt for his board, cold, hungry, and
desolate; now he was coming, the brilliant author whom everybody
delighted to honor. When we are in want, few are ready to help; when
above want, the world stands ready to lavish all upon us. After spending
some time in Leipzig, he visited Dresden to enjoy the culture of that
artistic city. During this visit, Samuel, who had become dissipated,
broke into his brother's desk, stole all his hard-earned money, and left
the city. He led a wandering life thereafter, dying in a hospital in
Silesia. Paul never saw him again, but sent him a yearly allowance, as
soon as he learned his abiding-place. What a noble character!
He now returned to Weimar, dedicating his "Titan" to the four daughters
of the Duke of Mecklenburg, one of whom became the mother of Emperor
William, the famous and beautiful Louise of Prussia. He visited her
later in Berlin, where he writes, "I have never been received in any
city with such idolatry. I have a watch-chain of the hair of three
sisters; and so much hair has been begged of me, that if I were to make
it a traffic, I could live as well from the outside of my head as from
what is inside of it."
In this city he met the woman who was to be hereafter the very centre of
his life. He had had a passing fancy for several, but never for one that
seemed fitted, all in all, to make his life complete. Caroline Myer, the
daughter of one of the most distinguished Prussian officers, was a
refined, intellectual, noble girl, with almost unlimited resources
within herself, devoted to her family and to every good. Paul had met
women who dressed more elegantly, who were more sparkling in
conversation, who were more beautiful, but they did not satisfy his
heart. In his thirty-eighth year he had found a character that seemed
perfection. He wrote, "Caroline has exactly that inexpressible love for
all beings that I have till now failed to find even in those who in
everything else possess the splendor and purity of the diamond. She
preserves in the full harmony of her love to me the middle and lower
tones of sympathy for every joy and sorrow in others."
Her love for Richter was nearly adoration. Several months after their
marriage she wrote her father, "Richter is the purest, the holiest, the
most godlike man that lives. Could others be admitted, as I am, to his
inmost emotions, how much more would they esteem him!" Richter also
wrote to his best friend, Otto, "Marriage has made me love her more
romantically, deeper, infinitely more than before." At the birth of
their first child, he wrote again to Otto, "You will be as transported
as I was when the nurse brought me, as out of a cloud, my second love,
with the blue eyes wide open, a beautiful, high brow, kiss-lipped,
heart-touching. God is near at the birth of every child."
On Caroline's first birthday after their marriage, he wrote, "I will be
to thee father and mother! Thou shalt be the happiest of human beings,
that I also may be happy."
"Titan," now ten years in progress, was published, and made a great
sensation. The literary world was indignant at the fate of "Linda," his
heroine, but all pronounced it a great book,--his masterpiece.
Soon after he removed to Bayreuth, and settled down to earnest work.
Almost every day he might be seen walking out into the country, where he
rented a room in a peasant's house for quiet and country air. Whenever
the day was pleasant he worked out of doors. A son had now been born to
him, and life seemed complete. Now he played with his home-treasures,
and now talked at table about some matter of art or science that all
might be instructed. He was especially fond of animals, having usually
a mouse, a tame spider, a tree-frog, and dogs. So good was he to his
canary birds that he never left the house without opening the door of
their cage that they might fly about and not be lonely. Often when he
wrote, they walked over his manuscript, scattering water from the vase
and mingling it with his ink.
His son Max, a boy of sixteen, had entered school at Munich. He was a
beautiful youth, conscientious, sensitive, devoted to study, and the
idol of the household. At first he wept whole nights from homesickness,
denying himself sufficient fire, food, and clothing, from a desire to
save expense to his parents. He was a fine scholar, but distrusted his
intellectual gifts. At the end of a year he came home, pale and worn,
and died at the age of nineteen.
To Richter this was a death-blow. He went on writing, while the tears
dropped upon his page. He could never bear the sight of a book his boy
had touched, and the word "philology," his son's favorite study, cut him
to the heart. At the end of three months he wrote to a friend, "My being
has suffered not merely a wound, but a complete cutting off of all joy.
My longing after him grows always more painful." Broken in health he
visited Dresden; but the end was near. The sight of the left eye at
first failed him, then the right, till he was left in complete darkness.
He still hoped to finish his autobiography, and the "Immortality of the
Soul," begun on the very day Max was buried; but this was denied him.
Once only did his sorrows overpower him, when pitifully looking toward
the window, he cried out as Ajax in the "Iliad":--
"Light! light only, then may the enemy come!"
The devoted wife and two daughters grew unspeakably dear to him. When
tired with thinking, he would seat himself at the piano, and play till
he, as well as those who heard him, would burst into tears. On the 14th
of November, 1825, he sat in his chamber, his youngest child climbing on
the back of his chair, and laying her face against her father's. It was
only noon, but thinking it was night, Richter said, "It is time to go to
rest." He was wheeled into his sleeping apartment, and some flowers laid
on the bed beside him. "My beautiful flowers! My lovely flowers!" he
said, as he folded his arms, and soon fell asleep. His wife sat beside
him, her eyes fixed on the face of the man she loved. About six the
doctor arrived. The breath came shorter, the face took on a heavenly
expression, and grew cold as marble. The end had come. He was buried by
torchlight, the unfinished manuscript of the "Immortality of the Soul"
being borne upon his coffin, while the students sung Klopstock's hymn,
"Thou shalt arise, my Soul." His more than one hundred volumes and his
noble, generous life are his monuments. He said, "I shall die without
having seen Switzerland or the ocean, but the ocean of eternity I shall
not fail to see."
LEON GAMBETTA.
On January 6, 1883, Paris presented a sad and imposing spectacle. Her
shops were closed; her public buildings and her homes were draped in
black. Her streets were solid with hundreds of thousands, all
dispirited, and many in tears. A large catafalque covered with black
velvet upheld a coffin shrouded with the tricolor. From a vase at each
corner rose burning perfume, whose vapor was like sweet incense. Six
black horses drew the funeral car, and two hundred thousand persons
followed in the procession, many bearing aloft wreaths of flowers, and
shouting, "Vive la Republique! Vive la Gambetta!"
The maker of the Republic, the brilliant, eloquent leader of the French
people, was dead; dead in the prime of his life at forty-five. The
"Figaro" but voiced the feeling of the world when it said, "The Republic
has lost its greatest man." America might well mourn him as a friend,
for he made her his pattern for his beloved France. The "Pall-Mall
Gazette" said, "He will live in French history among the most
courageous"; and even Germany courted him as the bravest of the brave,
while she breathed freer, saying in the "Berlin Press," "The death of
Gambetta delivers the peace of Europe from great danger." The hand that
would sometime doubtless have reached out to take back sobbing Alsace
and Lorraine was palsied; the voice that swayed the multitude, now with
its sweet persuasiveness, and now with its thunder like the rush of a
swollen torrent, was hushed; the supreme will that held France like a
willing child in its power, had yielded to the inevitable,--death.
[Illustration: LEON GAMBETTA.]
Leon Gambetta was born at Cahors, April 2, 1838. His father was an
Italian from Genoa, poor, and of good character; his mother, a French
woman, singularly hopeful, energetic, and noble. They owned a little
bazaar and grocery, and here, Onasie, the wife, day after day helped her
husband to earn a comfortable living. When their only son was seven
years old, he was sent to a Jesuits' preparatory school at Monfaucon,
his parents hoping that he would become a priest. His mother had great
pride in him, and faith in his future. She taught him how to read from
the "National," a newspaper founded by Thiers, republican in its
tendencies. She saw with delight that when very young he would learn the
speeches of Thiers and Guizot, which he found in its columns, and
declaim them as he roamed alone the narrow streets, and by the quaint
old bridges and towers of Cahors. At Monfaucon, he gave his orations
before the other children, the mother sending him the much-prized
"National" whenever he obtained good marks, and the Jesuits, whether
pleased or not, did not interfere with their boyish republican.
At eight years of age an unfortunate accident happened which bade fair
to ruin his hopes. While watching a cutter drill the handle of a knife,
the foil broke, and a piece entered the right eye, spoiling the sight.
Twenty years afterward, when the left, through sympathy, seemed to be
nearly destroyed, a glass eye was inserted, and the remaining one was
saved.
When Leon was ten years old, the Revolution of 1848 deposed Louis
Philippe, the Orleanist, and Louis Napoleon was made President of the
Republic. Perhaps the people ought to have known that no presidency
would long satisfy the ambition of a Bonaparte. He at once began to
increase his power by winning the Catholic Church to his side. The
Jesuits no longer allowed the boy Leon to talk republicanism; they saw
that it was doomed. They scolded him, whipped him, took away the
"National," and finally expelled him, writing to his parents, "You will
never make a priest of him; he has an utterly undisciplinable
character."
The father frowned when he returned home, and the neighbors prophesied
that he would end his life in the Bastile for holding such radical
opinions. The poor mother blamed herself for putting the "National" into
his hands, and thus bringing all this trouble upon him. Ah, she wrought
better than she knew! But for the "National," and Gambetta's
unconquerable love for a republic, France might to-day be the plaything
of an emperor.
Meantime Louis Napoleon was putting his friends into office, making
tours about the country to win adherents, and securing the army and the
police to his side. At seven o'clock, on the morning of December 2,
1851, the famous Coup d'etat came, and the unscrupulous President had
made himself Emperor. Nearly two hundred and fifty deputies were
arrested and imprisoned, and the Republicans who opposed the usurpation
were quickly subdued by the army. Then the French were graciously
permitted to say, by ballot, whether they were willing to accept the
empire. There was, of course, but one judicious way to vote, and that
was in the affirmative, and they thus voted.
Joseph Gambetta, the father, saw the political storm which was coming,
and fearing for his outspoken son, locked him up in a lyceum at Cahors,
till he was seventeen. Here he attracted the notice of his teachers by
his fondness for reading, his great memory, and his love of history and
politics. At sixteen he had read the Latin authors, and the economical
works of Proudhon. When he came home, his father told him that he must
now become a grocer, and succeed to the business. He obeyed, but his
studious mind had no interest in the work. He recoiled from spending his
powers in persuading the mayor's wife that a yard of Genoa velvet at
twenty francs was cheaper than the same measure of the Lyon's article at
thirteen. So tired and sick of the business did he become, that he
begged his father to be allowed to keep the accounts, which he did in a
neat, delicate hand.
His watchful mother saw that her boy's health was failing. He was
restless and miserable. He longed to go to Paris to study law, and then
teach in some provincial town. He planned ways of escape from the hated
tasks, but he had no money, and no friends in the great city.
But his mother planned to some purpose. She said to M. Menier, the
chocolate-maker, "I have a son of great promise, whom I want to send to
Paris against his father's will to study law. He is a good lad, and no
fool. But my husband, who wants him to continue his business here, will,
I know, try to starve him into submission. What I am about to propose is
that if I buy your chocolate at the rate you offer it, and buy it
outright instead of taking it to sell on commission, will you say
nothing if I enter it on the book at a higher price, and you pay the
difference to my son?" Menier, interested to have the boy prosper,
quickly agreed.
After a time, she called her son aside and, placing a bag of money in
his hand, said, "This, my boy, is to pay your way for a year. A trunk
full of clothes is ready for you. Try and come home somebody. Start
soon, and take care to let nobody suspect you are going away. Do not
say good-bye to a single soul. I want to avoid a scene between you and
your father."
Ambition welled up again in his heart, and the bright expression came
back into his face. The next morning he slipped away, and was soon at
Paris. He drove to the Sorbonne, because he had heard that lectures were
given there. The cab-driver recommended a cheap hotel close by, and,
obtaining a room in the garret, the youth, not yet eighteen, began his
studies. He rose early and worked hard, attending lectures at the
medical school as well as at the law, buying his books at second-hand
shops along the streets. Though poverty often pinched him as to food,
and his clothes were poor, he did not mind it, but bent all his energies
to his work. His mother wrote how angered the father was at his leaving,
and would not allow his name to be mentioned in his presence. Poor
Joseph! how limited was his horizon.
Leon's intelligence and originality won the esteem of the professors,
and one of them said, "Your father acts stupidly. You have a true
vocation. Follow it. But go to the bar, where your voice, which is one
in a thousand, will carry you on, study and intelligence aiding. The
lecture-room is a narrow theatre. If you like, I will write to your
father to tell him what my opinion of you is."
Professor Valette wrote to Joseph Gambetta, "The best investment you
ever made would be to spend what money you can afford to divert from
your business in helping your son to become an advocate."
The letter caused a sensation in the Gambetta family. The mother took
courage and urged the case of her darling child, while her sister, Jenny
Massabie, talked ardently for her bright nephew. An allowance was
finally made. In two years Leon had mastered the civil, criminal,
military, forest, and maritime codes. Too young to be admitted to the
bar to plead, for nearly a year he studied Paris, its treasures of art,
and its varied life. It opened a new and grand world to him.
Accidentally he made the acquaintance of the head usher at the Corps
Legislatif, who said to the young student, "You are an excellent fellow,
and I shall like to oblige you; so if the debates of the Corps
Legislatif interest you, come there and ask for me, and I will find you
a corner in the galleries where you can hear and see everything." Here
Leon studied parliamentary usage, and saw the repression of thought
under an empire. At the Cafe Procope, once the resort of Voltaire,
Diderot, Rousseau, and other literary celebrities, the young man talked
over the speeches he had heard, with his acquaintances, and told what he
would do if he were in the House. An improbable thing it seemed that a
poor and unknown lad would ever sit in the Corps Legislatif, as one of
its members! He organized a club for reading and debating, and was of
course made its head. It could not be other than republican in
sentiment.
In 1860, at the age of twenty-two, Gambetta was admitted to the bar. The
father was greatly opposed to his living in Paris, where he thought
there was no chance for a lawyer who had neither money nor influential
friends, and urged his returning to Cahors. Again his aunt Jenny, whom
he always affectionately called "Tata," took his part. Having an income
of five hundred dollars a year, she said to the father, "You do not see
how you can help your son in Paris, it may be for long years; but next
week I will go with him, and we shall stay together;" and then, turning
to her nephew, she added, "And now, my boy, I will give you food and
shelter, and you will do the rest by your work."
They took a small house in the Latin Quartier, very plain and
comfortless. His first brief came after waiting eighteen months! Grepps,
a deputy, being accused of conspiracy against the Government, Gambetta
defended him so well that Cremieux, a prominent lawyer, asked him to
become his secretary. The case was not reported in the papers, and was
therefore known only by a limited circle. For six years the brilliant
young scholar was virtually chained to his desk. The only recreation was
an occasional gathering of a few newspaper men at his rooms, for whom
his aunt cooked the supper, willing and glad to do the work, because she
believed he would some day come to renown from his genius.
Finally his hour came. At the Coup d'etat, Dr. Baudin, a deputy, for
defending the rights of the National Assembly, was shot on a barricade.
On All-Soul's Day, 1868, the Republicans, to the number of a thousand,
gathered at the grave in the cemetery of Montmartre, to lay flowers upon
it and listen to addresses. The Emperor could not but see that such
demonstrations would do harm to his throne. Dellschuzes, the leader, was
therefore arrested, and chose the unknown lawyer, Gambetta, to defend
him. He was a strong radical, and he asked only one favor of his lawyer,
that he would "hit hard the Man of December," as those who hated the
Coup d'etat of December 2, loved to call Louis Napoleon.
Gambetta was equal to the occasion. He likened the Emperor to Catiline,
declaring that as a highwayman, he had taken France and felled her
senseless. "For seventeen years," he said, "you have been masters of
France, and you have never dared to celebrate the Second of December. It
is we who take up the anniversary, which you no more dare face than a
fear-haunted murderer can his victim's corpse." When finally, overcome
with emotion, Gambetta sank into his seat at the close of his speech,
the die was cast. He had become famous from one end of France to the
other, and the Empire had received a blow from which it never recovered.
That night at the clubs, and in the press offices, the name of Leon
Gambetta was on every lip.
It is not strange that in the elections of the following year, he was
asked to represent Belleville and Marseilles, and chose the latter,
saying to his constituents that he was in "irreconcilable opposition to
the Empire." He at once became the leader of a new party, the
"Irreconcilables," and Napoleon's downfall became from that hour only a
question of time. Gambetta spoke everywhere, and was soon conceded to be
the finest orator in France. Worn in body, by the confinement of the
secretaryship, and the political campaign, he repaired to Ems for a
short time, where he met Bismarck. "He will go far," said the Man of
Iron. "I pity the Emperor for having such an irreconcilable enemy." The
"National," under Madam Gambetta's teaching in childhood, was bearing
fruit.
Napoleon saw that something must be done to make his throne more stable
in the hearts of his people. He attempted a more liberal policy, with
Emile Ollivier at the head of affairs. But Gambetta was still
irreconcilable, saying in one of his great speeches, "We accept you and
your Constitutionalism as a bridge to the Republic, but nothing more."
At last war was declared against Prussia, as much with the hope of
promoting peace at home as to win honors in Germany. Everybody knows the
rapid and crushing defeat of the French, and the fall of Napoleon at
Sedan, September 2, when he wrote to King William of Prussia, "Not
having been able to die at the head of my troops, I can only resign my
sword into the hands of your Majesty."
When the news reached Paris on the following day, the people were
frantic. Had the Emperor returned, a defeated man, he could never have
reached the Tuileries alive. Crowds gathered in the streets, and forced
their way into the hall of the Corps Legislatif. Then the eloquent
leader of the Republican ranks, scarcely heard of two years before,
ascended the Tribune, and declared that, "Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and
his dynasty have forever ceased to reign over France." With Jules Favre,
Ferry, Simon, and others, he hastened to the Hotel de Ville, writing on
slips of paper, and throwing out to the multitude, the names of those
who were to be the heads of the provisional government. Cool, fearless,
heroic, Gambetta stood at the summit of power, and controlled the
people. They believed in him because he believed in the Republic.