"Try to come home a somebody!" Long after Leon Gambetta had left the
old French town of Cahors, where he was born October 30, 1838, long
after the gay and brilliant streets of Paris had become familiar to
him, did the parting words of his idolized mother ring in his ears,
"Try to come home a somebody!" Pinched for food and clothes, as he
often was, while he studied early and late in his bare garret near the
Sorbonne, the memory of that dear mother cheered and strengthened him.
He could still feel her tears and kisses on his cheek, and the tender
clasp of her hand as she pressed into his the slender purse of money
which she had saved to release him from the drudgery of an occupation
he loathed, and to enable him to become a great lawyer in Paris. How
well he remembered her delight in listening to him declaim the speeches
of Thiers and Guizot from the pages of the National, which she had
taught him to read when but a mere baby, and from which he imbibed his
first lessons in republicanism,--lessons that he never afterward forgot.
Such deep root had they taken that he could not be induced to change
his views by the fathers of the preparatory school at Monfaucon,
whither he had been sent to be trained for the priesthood. Finally
despairing of bringing the young radical to their way of thinking, the
Monfaucon fathers sent him home to his parents. "You will never make a
priest of him," they wrote; "he has a character that cannot be
disciplined."
His father, an honest but narrow-minded Italian, whose ideas did not
soar beyond his little bazaar and grocery store, was displeased with
the boy, who was then only ten years old. He could not understand how
one so young dared to think his own thoughts and hold his own opinions.
The neighbors held up their hands in dismay, and prophesied, "He will
end his days in the Bastile." His mother wept and blamed herself and
the National as the cause of all the trouble.
How little the fond mother, the disappointed father, or the gloomily
foreboding neighbors dreamt to what heights those early lessons they
now so bitterly deplored were to lead!
When at sixteen Leon Gambetta returned from the Lyceum to which he had
been sent on his return from the Monfaucon seminary, his wide reading
and deep study had but intensified and broadened the radicalism of his
childhood. He longed to go to Paris to study law, but his father
insisted that he must now confine his thoughts to selling groceries and
yards of ribbon and lace, as he expected his son to succeed him in the
business.
Poor, foolish Joseph Gambetta! he would confine the young eagle in a
barnyard. But the eagle pined and drooped in his cage, and then the
loving mother--ah, those loving mothers, will their boys ever realize
how much they owe them!--threw open the doors and gave him freedom, an
opportunity to win fame and fortune in the great city of Paris.
And now what mattered it that his clothes were poor, that his food was
scant, and that it was often bitterly cold in his little garret. If not
for his own sake, he MUST for hers "come home a somebody."
The doors which led to a wider future were already opening. The
professors at the Sorbonne appreciated his great intellect and
originality. "You have a true vocation," said one. "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
theater. If you like, I will write to your father to tell him what my
opinion of you is." And he wrote, "The best investment you ever made
would be to spend what money you can divert from your business in
helping your son to become an advocate."
To such good purpose did the young student use his time that within two
years he won his diploma. Still too young to be admitted to the bar, he
spent a year studying life in Paris, listening to the debates in the
Corps Legislatif, reading and debating in the radical club which he had
organized, making himself ready at every point for the great
opportunity which gained him a national reputation and made him the
idol of the masses.
In 1868 his masterly defense of Delescluze, the radical editor, against
the prosecution of the Imperial government, brought the brilliant but
hitherto unknown young lawyer prominently before the public. He lost
his case, but won fame. Gambetta had waited eighteen months for his
first brief, and five times eighteen months for his first great case.
This case proved to be the initial step that led him from victory to
victory, until, after the fall of Napoleon at Sedan, he became
practically Dictator of France. He was, more than any one man, the
maker of the French Republic, whose rights and liberties he ever
defended, even at the risk of his life. He died December 31, 1882.
Well had he fulfilled the hopes and ambitions of his loving mother,
well had he answered the pathetic appeal, "Try to come home a somebody."