Blanqui got so that he no longer wore a shirt. For twelve years he had
worn the same clothes--his prison clothes--rags, which he displayed
with sombre pride at his club. He renewed only his boots and his gloves,
which were always black.
At Vincennes during his eight months of captivity for the affair of the
15th of May, he lived only upon bread and raw potatoes, refusing all
other food. His mother alone occasionally succeeded in inducing him to
take a little beef-tea.
With this, frequent ablutions, cleanliness mingled with cynicism, small
hands and feet, never a shirt, gloves always.
There was in this man an aristocrat crushed and trampled upon by a
demagogue.
Great ability, no hypocrisy; the same in private as in public. Harsh,
stern, serious, never laughing, receiving respect with irony, admiration
with sarcasm, love with disdain, and inspiring extraordinary devotion.
There was in Blanqui nothing of the people, everything of the populace.
With this, a man of letters, almost erudite. At certain moments he
was no longer a man, but a sort of lugubrious apparition in which all
degrees of hatred born of all degrees of misery seemed to be incarnated.
LAMARTINE. February 23, 1850.
During the session Lamartine came and sat beside me in the place usually
occupied by M. Arbey. While talking, he interjected in an undertone
sarcastic remarks about the orators in the tribune.
Thiers spoke. “Little scamp,” murmured Lamartine.
Then Cavaignac made his appearance. “What do you think about him?” said
Lamartine. “For my part, these are my sentiments: He is fortunate, he is
brave, he is loyal, he is voluble--and he is stupid.”
Cavaignac was followed by Emmanuel Arago. The Assembly was stormy.
“This man,” commented Lamartine, “has arms too small for the affairs he
undertakes. He is given to joining in mêlées and does not know how to
get out of them again. The tempest tempts him, and kills him.”
A moment later Jules Favre ascended the tribune. “I do not know how
they can see a serpent in this man,” said Lamartine. “He is a provincial
academician.”
Laughing the while, he took a sheet of paper from my drawer, asked me
for a pen, asked Savatier-Laroche for a pinch of snuff, and wrote a few
lines. This done he mounted the tribune and addressed grave and haughty
words to M. Thiers, who had been attacking the revolution of February.
Then he returned to our bench, shook hands with me while the Left
applauded and the Right waxed indignant, and calmly emptied the snuff in
Savatier-Laroche’s snuffbox into his own.