[Footnote 82:  Delescluze’s wild life began at Dreux, in 1809.  Driven from home on account of his bad conduct, he came to Paris, and obtained employment in an attorney’s office, from which he was very soon afterwards, it is said, discharged for robbery.  In 1834, he underwent the first of his long list of imprisonments, for the part he took in the April revolution, and in the following year, being compromised in a conspiracy against the safety of the state, he took refuge in Belgium, Where he obtained the editorship of the Courrier de Charleroi.  In 1840 he returned to Paris, where he founded a journal called the Revolution Democratique et Sociale, which brought him fifteen months’ imprisonment and twenty thousand francs fine.  After a long period of liberty of nearly eight years, he was condemned to transportation by the High Court of Justice, but the condemnation was given in his absence, for he had slipped over to England, where he remained until 1853.  On his returning in that year to France he was immediately imprisoned at Mazas, transferred afterwards to Belle-Isle, and then successively to the hulks of Corte, Ajaccio, Toulon, Brest, and finally to Cayenne.  These sojourns lasted until 1868, when the amnesty permitted him to return to France, where he made haste to bring out another new journal, Le Reveil, which of course earned him fines and imprisonments with great rapidity, three of each within the twelvemonth.

In the month of February, 1871, he was elected deputy by a large number of votes; and later, when the Assembly went to Bordeaux, sat there for some time, and then gave in his resignation, in order to take part with the Commune.

By the Commune he was made delegate at the Ministry of War, after the pretended flight of Rossel, and in a sitting of the 20th of April, in which the project of burning Paris was discussed, Delescluze ended his speech with the words—­“If we must die, we will give to Liberty a pile worthy of her.”]

[Footnote 83:  He was convinced of the hopelessness of any further struggle after the capture of Fort Issy; gave in his resignation, and hid himself to escape the vengeance of his former colleagues.  He was supposed to be in England or Switzerland, whereas, in fact, he had fled no farther than the Boulevard Saint Germain.  He was arrested by the police on the ninth of June, disguised as an employe of the Northern Railway.  He was first interrogated at the Petit Luxembourg, and afterwards conducted handcuffed to Versailles, where three mouths after he was tried by court-martial and sentenced to military degradation and death.]

[Footnote 84:  “A plot had just been discovered between Bourget of the Internationale, Billioray, member of the Commune, and Cerisier, captain of the 101st Battalion of the insurgent National Guard.  For a certain sum of money they were to deliver Port Issy into the hands of General Valentin, of the Versailles army.  The succession of Rossel to the Ministry of War frustrated the whole project.