But it is in the real middle-class more than any other, that is, among tradespeople and small shop-keepers, that there is the most veneration for Lafayette.  They simply worship him.  Lafayette, the establisher of order, is their idol.  They adore him as a kind of Providence on horseback, an armed tutelary patron of public peace and security, as a genius of freedom, who also takes care in the battle for freedom that nothing is stolen and that everybody keeps his little property.  The great army of public order, as Casimir Perier called the National Guard, the well-fed heroes in great bearskin caps into which small shopmen’s heads are stuck, are drunk with delight when they speak of Lafayette, their old general, their Napoleon of peace.  Truly he is the Napoleon of the small citizen, of those brave folks who always pay their bills—­those uncle tailors and cousin glove-makers who are indeed too busy by day to think of Lafayette, but who praise him afterward in the evening with double enthusiasm, so that one may say that it is about eleven o’clock at night, when the shops are shut, that his fame is in full bloom.

I have just before used the expression “master of ceremonies.”  I now recall that Wolfgang Menzel has in his witty trifling called Lafayette a master of ceremonies of Liberty.  This was when the former spoke in the Literaturblatt of the triumphal march of Lafayette across the United States, and of the deputations, addresses, and solemn discourses which attended such occasions.  Other much less witty folk wrongly imagine that Lafayette is only an old man who is kept for show or used as a machine.  But they need hear him speak only once in public to learn that he is not a mere flag which is followed or sworn by, but that he is in person the gonfaloniere in whose hands is the good banner, the oriflamme of the nations.  Lafayette is perhaps the most prominent and influential speaker in the Chamber of Deputies.  When he speaks, he always hits the nail, and his nailed-up enemies, on the head.

When it is needed, when one of the great questions of humanity is discussed, then Lafayette ever rises, eager for strife as a youth.  Only the body is weak and tottering, broken by age and the battles of his time, like a hacked and dented old iron armor, and it is touching when he totters under it to the tribune and has reached his old post, to see how he draws a deep breath and smiles.  This smile, his delivery, and the whole being of the man while speaking on the tribune, are indescribable.  There is in it all so much that is winsome and yet so much delicate irony, that one is enchained as by a marvelous curiosity, a sweet, strange enigma.  We know not if these are the refined manners of a French marquis or the straightforward simplicity of an American citizen.  All that is best in the ancien regime, the chivalresque courtesy and tact, are here wondrously fused with what is best in the modern bourgeoisie,