One night—­it was some great festival of the empire, and all Paris was illumined—­my mother was walking in the garden with three of my father’s comrades, and I was following them, when we saw a tall figure in the gloom of the trees.  It was the proscribed Victor du Lahorie, my godfather.  He was even then conspiring against Bonaparte in the cause of liberty, and was shortly after executed.  I remember his saying, “If Rome had kept her kings, she had not been Rome,” and then, looking on me, “Child, put liberty first of all!” That one word outweighed my whole education.

III.—­Before the Exile

It was not until the writer saw, in 1848, the triumph of all the enemies of progress that he knew in the depths of his heart that he belonged, not to the conquerors, but to the vanquished.  The Republic lay inanimate; but, gazing on her form, he saw that she was liberty, and not even the sure fore-knowledge of the ruin and exile that must follow could prevent his espousal with the dead.  On June 15 he made his protest from the tribune, and from that day he fought relentless battle for liberty and the republic.  And on December 2, 1851, he received what he had expected—­twenty years of exile.  That is the history of what has been called his apostasy.

Throughout that strange period before his exile, the frightful phantom of the past was all-powerful with men.  Every kind of question was debated—­national independence, individual liberty, liberty of conscience, of thought, of speech, and of the Press; questions of marriage, of education, of the right to work, of the right to one’s fatherland as against exile, of the right to life as against penal law, of the separation of Church and state, of the federation of Europe, of frontiers to be wiped out, and of custom-houses to be done away—­all these questions were proposed, debated, and sometimes settled.

In these debates the author of this memoir took his part and did his duty, and was repaid with insults.  He remembers interjecting, when they were insisting on parental rights, that the children had rights, too.  He astounded the assembly by asserting that it was possible to do away with misery.  On July 17, 1851, he denounced the conspiracy of Louis Bonaparte, unveiling the project of the president to become emperor.  On another day he pronounced from the tribune a phrase which had never yet been uttered—­“The United States of Europe.”  Contempt and calumny were poured upon him, but what of that?  They called George Washington a pickpocket.

These men of the old majority, who were doing all the evil that they could—­did they mean to do evil?  Not a bit of it.  They deceived themselves, thinking that they had the truth, and they lied in the service of the truth.  Their pity for society was pitiless for the people, whence arose so many laws, so many actions, that were blindly ferocious.  They were rather a mob than a senate, and were led by the worst of their number.  Let us be indulgent, and let night hide the men of night.