Adolphe Thiers was born in Marseilles, April 16, 1797.  He was a poor little baby, whose father, an ex-Jacobin, had fled from France to escape the counter-revolution.  The doctor who superintended his entrance into the world recorded that he was a healthy, active child, with remarkably short legs.  These legs remained short all his life, but his body grew to be that of a tall, powerful man.  His appearance was by no means aristocratic or dignified if seen from a distance, but his defects of person were redeemed by the wondrous sparkle in his eyes.  The family of his mother, on the maternal side, was named Lhommaca, and was of Greek origin.  It came from the Levant, and its members spoke Greek among themselves.  Madame Thiers’ father was named Arnic, and his descent was also Levantine.  Mademoiselle Arnic made a love-match in espousing Thiers, a widower, who after the 9th Thermidor had taken refuge under her father’s roof.  A writer who obtained materials for a sketch of Thiers from the Thiers himself, says,—­

“She pitied him, she was dazzled by his brilliant parts, charmed by his plausible manners, and regardless of his poverty and his incumbrance of many children, she insisted on marrying him.  Her family was indignant, and cast her off; nor did she long find comfort in her husband.  She was a Royalist, and remained so to the end of her days; he was a Jacobin.  Moreover, she soon found that his tastes led him to drink and dissipation.”

This man, the father of Thiers, was small of stature, mercurial in temperament, of universal aptitudes, much wit, and a perennial buoyancy of disposition.  His weakness, like his son’s, was a passion for omniscience.  Some one said of him:  “He talks encyclopedia, and if anybody asked him, would be at no loss to tell you what was passing in the moon.”  He had been educated for the Bar, and belonged to a family of the haute bourgeoisie of Provence; but everything was changed by the revolutionary see-saw, and shortly before his son was born, he had been a stevedore in the docks of Marseilles.  His father (the statesman’s grandfather) had been a cloth merchant and a man of erudition.  He wrote a History of Provence, and died at the age of ninety-five.  The Thiers who preceded him lived to be ninety-seven, and was a noted gastronome, whose house at Marseilles in the early part of the eighteenth century was known far and wide for hospitality and good cheer.  He was ruined by speculative ventures in the American colonies.

Thiers’ grandfather, the cloth merchant, was a Royalist, who brought down upon himself the wrath of the Jacobins by inciting the more moderate party in Marseilles to seize the commissioners sent to them by the Convention, and imprison them in the Chateau d’If.  His son (Thiers’ father), being himself a Jacobin, helped to release the prisoners, and accepted an office under them in Marseilles.  This was the reason why he had to conceal himself during the reaction that followed the fall of Robespierre.