Meantime in the Hotel-de-Ville the mob had set up another provisional government under Socialistic leaders, and the first thing the more genuine provisional government had to do was to get rid of the others.

Lamartine says of himself that he felt his mission was to preserve society, and very nobly he set himself to his task.  When he and his colleagues reached the Hotel-de-Ville, where the mob was clamoring for Socialism and a republic, a compromise had to be effected; and thus Louis Blanc, the Socialistic reformer, came into the Provisional Government.  It was growing night, and the announcement of this new arrangement somewhat calmed the crowd; but at midnight an attack was made on the Hotel-de-Ville, and the new rulers had to defend themselves by personal strength, setting their backs against the doors of the Council Chamber, and repelling their assailants with their own hands.  But the Press and the telegraph were at their command, and by morning the news of the Provisional Government was spread all over the provinces.  “The mob,” says Lamartine, “was in part composed of galley slaves who had no political ideas in their heads, nor social principles in their hearts, and partly of that scum which rises to the surface in popular commotions, and floats between the fumes of intoxication and the thirst for blood.”

Lamartine was not a great man, but it was lucky for France, and for all Europe, that at this crisis he succeeded in establishing a provisional government, and that he was placed at its head.  But for him, Paris might have had the Commune in 1848, as she had it in 1871, but with no great army collected at Versailles to bring it to subjection.

From such a fate France was saved by the energy and enthusiastic patriotism of one man, to whom, it seems to me, justice in history has hardly yet been done.  “Lamartine was not republican enough for republicans; he lost at last his prestige among the people, and from personal causes the full sympathy of his friends; and his star sank before the rising sun of Louis Napoleon.”  Mrs. Oliphant also says of him,—­

“In the midst of his manifold literary labors there happened to Lamartine such a chance as befalls few poets.  He had it in his power, once in his life, to do something greater than the greatest lyric, more noble than any verse.  At the crisis of the Revolution of 1848, chance (to use the word without irreverence) thrust him, and no other, into the place of master, and held him for one supreme moment alone between France and anarchy,—­between, we might almost say, the world and another terrible revolution.  And then the sentimentalist proved himself a man.  He confronted raving Paris, and subdued it.  The old noble French blood in his veins rose to the greatness of the crisis.  With a pardonable thrill of pride in a position so strange to a writer and a man of thought, into which, without any action of his own, he found himself forced, he describes how he faced the tumultuous