One afternoon Lamartine received news that the soldiers at the Invalides, dissatisfied with General Petit, their commander, had dragged him to the street, placed him on a cart, and were carrying him thus around Paris.  On foot he rushed to the rescue, trusting to his powers of haranguing the multitude; but luckily the general had been released before his arrival.  There is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous.  We smile at the spectacle of the ruler of France rushing on foot, through dim streets, after a cart he could not find.  General Petit was that officer of the Old Guard whom Napoleon had embraced when he took leave of his beloved corps at Fontainebleau.  Lamartine re-established him as commander at the Invalides, and the mutiny was put down.

On the night of the first day of the Provisional Government, a mob having demanded that the red flag of Communism should be substituted for the tricolor, Lamartine replied,—­

“Citizens! neither I nor any member of the Government will adopt the Drapeau Rouge.  We would rather adopt that other flag which is hoisted in a bombarded city to mark to the enemy the hospitals of the wounded.  I will tell you in one word why I will oppose the red flag with the whole force of patriotic determination.  It is, citizens, because the tricolor has made the tour of the world with the Republic and the Empire, with your liberties and your glory; the red flag has only made the tour of the Champ de Mars, dragged through the blood of citizens.”

Muskets in the crowd were here levelled at the speaker, but were knocked up by the more peaceable of his hearers.

There was soon great discontent throughout the departments because of the imposition of a land-tax; but as Lamartine said truly, farmers would have found war or the triumph of Red Republicanism more expensive still.

On March 17, about three weeks after the departure of the king, a great Socialist demonstration was made in Paris.  Large columns of men marched to the Hotel-de-Ville, singing the old revolutionary chant of “Ca ira.”  Ledru-Rollin, in the fulness of his heart, seeing these one hundred and twenty thousand men all marching with some discipline, said to his colleagues in the Council Chamber:  “Do you know that your popularity is nothing to mine?  I have but to open this window and call upon these men, and you would every one of you be turned into the street.  Do you wish me to try it?”

Upon this, Garnier-Pages, the Finance Minister, walked up to Ledru-Rollin, and presenting a pistol, said:  “If you make one step toward that window, it shall be your last.”  Ledru-Rollin paused a moment, and then sat down.

The object of the demonstration was to force the Provisional Government to take measures for raising and equalizing wages, and providing State employment for all out of employ.  The main body was refused admittance into the Hotel-de-Ville, but a certain number of the leaders were permitted to address the Provisional Government.  To Ledru-Rollin’s and Louis Blanc’s surprise, they found that half of these leaders were men they had never seen before, more radical radicals than themselves,—­that revolutionary scum that rose to the surface in the Reign of Terror and the Commune.