sh gentleman, "indolent, vain,
good-natured, selfish, fearing and disliking his superiors;...
he loves to excite the astonishment of the populace. As a child
he liked best bad children,--as a man, bad men."

But one good quality he had pre-eminently,--no man was ever more
grateful for kindness, or more indulgent to his friends.

Such was the man, untried, uneducated in French politics, covered
with ridicule, and even of doubtful courage, whom the voices of
five and a half millions of French voters called to the presidential
chair. It was to the country Louis Napoleon had appealed, to the
rural population of France as against the dangerous classes in the
great cities. Paris had for sixty years been making revolutions
for the country; now it was the turn of the provincials, who said
they were tired of receiving a new Government by mail whenever it
pleased the Parisians to make one. Paris contained one hundred and
forty thousand Socialists, besides Anarchists and Red Republicans.
With these the rural population had no sympathy. Louis Napoleon was
not chosen by their votes, nor by those of their sympathizers in
other great cities. His success was in the rural districts alone.

His election was a great disappointment to the Assembly, and from
the first moment the prince president and that body were antagonistic
to each other. The president claimed to hold his powers from the
people, and to be in no way under the control of the Assembly;
the Assembly was forever talking of deposing him, of imprisoning
him at Vincennes, and so on.

Immediately after his election the prince president found it very
difficult to form a cabinet. After being repulsed in various quarters,
he sent a confidential messenger to Lamartine, asking him to meet him
by night on horseback in a dark alley in the Bois de Boulogne. After
listening to his rival's appeal for assistance in this emergency,
Lamartine frankly told him that for various reasons he felt himself
to be not only the most useless, but the most dangerous minister a
new Government could select. He said, "I should ruin myself without
serving you." The prince seemed grieved. "With regard to popularity,"
he answered, with a smile, "I have enough for both of us." "I know it,"
replied Lamartine; "but having, as I think, given you unanswerable
reasons for my refusal, I give you my word of honor that if by
to-morrow you have not been able to win over and to rally to you
the men I will name, I wi