g thus some of his strength in such pieces as the
_Vieillesse de Brididi_, the _Foire aux Grotesques_, and _Un Monsieur
Bien-Mis_, in 1868 he founded the _Lanterne_, and thenceforth became
the most ardent champion of the revolutionary party; and in the
brilliant articles we all know, he cast its light on the follies of
others under the pretext that they were his own. This satirical
production reached the eleventh number, when its author, overstepping
all bounds, took Napoleon by the horns and the gendarmes by the nose,
and committed other extravagances, until the Government fined him to the
amount of ten thousand francs penalties, and ordered him a short repose
in the prison of Sainte-Pelagie. The notoriety attaching to his name
dates from that period, and the events which accompanied the violent
death of Victor Noir tended to augment his popularity and to convert him
into the leader of a party, or the bearer of a flag, around which
rallied all the elements of the struggle against established authority.
He escaped to Belgium, and studied socialism, which he expounded later
to an admiring audience of seventeen to eighteen thousand electors at
Belleville. Elected deputy by the 20th Arrondissement, M. de Rochefort
became, in 1869, a favourite representative of that class of the
Parisian population whose bad instincts he had flattered and whose
tendencies to revolt against authority he had encouraged, and in virtue
of these claims he was chosen to form part of the Government of the
National Defence. As President of the Commission of Barricades, after
the 4th of September, during the siege of Paris, in the midst of the
difficulties of all sorts caused to the Government of the National
Defence by the investment of the capital, M. De Rochefort, making more
and more common cause with the revolutionary party, separated himself
from his colleagues in the Government who refused to permit the
establishment of a second Government, the Commune, within a besieged
city. By this act he openly declared himself a partisan of the Commune,
and immediately after the acceptance of the preliminaries of peace he
resigned his position as a deputy, alleging that his commission was at
an end, and retired to Arcachon.

His wildly sanguinary articles in the _Marseillaise_, and the compacts
sealed with blood, with Flourens and his associates, now had so
exhausted our poor Rochefort that at the moment of flourishing his
handkerchief as the standard of