on
for Lafayette. They simply worship him. Lafayette, the establisher of
order, is their idol. They adore him as a kind of Providence on
horseback, an armed tutelary patron of public peace and security, as a
genius of freedom, who also takes care in the battle for freedom that
nothing is stolen and that everybody keeps his little property. The
great army of public order, as Casimir Perier called the National Guard,
the well-fed heroes in great bearskin caps into which small shopmen's
heads are stuck, are drunk with delight when they speak of Lafayette,
their old general, their Napoleon of peace. Truly he is the Napoleon of
the small citizen, of those brave folks who always pay their
bills--those uncle tailors and cousin glove-makers who are indeed too
busy by day to think of Lafayette, but who praise him afterward in the
evening with double enthusiasm, so that one may say that it is about
eleven o'clock at night, when the shops are shut, that his fame is in
full bloom.

I have just before used the expression "master of ceremonies." I now
recall that Wolfgang Menzel has in his witty trifling called Lafayette a
master of ceremonies of Liberty. This was when the former spoke in the
_Literaturblatt_ of the triumphal march of Lafayette across the United
States, and of the deputations, addresses, and solemn discourses which
attended such occasions. Other much less witty folk wrongly imagine that
Lafayette is only an old man who is kept for show or used as a machine.
But they need hear him speak only once in public to learn that he is not
a mere flag which is followed or sworn by, but that he is in person the
_gonfaloniere_ in whose hands is the good banner, the oriflamme of the
nations. Lafayette is perhaps the most prominent and influential speaker
in the Chamber of Deputies. When he speaks, he always hits the nail, and
his nailed-up enemies, on the head.

When it is needed, when one of the great questions of humanity is
discussed, then Lafayette ever rises, eager for strife as a youth. Only
the body is weak and tottering, broken by age and the battles of his
time, like a hacked and dented old iron armor, and it is touching when
he totters under it to the tribune and has reached his old post, to see
how he draws a deep breath and smiles. This smile, his delivery, and the
whole being of the man while speaking on the tribune, are indescribable.
There is in it all so much that is winsome and yet so much delicate
irony, that o