he author of
"L'Histoire de Dix Ans" as such. Though Louis Blanc was three or four
and thirty then, he looked like a boy of seventeen--a fact not
altogether owing to his diminutive stature, though he was one of the
smallest men, if not the smallest man, I ever saw. Of course I mean a
man not absolutely a dwarf. I have been assured, however, that he was a
giant compared to Don Martinoz Garay, Duke of Altamira, and Marquis of
Astorga, a Spanish statesman, who died about the early part of the
twenties. These notes do not extend beyond the fall of the Commune, and
it was only after that event that I met M. Blanc once or twice in his
old haunts. Hence my few recollections of him had better be jotted down
here. They are not important. The man, though but sixty, and apparently
not in bad health, looked _desillusionne_. They were, no doubt, the most
trying years to the Third Republic, but M. Blanc must have perceived
well enough that, granting all the existing difficulties, the men at the
head of affairs were not the Republicans of his dreams. He had,
moreover, suffered severe losses; all his important documents, such as
the correspondence between him and George Sand and Louis-Napoleon while
the latter was at Ham, and other equally valuable matter, had been
destroyed at the fire of the Northern Goods Station at La Villette, a
fire kindled by the Communists. He was dressed almost in the fashion of
the forties, a wide-skirted, long, brown frock coat, a shirt innocent of
starch, and a broad-brimmed hat. A few years later, he founded a paper,
_L'Homme-Libre_, the offices of which were in the Rue Grange-Bateliere.
The concern was financed by a Polish gentleman. Blanc gave his readers
to understand that he would speak out plainly about persons and things,
whether past or present; that he would advance nothing except on
documentary proofs; but that, whether he did or not, he would not be
badgered into giving or accepting challenges in defence of his writings.
"I am, first of all, too old," he said; "but if I were young again, I
should not repeat my folly of '47, when I wanted to fight with Eugene
Pelletan on account of a woman whose virtue, provided she had any, could
make no difference to either of us. It does not matter to me that we
were not the only preux chevaliers of that period, ready to do battle
for or against the charms of a woman whose remains had crumbled to dust
by then."[14]

[Footnote 14: M. Eugene Pelletan, th