Rouher a fairly intelligent young fellow; but his
intelligence had not struck me as likely to make a mark, at any rate so
soon, seeing that he was considerably below forty when I met him at the
Elysee. It is idle to assert, as the republicans have done since, that
he gained his position by abandoning the political professions to which
he owed his start in public life. Among the nine hundred deputies of the
Second Republic, there were at least a hundred intelligent so-called
republicans ready and willing to do the same with the prospect of a far
less signal reward than fell eventually to Rouher's lot.

My curiosity was doomed to remain unsatisfied until two or three years
later, when Rouher had already become a fixture in the political
organization of the Empire. It was De Morny himself who gave me the
particulars of Rouher's beginnings, and I have no reason to suppose that
he painted them and the man in deliberately glowing colours, albeit that
in one important crisis they acted in concert. Clermont-Ferrand was only
about twelve miles from Riom, Rouher's native town. I have already
remarked that De Morny, at the time he met with his brother for the
first time, was at the head of an important industrial establishment. It
was at the former place; De Morny, therefore, was in a position to know.

Eugene Rouher, it appears, like a good many men who have risen to
political eminence, belonged to what, for want of a better term, I may
call the rural bourgeoisie--that is, the frugal, thrifty, hard-headed,
small landowner, tilling his own land, honest in the main, ever on the
alert to increase his own property by a timely bargain, with an intense
love of the soil, with a kind of semi-Voltairean contempt for the
clergy, an ingrained respect largely admixed with fear for "the man of
the law," to which profession he often brings up his son in order to
have what he likes most--litigation--for nothing. Rouher's grandfather
was a man of that stamp; he made an attorney of his son, and the latter
established himself in the Rue Desaix, in a small, one-storied,
uninviting-looking tenement, where, in the year 1814, Eugene Rouher was
born.[55] Rouher's father was not very prosperous, yet he managed to
send both his sons to Paris to study law. The elder son, much older than
the future minister, had succeeded in getting a very good practice at
the Riom bar, but he died a short time before Eugene returned from
Paris, leaving a widow and a son,