Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 734, January 19, 1878

No. 734. SATURDAY, JANUARY 19, 1878. Price 1½ d.
In a densely populated street of the quaint sea-port of Marseilles there dwelt a poor locksmith and his family, who were so hard pressed by the dearness of provisions and the general hardness of the times, that the rent and taxes for the wretched tenement which they called a home had been allowed to fall many weeks into arrear. But the good people struggled on against their poverty; and the locksmith (who was the son of a ruined cloth-merchant), though fallen to the humble position of a dock-porter, still managed to wade through life as if he had been born to opulence. This poor labourer’s name was Thiers, and his wife was a descendant of the poet Chenier; the two being destined to become the parents of Louis Adolphe Thiers, one of the most remarkable men that ever lived.
The hero of our story was at his birth mentally consigned to oblivion by his parents, while the neighbours laughed at the ungainly child, and prognosticated for him all kinds of evil in the future. And it is more than probable that these evil auguries would have been fulfilled had it not been for the extraordinary care bestowed upon him by his grandmother. But for her, perhaps our story had never been written.
Under her fostering care the child survived all those diseases which were, according to the gossips, to prove fatal to him; but while his limbs remained almost stationary, his head and chest grew larger, until he became a veritable dwarf. By his mother’s influence with the family of André Chenier, the lad was enabled to enter the Marseilles Lyceum at the age of nine; and here the remarkable head and chest kept the promise they made in his infancy, and soon fulfilled Madame Thiers’ predictions.
Louis Adolphe Thiers was a brilliant though somewhat erratic pupil. He was noted for his practical jokes, his restlessness, and the ready and ingenious manner in which he always extricated himself from any scrapes into which his bold and restless disposition had led him. Thus the child in this case would appear to have been ‘father to the man,’ by the manner in which he afterwards released his beloved country from one of the greatest ‘scrapes’ she ever experienced.