Louis Blanc’s head was all there was to him--that and a great heart.
His marriage to Madame Blanc was a marvel. They met in London. She was German and could speak no French. He was French and could speak no German. He courted her in broken English; and he did well, for a better woman never lived.
Victor Hugo, standing at her grave years later, pronounced one of his noblest eulogies to womanhood. It was an outburst of remembered oratory.
Gambetta.--[Page 45.]
We were glad of the friendship of such a man as Louis Blanc. He wrote me many letters and invited us to Paris, where we spent some delightful days. His brother Charles was the director of Fine Arts and Theaters there. We had invitations to the best operas and plays. One night I had the pleasure of hearing Gounod lead the Grand Opera House orchestra in his own “Faust.” Monsieur Blanc also took us out to see the National Assembly sitting at Versailles, where he was a senator. By good luck we saw and heard Gambetta and Jules Favre. There was no disorder that day, at least, and the speaking was moderate in tone. It was no noisier than our own senate. Louis Blanc also spoke a few words in a quiet way. He wished them to move the Assembly into Paris. “It is all nonsense,” he said to me, “this pretense of fearing a Paris mob. ‘Do right,’ I might have said to them, ‘and the mob will let you alone. Do wrong, and--well, it is not far from Paris to Versailles, and there was a time when a mob could escort a king even, from the one place to the other.’” He meant Louis XVI. and his queen, whom the mob led from this same palace to the Paris scaffold.
That evening we went late to dinner. The Blanc’s lived on an upper floor of house No. 96, on the Rue du Rivoli. It was rather far. “But why didn’t you come earlier?” said Mrs. Blanc, meeting us at the door. “You can’t guess who was here.” It was Victor Hugo. How sorry we were to have missed the opportunity of seeing the most famous man in France.
It happened later that I was in Paris the day after Victor Hugo’s funeral. Everybody said it was like the funeral of a great king. I went up to the “Arc de Triomphe.” The great monument built by Napoleon, in his own honor, was covered with wreaths in honor of Victor Hugo. Which man, I thought, does France, in her inmost heart, revere the most--the poet, or the conqueror?
I do not recall much that Louis Blanc said to me that first time in Paris, but something he said in reply to some words of Mr. Dixon’s, at the banquet, I wrote down. Dixon was chaffing, in an exaggerated way, about the patriot’s idea of liberty. “Ah!” replied Louis Blanc, quoting from another Frenchman, “there is but one thing only, which dreads not comparison with Glory; that is Liberty.”
The nephew whom I had obliged, and through whom our friendship with the statesman came about, fell ill in Paris, and Louis Blanc wrote me this: