"Try to come home a somebody!" Long after Leon Gambetta had left
the old French town of Cahors, where he was born October 30, 1838,
long after the gay and brilliant streets of Paris had become
familiar to him, did the parting words of his idolized mother ring
in his ears, "Try to come home a somebody!" Pinched for food and
clothes, as he often was, while he studied early and late in his
bare garret near the Sorbonne, the memory of that dear mother
cheered and strengthened him.

He could still feel her tears and kisses on his cheek, and the
tender clasp of her hand as she pressed into his the slender purse
of money which she had saved to release him from the drudgery of
an occupation he loathed, and to enable him to become a great
lawyer in Paris. How well he remembered her delight in listening
to him declaim the speeches of Thiers and Guizot from the pages of
the National, which she had taught him to read when but a mere
baby, and from which he imbibed his first lessons in
republicanism,--lessons that he never afterward forgot.

Such deep root had they taken that he could not be induced to
change his views by the fathers of the preparatory school at
Monfaucon, whither he had been sent to be trained for the
priesthood. Finally despairing of bringing the young radical to
their way of thinking, the Monfaucon fathers sent him home to his
parents. "You will never make a priest of him," they wrote; "he
has a character that cannot be disciplined."

His father, an honest but narrow-minded Italian, whose ideas did