Pantheon, which contains memorials of the heroes and heroines of
France. But, though we may not fairly judge of his political
motives, we can readily reconstruct a picture of him as a man, and
in doing so recall his one romance, which many will remember after
they have forgotten his oratorical triumphs and his statecraft.

Leon Gambetta was the true type of the southern Frenchman--what
his countrymen call a meridional. The Frenchman of the south is
different from the Frenchman of the north, for the latter has in
his veins a touch of the viking blood, so that he is very apt to
be fair-haired and blue-eyed, temperate in speech, and self-
controlled. He is different, again, from the Frenchman of central
France, who is almost purely Celtic. The meridional has a marked
vein of the Italian in him, derived from the conquerors of ancient
Gaul. He is impulsive, ardent, fiery in speech, hot-tempered, and
vivacious to an extraordinary degree.

Gambetta, who was born at Cahors, was French only on his mother's
side, since his father was of Italian birth. It is said also that
somewhere in his ancestry there was a touch of the Oriental. At
any rate, he was one of the most southern of the sons of southern
France, and he showed the precocious maturity which belongs to a
certain type of Italian. At twenty-one he had already been
admitted to the French bar, and had drifted to Paris, where his
audacity, his pushing nature, and his red-hot un-restraint of
speech gave him a certain notoriety from the very first.

It was toward the end of the reign of Napoleon III. that Gambetta
saw his opportunity. The emperor, weakened by disease and yielding
to a sort of feeble idealism, gave to France a greater freedom of