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Book, page 201 / 392 up what you thought or hoped was the safest side, and put your head round the corner and see what was happening. Who is getting the best of it in a fight is a question that will not be denied, though it may easily mean a stray bullet in your head. Speaking of '48, though it breaks my rule, I must recall an account which I induced Lady Sligo to give last year to me and my son, of her recollections of Lamartine during this very period. I happened, if I remember rightly, to be comparing Lamartine's ceaseless flow of admirable oratory with that of Mr. Lloyd George. Both men seemed to find it possible to speak all day and manage affairs all night, without apparently exhausting themselves. Inexhaustibility in the matter of vital energy seemed to be the gift of each. Most men are soon pumped dry by skipping from China to Peru, from Upper Silesia to the Lower Congo, from Vladivostok to Washington. Not so Mr. Lloyd George, and certainly not so Lamartine. During his amazing tenure of the office of President of the Second Republic, he would make a perfectly correct and yet perfectly sympathetic speech to a deputation from Ireland in the early part of the morning, and to one from Chili in the afternoon. He always contrived to soothe men's minds, without really saying anything. Full of my readings of the Poet-President's orations and Despatches, I asked Lady Sligo whether she had ever seen or heard the great man. She told us how, when a girl of fourteen or fifteen, M. Lamartine, either President or ex-President, I am not sure which, and his pleasant wife, took a great fancy to her and how on several occasions she drove out with them in their capacious landau. Lamartine's dress was marvellous. Apparently it chiefly consisted of white duck trousers, which were folded round his portly form in some extraordinary manner. There was also a white waistcoat, and, as far as I remember, something in the nature of a tight-waisted frock-coat. But what seems to have stuck most in her memory is that the pockets of the white pantaloons were stuffed with gold coins, and that these gold coins, whether in the carriage, in the armchairs, or on the sofas on which the great man was apt to fling himself, would tumble out on the floor. It was the duty of the younger portion of the family and friends to collect the product of these golden showers. "Why," I asked, "did M. Lamartine make himself into a kind of walking gold-reserve?" The answer was as curious as it was simple. Lamartine, it
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