When the February revolution came, Baron d’Eckstein was very active. His friend Lamartine was then in the ascendant, and through him he knew all that was going on. No revolution, I believe, was ever made with so little preparation. There was no conspiracy of any kind. A night or two before the contemplated banquet to Ledru Rollin, Lamartine was asked by his friends, Eckstein being present, whether he would accept office under the Duchesse d’Orléans, provided she was proclaimed Regent in the Chamber. He laughed as if it were an idle dream, outside the sphere of practical politics, as we now say, but he accepted. The Duchesse and her friends counted on him, and his prestige at that time was so great that he might have carried anything. But no one knows his own prestige, and when the moment came, when the Duchesse d’Orléans was present in the Chamber and Lamartine was expected to speak, there was confusion and fright; some shots had been fired in the Assembly, the name of the Republic had been shouted, the Deputies broke up, and the Duchesse had to fly. Never was kingdom lost with so little excuse. I saw the whole so-called revolution from my windows at the corner of the Rue Royale and the Boulevard de la Madeleine. I may have to describe what I saw at some other time. At present I am thinking of the poet-statesman only, of Lamartine and his brilliant speech from the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville. Whatever Lamartine was, a poet, a dreamer, an aristocrat, he had the spirit of _noblesse_ in him, and that spirit prevailed at the time. It was due to him, I believe, that capital punishment was then abolished once for all for political offences. Sinister elements came to the surface, but they had soon to hide again. I remember another speaker at the Hôtel de Ville, speaking after Lamartine in support of the abolition of every kind of title and privilege, and, before all, for the abolition of the nobility. He was eloquent, he was furious, and after he had summed up all the crimes committed by the French nobility and laughed at those who had grown rich and powerful by the misdeeds of their noble ancestors, he finished up in a loud voice, “Soyons ancêtres nous-mêmes,” a sentiment loudly applauded by the unwashed multitudes who aspired to take the place of the _ancêtres_ whom they had just heard execrated from the balcony of their terrible Hôtel de Ville. All the walls in the streets where I lived were then chalked with the mysterious words, _Liberté_, _Egalité_, _Fraternité_. Not far from my house there was a tobacconist’s shop, called _Aux trois blagues_, with three tobacco pouches painted over the window. My friend, the tobacconist, was an _aristo_, so he left the _trois blagues_ and simply wrote underneath, _Liberté_, _Egalité_, _Fraternité_.