Bahorel had been mixed up in the sanguinary tumult of June, 1822, on
the occasion of the burial of young Lallemand. Bahorel was a being of
good temper and bad company, brave and a spendthrift, prodigal and
generous, chattering and eloquent, bold and insolent, and the very best
clay for the devils moulding imaginable. He displayed daring waistcoats
and scarlet opinions; he was a turbulent on a grand scale, that is
to say, that he liked nothing so much as a quarrel unless it were an
émeute, and nothing so much as an émeute except a revolution. He was
ever ready to break a pane of glass, tear up the paving-stones, and
demolish a government, in order to see the effect; he was a student
in his eleventh year. He sniffed at the law, but did not practise it,
and he had taken as his motto, "Never a lawyer," and as his coat of
arms a night-table surmounted by a square cap. Whenever he passed in
front of the law-school, which rarely happened to him, he buttoned up
his frock-coat and took hygienic precautions. He said of the school
gate, "What a fierce old man!" and of the Dean M. Devincourt, "What a
monument!" He found in his lectures a subject for coarse songs, and
in his professors an occasion for laughter. He spent in doing nothing
a very considerable allowance, something like three thousand francs.
His parents were peasants in whom he had inculcated a respect for their
son. He used to say of them, "They are peasants, and not towns-people,
that is why they are so intelligent." Bahorel, as a capricious man,
visited several cafés; and while the others had habits he had none. He
strolled about: to err is human, to stroll is Parisian. Altogether, he
had a penetrating mind, and thought more than people fancied. He served
as the connecting link between the Friends of the A. B. C. and other
groups which were still unformed, but which were to be constituted at a
later date.
There was in this assembly of young men a bald-headed member. The
Marquis d'Avaray, whom Louis XVIII. made a duke because he helped him
to get into a hired cab on the day when he emigrated, used to tell how,
when the King landed in 1814 at Calais upon his return to France, a man
handed him a petition.
"What do you want?" the King said.
"A postmastership, Sire."
"What is your name?"
"L'Aigle."
The King frowned, but looked at the signature of the petition, and
read the name thus written, LESGLE. This, anything but Bonapartist
orthography, touched the King, and he began smiling. "Sire," the man
with the petition went on, "my ancestor was a whipper-in of the name
of Lesgueules, and my name came from that. I called myself Lesgueules,
by contraction Lesgle, and by corruption L'Aigle." This remark caused
the King to smile still more, and at a later date he gave the man the
post-office at Meaux, purposely or through a mistake. The bald Mentor
of the group was son of this Lesgle or Legle, and signed himself Legle
(of Meaux.) His comrades, to shorten this, called him Bossuet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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