MM. de Montalembert and Lacordaire had constituted themselves the champions of liberty in educational matters, as well as of all other liberties, both religious and civil. From words they passed to deeds; and they opened, conjointly, an elementary school which a few poor children attended. The police intervened. Ordered to withdraw, the professors offered resistance, so they were obliged to arrest the "substance of the offence"--namely, the street arabs who filled the school-room. There was hardly sufficient ground for a trial before the _tribunal correctionnel_; but, in the meantime, a few days before the promulgation of the law which suppressed the hereditary rights to the peerage, M. Charles de Montalembert's most excellent father died. The matter then assumed unexpected proportions: Charles de Montalembert, a peer of France by the grace of non-retroactivity, was not amenable to ordinary courts of justice, so the trial was carried before the Court of Peers, where it took the dimensions of a political debate upon the freedom of education. Lacordaire, whose cause could not be disconnected from that of his accomplice, was also transferred to the Supreme Court, and he delivered extempore his own counsel's speech. M. de Montalembert, on the contrary, read a speech in which he attacked the university and M. de Broglie in particular. "At this point," says the _Moniteur_, in its report of the trial, "the honourable peer of France put up his eye-glass and looked critically at the young orator." Less fortunate before the Court of Peers than before the jury, which would certainly have acquitted them, the two editors of _l'Avenir_ lost their case; but they won it in the opinion of the country. The Comte de Montalembert owed it to this circumstance, that he sided with M. de Lamennais, whose Liberal doctrines he shared and professed at that time; he was also equally bound by the unexpected death of his father to find a career ready opened for him in the Upper Chamber. But when questioned by the Chamber as to his profession, he replied--"Schoolmaster." All these trials seemed but to give a handle to M. de Lamennais's religious enemies. Rumours began from below. From the lower clergy, who condemned them, M. de Lamennais and the other editors of _l'Avenir_ appealed to the bishops, who in their turn also condemned them. Then, driven back from one entrenchment after another, like the defenders of a town, who, having vainly defended their advanced positions, and their first and second _enceintes_, are forced to take refuge within the citadel itself, the accused men were obliged to look towards the Vatican, and to put their trust in Rome. The mainmast of this storm-beaten vessel, M. de Lamennais, was the first to be struck by the thunders of denunciation.