His brief career as deputy to the Constituent Assembly in 1848 derives a peculiar interest for the reader by reason of the seeming contradiction it presents to his settled political creed. But Reboul judged things by a higher standard than that of party prejudice. "A Frenchman before a royalist," he vindicated his patriotism by active measures in those stormy days when more voices were needed to speak for the right in the councils of the nation. No doubt, with his unfailing discernment, he saw the incongruity of his actual position as a man of the people with that refusal of office which was in a certain sense becoming--nay, required--in a legitimist of noble birth. He says of his nomination: "I had firmly refused before, being certain of my own incompetency, but our population would not hear reason. These good people imagine that, because one can scribble verses, one can therefore represent a borough. I was not able to disabuse them; it was made a question of honor and patriotism, and how could I refuse any longer? Here am I, therefore, who have always lived far from political gatherings, I a man of retirement and study, thrown into your whirlpool without well knowing what will happen to me there." He was not happy as a deputy. M. de Poujoulat says that Reboul's countenance in those days was that of a man bored to death. When, the following year, he retired from these unwonted honors, he thanked God for "having rescued him from the storm," and wrote to a friend: "I am quite happy again, and do not at all regret the honors I have left. I wonder what interest there can be in such heated disputes about vulgarized issues! I never felt more at home than I do now, and nothing whispers to me that I have had any loss." Of a young and unfortunate colleague in the Assembly, a man who had mistaken an irrepressible momentary exaltation for a genuine vocation, and from a porter had vaulted to the position of a deputy, while he further aspired to that of a poet, Reboul says with grave sympathy and sterling sense: "His blind ambition often astounded me, but it was so candid and so genuine that I had not the heart to condemn it. I have often grieved over this frank nature, this child who, in his gambols, _would_ handle as a whip which he could use the serpent that was to bite him. The best thing for him would be to go back to his trade in the teeth of the world, and to make use of his strength and youth; he would find in that a truer happiness than in the shadow of an official desk, or in the corruptions of the literary 'Bohemia,' but such an effort, I fear, is beyond his strength of mind." With what special right Reboul could give this sound, if stern, advice, we shall see presently.