Albert was a man of fifty or more, with a large head, square German face and forehead, a large hazel eye, fixed and unexcitable, hair closely cut, and beard upon his chin and lip. His dress was a long iron-gray frock coat, buttoned closely to his chin. His face was rather thin, and his complexion bronzed. His name had for years been identified with reform; and though a manufacturer himself, of the class of workmen, being proprietor and chief engineer of a large machine factory at Lyons, he had established and sustained in that city a paper to advocate his principles, named "La Glaneuse," the prosecution of which by the Government for libel and the fining and imprisonment of its editor formed an originating cause of the revolt in Lyons of April, 1834. For the part played by this man in the revolt thus arising, he was sentenced to transportation, a penalty afterwards commuted to fine and imprisonment. He was a man of few words, remarkably few, but of deep thought and prompt action, and, in moments of crisis and emergency, a man of unshaken and inflexible nerve. To the casual observer, he seemed only a silent man, or a sullen one, astute or stolid; in times of peril he was a man of iron, but a man of action and passion, too, moving with resistless might. To rouse his powers, mental or physical, demanded, indeed, circumstances of unusual import, but once roused they were irresistible.
Such were the personages now assembled in the office of "Le National;" and, of those five men, all were connected with the press, directly, as editor or proprietor, save only Ledru Rollin, and he was a writer for "La Réforme," as well as an advocate.
The name of Louis Blanc's paper was, as has been said, "Le Bon Sens."
But to return to the narrative.
"And you really wish a sermon from me, old comrades, with patience as the text?"
"Aye--aye--aye!" exclaimed all.
"Suppose I add to it this line I find on the paper before me on the table, that our good Marrast had just written as the text for a paragraph which would probably have cost him another fine and imprisonment, had the paragraph been completed and published?"
"Read! read!" cried Rollin.
"With your permission, Armand?"
"Certainly," replied the editor, still continuing his promenade.
"'Again the House of Orléans triumphs!'" read Louis Blanc, aloud.
"And is it not true--the accursed tyrants?" vociferated Rollin.
"Aye, true!" was the mild answer; "alas, too true! That perfidious House does triumph, and for that very reason the fact should never be acknowledged by its opponents."