Even later than this, Lamartine was still the man of the period. Only four months before the outbreak of the Revolution of July, a eulogium of Daru is prescribed as the theme of his oration before the French Academy. He accomplishes the feat of pronouncing it without naming Napoleon's name; and he says frankly: "This century will be dated from our double restoration of lost blessings, the restoration of liberty by the throne and of the throne by liberty.... Let us not forget that our future is inseparably bound up with that of our kings, that it is impossible to separate the tree from its root without drying up the trunk, and that in our country it is monarchy which has borne everything, even the perfect fruit of liberty."
Lamartine now enjoys a period of triumph, the period of budding fame. Fame did not come to him early, for he was thirty years old; but it penetrated like the first rays of the rising sun into his ambitious soul. Let us picture to ourselves a salon in the days of Louis XVIII, as described by writers of the day. About a hundred persons are assembled in a suite of drawing-rooms in the house of some important personage, say General Foy. Lamartine, then an attaché of the embassy in Florence, but for the moment in Paris on one of his short visits, is among the invited guests.[1] A movement of admiration passes through the assembly as he enters--young, erect, handsome, aristocratic in mien and bearing. A crowd, chiefly of ladies, gathers round him; he is conscious of charming faces, splendid toilettes, smiles and flattery on every side. People forget for a moment to offer their congratulations to the deputies present on their last speeches. Even those who have not seen Lamartine before know him at once, for he outshines all. General Foy goes up to him, enthusiastically presses his hand, and assures him that it is in his power, whenever he chooses, to become an ornament of the Chamber, which has long stood in need of just such a talented champion of the sacred principles of royalty. Then Lamartine, in the melodious voice which as yet has never uttered a political catchword, repeats one or two of his first poems--_L'Enthousiasme, Souvenir, Le Désespoir, La Prière, La Foi_, or some such reflective pieces--thereby producing boundless ecstasy, and calling forth outbursts of every shade of enthusiasm and gratitude. Benjamin Constant comes up with his impenetrable, solemnly ironic mien, congratulates him on having discovered this new fountain of poetical inspiration, and assures him that he knows of no such loftiness and purity of thought and expression except in Schiller's reflective poems. The ladies are of opinion that this comparison is very flattering indeed to Schiller, an unknown German bourgeois poet, whose name they just remember having heard. What is he compared with Lamartine!