One would have thought that the legitimist poet would have arisen from some lonely castle of Brittany, and have borne a name which twenty generations of mediæval heroes had made famous in song. One would have pictured him as the melancholy, high-spirited descendant of Crusaders, orphaned by the Vendean war, inspired by the influence of the ocean and the majestic solitude of the _landes_.[30]
He would be likely to be a Christian Byron, a modern Ossian, far removed from contact with the world, almost a prophet as well as a poet. But as if to render his personality more marked, and his partisanship more striking, the champion of legitimacy was none of these things. Instead of being a noble, he was a baker; instead of a solitary, a busy man of the world--even a deputy in the French Assembly in 1840. Who would have dreamt this? Yet when God chose a king for Israel, he did not call a man of exalted family to the throne, but "a son of Jemini of the least tribe of Israel, and his kindred the last among all the families of the tribe of Benjamin."[31] So it fell out with the representative who, among the constellation of more than ordinary brilliancy which marked the beginning of this century in France, was to uphold the old political faith of the land. There was doubtless some wise reason for this singular and unexpected choice. Reboul was a man of the people, a worker for his bread, that it might be known what the people could do when led by faith and loyalty; he was from Nîmes, in the south of France, not far from Lyons and Marseilles, that his attitude might be a perpetual protest against the wave of communism and revolution which had its source in the south; he was, so to speak, a descendant of the Romans--for Nîmes was a flourishing Roman colony and its people are said to retain much of the massiveness of the Roman character--that he might rebuke the mistaken notion of those who make of the old republic a type of modern anarchy, and desecrate the names of Lucretia and Cornelia by bestowing them on the _tricoteuses_[32] of 1793, or the _pétroleuses_ of 1870. It must have been a special consolation to the exiled representative of the Bourbons, the object of such devoted and romantic loyalty, to follow the successes and receive the outspoken sympathy of so unexpected and so staunch an adherent. Uncompromising in his championship of the "_drapeau blanc_," Reboul was politically a host in himself, and, untrammelled as he was by the traditions and prejudices that hedged in the nobles of the party, he was able to mingle with all classes, speak to all men, treat with all parties, and yet to carry his allegiance through all obstacles, unimpaired and even unsuspected.