Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/69



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 39

proposed a Junta, composed of three members — namely Generals D. Pedro Juan Caballero, and D. Fulgencio Yegros, with Dr. (D.C.L. — others say D.D.) Jose Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia. The two former were at once accepted, the latter, whose name was fated to sound sinister in the ears of men, owed his rise to the peculiar persistence of his character. Born about 1757, ten years before the expulsion of the Societas Jesu, he was at the time when this Revolution broke out, of mature age. He began life as a student of theology at the college of Cordoba, and for many years he was supposed to be half a Jesuit. Of an ascetic tui-n of mind, and fond of study and solitude, he acquired also the reputation of a Cabalist. Become by profession a lawyer, he secm-ed by his talents, his expe- rience, and his unusual integrity, the esteem of his fellow countrymen, who selected him for various important offices in the Province. For some years during middle age he had retired to his house in the suburbs of the capital, and to a farm not distant from Asuncion ; there he devoted himself to the perusal of the few books on science and politics which were then procurable. He read greedily everything published about the French Republic, the Consulate, and the Empire, and evidently, as says M. Quentin (copying Rengger), he had mastered his Rollin, and dreamed in early days of becoming Consul, Dictator, and Imperator.

The portrait of this truly remarkable man has been pre- served : I secured a photograph taken, of course, from a portrait, which showed him in about his sixtieth year. He sits opposite his library, deeply concentrated in the presence of his books, with a look of penetration and intelligence, and that painful, distrusting, care-worn expression which belongs to men whom hope deferred has made sick, and who have risen to the height of their ambition only when Siren life has lost many of her charms. Of a purely nervous-