Page:Memoirs of Henry Villard, volume 1.djvu/26

2 recluse, but a man of great learning. After Jacob's marriage, the Prince of Nassau-Weilburg gave him the pastorate of Marnheim, a village on the military road to Mainz. At the time of his occupancy this was considered a very lucrative charge, but the exposed position of Marnheim led to its being plundered freely by both contestants in the wars growing out of the French Revolution. Both Jacob Hilgard and his wife believed in the doctrines of the Revolution, and he was so outspoken in favor of them that he was driven by mob violence into exile for four years.

Henry Villard's grandfather was Jacob's son Friedrich. His education suffered considerably because of the unrest of the times and the consequent impoverishment of the family. An uncle sent him to the gymnasium at Idstein in Nassau, and helped him to become a notary in Nancy. Later he was made burgomaster in Kirchheimbolanden, a village near Marnheim, mayor of Speyer, and incumbent of other important Government offices. A man of very solid character and of unusual beauty of person, he was first married to Charlotte Henrich, the daughter of a rich banker whose descendants still carry on his banking business in Neustadt on the Haardt.

Their first-born was Gustav Leonhard Hilgard, who in turn became father of Henry Villard. Gustav, the most talented of the five sons born to Friedrich Hilgard by his first marriage, was somewhat hot-blooded and masterful, with beautiful light-blue eyes and curly, dark-brown hair. Educated at the gymnasium in Speyer, he afterwards studied at the universities of Munich, Heidelberg and Würzburg, at all of which an inheritance received from his mother, who died in 1818, enabled him to live handsomely and to lend a helping hand to needy fellow-students. In 1828 he passed a brilliant examination, and went with his brother Theodor to Paris to attend law lectures at the Collège de France. Returning to the Palatinate, he was appointed to a small legal position at Zweibrücken, and later was transferred to