VISCOUNT FERDINAND DE LESSEPS. 371 



advance were called, and he went forward. Fortune was inconstant, 

 but he never looked back. For more than a half century he was the 

 most conspicuous and interesting figure in the rush of the busy world ; 

 — he turned its tide, but it overtook him and whelmed over him 

 when his footsteps faltered in old age. He was the hero of one 

 generation, and the victim of another. 



He was born at Versailles in the year 1805, and educated at the 

 Lycee Napoleon for the foreign service, to which the family had a 

 sort of traditional claim. His grandfather, Martin de Lesseps, was 

 Consul at St. Petersburg before the Revolution, and his father, 

 Matthew de Lesseps, held the Commissariat-Generalship of Egypt at 

 the time that Ferdinand was born. Subsequently he was Imperial 

 Commissary at the Seven Islands (Ionian), where he won tlie good 

 will of everybody, and in the fantastic diction of the period he was 

 declared to be "liberal even to fanatical generosity." In 1817 he 

 was sent on a mission to Morocco, and shortly after ap[»ears as French 

 Consul at Philadelphia, where he assisted at a Commercial Convention, 

 and was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society. 

 He married Mademoiselle de Grivegnir, daughter of a distinguished 

 jurist in Malaga. It was through tliis Spanish mother that Ferdinand 

 de Lesseps came to be a kinsman of the Empress of the French, in the 

 unfolding [)lot of this family's missions. 



Tlie rirst professional employment for Ferdinand was offered by his 

 uncle, Jean Baptiste de Lesseps (best known to scientific men as that 

 Viscount de Lesseps who, in 1787, crossed Siberia from the Okhotsk 

 Sea to bring a report — which proved to be the last tidings — from 

 La Perouse). This uncle in 1825 was French Consul at Lisbon, and 

 Ferdinand, then twenty years old, was sent by him on a diplomatic 

 errand. Shortly after this we find him a " student consul " at Alexan- 

 dria, under his father, Matthew de Lesseps. 



In 1833 he was given a sub-consulate at Cairo. It was in the 

 following year that the great plague broke out, memorable as perhaps 

 the most fatal visitation of modern times. Young Lesseps was then 

 left in management of the Consul-Generalship, and he won such golden 

 opinion that he was decorated with the cross of the Legion of Honor. 

 In 1838 he went as Consul to Rotterdam, in 1839 to Malaga. It was 

 as French Consul at Barcelona that he won, during the revolt of 1842, 

 the admiration of Europe as a humanitarian. His personal courage 

 and his devotion to suffering people induced four governments to send 

 him decorations. He was made an officer of the Legion of Honor. 

 The city of Marseilles awarded him a medal, and the city of Barcelona 



