government in order to strengthen its goodwill for the Suez Canal. Once this goodwill had been shown, he bore no malice towards those who rendered him his liberty by preferring Gambetta. He afterwards declined the other candidatures that were offered him: for the Senate in 1876, and for the Chamber in 1877. In 1873 he became interested in a project for uniting Europe and Asia by a railway to Bombay, with a branch to Peking. He subsequently encouraged Major Roudaire, who wished to transform the Sahara desert into an inland sea. The king of the Belgians having formed an International African Society, de Lesseps accepted the presidency of the French committee, facilitated M. de Brazza’s explorations, and acquired stations that he subsequently abandoned to the French government. These stations were the starting-point of French Congo. In 1879 a congress assembled in the rooms of the Geographical Society at Paris, under the presidency of Admiral de la Roncière le Noury, and voted in favour of the making of the Panama Canal. Public opinion, it may be declared, designated Ferdinand de Lesseps as the head of the enterprise. It was upon that occasion that Gambetta bestowed upon him the title of Le Grand Français. He was not a man to shirk responsibility, and notwithstanding that he had reached the age of 74, he undertook to carry out the Panama Canal project (see Panama Canal and France: History). Politics, which de Lesseps had always avoided, was his greatest enemy in this matter. The winding-up of the Panama Company having been declared in the month of December 1888, the adversaries of the French Republic, seeking for a scandal that would imperil the government, hoped to bring about the prosecution of the directors of the Panama Company. Their attacks were so vigorously made that the government was obliged, in self-defence, to have judicial proceedings taken against Ferdinand de Lesseps, his son Charles (b. 1849) and his co-workers Fontane and Cottu. Charles de Lesseps, a victim offered to the fury of the politicians, tried to divert the storm upon his head and prevent it from reaching his father. He managed to draw down upon himself alone the burden of the condemnations pronounced. One of the consequences of the persecutions of which he was the object was to oblige him to spend three years, from 1896 to 1899, in England, where his participation in the management of the Suez Canal had won for him some strong friendships, and where he was able to see the great respect in which the memory and name of his father were held by Englishmen.
Ferdinand de Lesseps died at La Chenaie on the 7th of December 1894. He had contracted a second marriage in 1869 with Mlle Autard de Bragard, daughter of a former magistrate of Mauritius; and eleven out of twelve children of this marriage survived him. M. de Lesseps was a member of the French Academy, of the Academy of Sciences, of numerous scientific societies, Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour and of the Star of India, and had received the freedom of the City of London. According to some accounts he was unconscious of the disastrous events that took place during the closing months of his life. Others report that, feeling himself powerless to scatter the gathered clouds, and aware of his physical feebleness, he had had the moral courage to pass in the eyes of his family, which he did not wish to afflict, as the dupe of the efforts they employed to conceal the truth from him. This last version would not be surprising if we relied upon the following portrait, sketched by a person who knew him intimately:—“Simple in his tastes, never thinking of himself, constantly preoccupied about others, supremely kind, he did not and would not recognize such a thing as evil. Of a confiding nature, he was inclined to judge others by himself. This naturally affectionate abandonment that every one felt in him had procured him profound attachments and rare devotions. He showed, while making the Suez Canal, what a gift he possessed for levying the pacific armies he conducted. He set duty above everything, had in the highest degree a reverence for honour, and placed his indomitable courage at the service of everything that was beneficial with an abnegation that nothing could tire. His marvellous physical and moral equilibrium gave him an evenness of temper which always rendered his society charming. Whatever his cares, his work or his troubles, I have never noticed in him aught but generous impulses and a love of humanity carried even to those heroic imprudences of which they alone are capable who devote themselves to the amelioration of humanity.” No doubt this eulogy requires some reservations. The striking and universal success which crowned his work on the Suez Canal gave him an absoluteness of thought which brooked no contradiction, a despotic temper before which every one must bow, and against which, when he had once taken a resolution, nothing could prevail, not even the most authoritative opposition or the most legitimate entreaties. He had resolved to construct the Panama Canal without locks, to make it an uninterrupted navigable way. All attempts to dissuade him from this resolution failed before his tenacious will. At his advanced age he went with his youngest child to Panama to see with his own eyes the field of his new enterprise. He there beheld the Culebra and the Chagres; he saw the mountain and the stream, those two greatest obstacles of nature that sought to bar his route. He paid no heed to them, but began the struggle against the Culebra and the Chagres. It was against them that was broken his invincible will, sweeping away in the defeat the work of Panama, his own fortune, his fame and almost an atom of his honour. But this atom, only grazed by calumny, has already been restored to him by posterity, for he died poor, having been the first to suffer by the disaster to his illusions. Political agitators, in order to sap the power of the Opportunist party, did not hesitate to drag in the mud one of the greatest citizens of France. But when the Panama “scandal” has been forgotten, for centuries to come the traveller in saluting the statue of Ferdinand de Lesseps at the entrance of the Suez Canal will pay homage to one of the most powerful embodiments of the creative genius of the 19th century.
See G. Barnett Smith, The Life and Enterprises of Ferdinand de Lesseps (London, 1893); and Souvenirs de quarante ans, by Ferdinand de Lesseps (trans. by C. B. Pitman). (de B.)
LESSING, GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM (1729–1781), German
critic and dramatist, was born at Kamenz in Upper Lusatia
(Oberlausitz), Saxony, on the 22nd of January 1729. His father,
Johann Gottfried Lessing, was a clergyman, and, a few years
after his son’s birth, became pastor primarius or chief pastor of
Kamenz. After attending the Latin school of his native town,
Gotthold was sent in 1741 to the famous school of St Afra at
Meissen, where he made such rapid progress, especially in classics
and mathematics, that, towards the end of his school career, he
was described by the rector as “a steed that needed double
fodder.” In 1746 he entered the university of Leipzig as a
theological student. The philological lectures of Johann Friedrich
Christ (1700–1756) and Johann August Ernesti (1707–1781)
proved, however, more attractive than those on theology, and
he attended the philosophical disputations presided over by his
friend A. G. Kästner, professor of mathematics and also an
epigrammatist of repute. Among Lessing’s chief friends in
Leipzig were C. F. Weisse (1726–1804) the dramatist, and Christlob
Mylius (1722–1754), who had made some name for himself
as a journalist. He was particularly attracted by the theatre
then directed by the talented actress Karoline Neuber (1697–1760),
who had assisted Gottsched in his efforts to bring the
German stage into touch with literature. Frau Neuber even
accepted for performance Lessing’s first comedy, Der junge
Gelehrte (1748), which he had begun at school. His father
naturally did not approve of these new interests and acquaintances,
and summoned him home. He was only allowed to return to
Leipzig on the condition that he would devote himself
to the study of medicine. Some medical lectures he did attend,
but as long as Frau Neuber’s company kept together the theatre
had an irresistible fascination for him.
In 1748, however, the company broke up, and Lessing, who had allowed himself to become surety for some of the actors’ debts, was obliged to leave Leipzig too, in order to escape their creditors. He went to Wittenberg, and afterwards, towards the end of the year, to Berlin, where his friend Mylius had
