And, true enough, at twenty-one (in Ursin Lemaitre), the labors of his grandfather were an apparent success.  He was not rugged, nor was he loud-spoken, as his venerable trainer would have liked to present him to society; but he was as serenely terrible as a well-aimed rifle, and the old man looked upon his results with pride.  He had cultivated him up to that pitch where he scorned to practise any vice, or any virtue, that did not include the principle of self-assertion.  A few touches only were wanting here and there to achieve perfection, when suddenly the old man died.  Yet it was his proud satisfaction, before he finally lay down, to see Ursin a favored companion and the peer, both in courtesy and pride, of those polished gentlemen famous in history, the brothers Lafitte.

The two Lafittes were, at the time young Lemaitre reached his majority (say 1808 or 1812), only merchant-blacksmiths, so to speak, a term intended to convey the idea of blacksmiths who never soiled their hands, who were men of capital, stood a little higher than the clergy, and moved in society among its autocrats.  But they were full of possibilities, men of action, and men, too, of thought, with already a pronounced disbelief in the custom-house.  In these days of big carnivals they would have been patented as the dukes of Little Manchac and Barataria.

Young Ursin Lemaitre (in full the name was Lemaitre-Vignevielle) had not only the hearty friendship of these good people, but also a natural turn for accounts; and as his two friends were looking about them with an enterprising eye, it easily resulted that he presently connected himself with the blacksmithing profession.  Not exactly at the forge in the Lafittes’ famous smithy, among the African Samsons, who, with their shining black bodies bared to the waist, made the Rue St. Pierre ring with the stroke of their hammers; but as a—­there was no occasion to mince the word in those days—­smuggler.

Smuggler—­patriot—­where was the difference?  Beyond the ken of a community to which the enforcement of the revenue laws had long been merely so much out of every man’s pocket and dish, into the all-devouring treasury of Spain.  At this date they had come under a kinder yoke, and to a treasury that at least echoed when the customs were dropped into it; but the change was still new.  What could a man be more than Capitaine Lemaitre was—­the soul of honor, the pink of courtesy, with the courage of the lion, and the magnanimity of the elephant; frank—­the very exchequer of truth!  Nay, go higher still:  his paper was good in Toulouse Street.  To the gossips in the gaming-clubs he was the culminating proof that smuggling was one of the sublimer virtues.

Years went by.  Events transpired which have their place in history.  Under a government which the community by and by saw was conducted in their interest, smuggling began to lose its respectability and to grow disreputable, hazardous, and debased.  In certain onslaughts made upon them by officers of the law, some of the smugglers became murderers.  The business became unprofitable for a time until the enterprising Lafittes—­thinkers—­bethought them of a corrective—­“privateering”.