We all read in the newspapers how, on the day when the Duke of Albany’s
lamentable death occurred, M. Jules Ferry, the French Prime Minister
and Secretary for Foreign Affairs, gave a dinner party. An Englishman
having expressed astonishment that this dinner had not been put off, a
Frenchman answered by asking whether Lord Granville would countermand
a banquet in case M. Wilson, M. Grévy’s son-in-law, were to die? Our
countryman seems to have concluded that Lord Granville would not let his
hospitalities be interfered with by M. Wilson’s decease; and perhaps he
was right. M. Daniel Wilson holds more effective power than was ever
possessed by a Dauphin of France; but his father-in-law is only the chief
of a government, not the head of a court, and M. Wilson’s existence has
therefore never been brought officially to the cognizance of foreign
rulers. It does not follow, however, that because M. Wilson is a private
person, the French government is bound to look upon the relations of
foreign monarchs as being exactly in the same position as this gentleman.
It is more than probable that if Marshal MacMahon were still president,
the foreign secretary would not have given a dinner on the day when a
child of the Queen of England had died suddenly on French soil. It is
equally probable that there would have been no such dinner if M. Thiers
or M. Gambetta had been president.
Presidents are not all alike. In their views as to the functions of
a republic—in their opinions as to the amount of authority which a
republican ruler may exercise over his ministers, as to the more or
less pomp in which he should live, as to the etiquette which he should
enforce, and as to the relations which he should personally maintain with
the rulers of other countries, M. Grévy and his predecessors have all
differed from one another. The three presidents who have governed France
since 1871 have in fact been so dissimilar in their characters, tastes,
principles, and objects, that it is really curious to compare their
various methods of living and ruling.
M. Thiers was seventy-four years old when he became supreme ruler of
France, after the siege of Paris. After the first vote of the Assembly,
which appointed him chief of the executive, M. Thiers took up his
residence at the Préfecture, in the apartments which M. Gambetta had
vacated.
“Pah! what a smell of tobacco!” he exclaimed, when he strutted into the
ex-dictator’s study; and presently Madame Thiers, her sister Mdlle.
Dosne, and the solemn M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, added their lamentations
to his. They had been going the round of the house, and found all the
rooms tenanted by hangers-on of M. Gambetta’s government, who had not yet
received notice to quit, and who hoped perhaps that they might retain
their posts under the new administration. All these gentlemen smoked,
read radical newspapers, refreshed themselves with absinthe, or beer,
while transacting the business of the state; and played billiards in
their leisure moments. They were dismissed in a pack before the day was
over; but Madame Thiers decided that it would require several days to
set the house straight; and so M. Thiers’ removal to the Archbishop’s
palace, where Monseigneur Guibert (now Cardinal), whom he afterward
raised to the see of Paris, offered him hospitality. M. Thiers would, no
doubt, have liked very much to sleep in Louis XIV.’s bed, and to have for
his study that fine room with the balcony, on which the heralds used to
announce the death of one king and the accession of another in the same
breath. His secretary and faithful admirer, M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire,
went about saying that it was fitting the “national historian” should be
lodged in the apartments of the greatest of the kings; but this idea did
not make its way at all. M. Thiers ended by saying that the rooms were
too large, while Madame Thiers despised them for being full of draughts
and having chimneys which smoked. Nevertheless, M. Thiers was nettled at
seeing that the Republicans objected quite as much as the Royalists to
see him occupy the royal apartments. “Stupid fellows!” he exclaimed on
seeing a caricature which represented him as a ridiculous pigmy, crowned
with a cotton nightcap, and lying in an enormous bed surrounded by the
majestic ghosts of the Bourbon kings. Then half-angry, half-amused, he
ejaculated with his usual vivacity: “Louis XIV. was not taller than I,
and as to his other greatness I doubt whether he would ever have had a
chance of sleeping in the best bed of Versailles if he had begun life as
I did.” Shortly after this, M. Mignet meeting Victor Hugo spoke to him in
a deprecating way about the fuss which had been made over this question
of the royal apartments. “I don’t know,” answered the poet. “Ideas of
dictatorship would be likely to sprout under that tester.” This was
reported to Thiers, who at once cried: “I like that! If Victor Hugo were
in my place, he would sleep in the king’s bed, but he would think the
dais too low, and have it raised.”
It was quite impossible for Thiers to submit to any of the restraints
of etiquette. He was a _bourgeois_ to the finger-tips. His character
was a curious effervescing mixture of talent, learning, vanity,
childish petulance, inquisitiveness, sagacity, ecstatic patriotism,
and self-seeking ambition. He was a splendid orator, with the shrill
voice of an old costerwoman; a _savant_, with the presumption of a
schoolboy; a kind-hearted man, with the irritability of a monkey; a
masterly administrator, with that irrepressible tendency to meddle with
everything, which worries subordinates, and makes good administration
impossible. He was a shrewd judge of men, and knew well how they were
to be handled, but his impatience prevented him from acting up to his
knowledge. He had a sincere love of liberty, with all the instincts of a
despot. He was most charming with women, understood their power, and yet
took so little account of it in his serious calculations that he often
offended, by his Napoleonic brusqueness, ladies who were in a position to
do him harm, and did it.
M. Feuillet de Conches had to give up M. Thiers as hopeless. What was to
be done with a president who, at a ceremonious dinner to Ambassadors and
Ministers, would get up from table after the first course and walk round
the room, discussing politics, pictures, the art of war, or the dishes
on the _menu_? Mr. Thiers’ own dinner always consisted of a little clear
soup, a plate of roast meat—veal was that which he preferred—some white
beans, peas, or lentils, and a glass saucer of jam—generally apricot.
He got through this repast, with two glasses of Bordeaux, in about a
quarter of an hour, and then would grow fidgety. “Is that good that you
are eating?” he would say to one of his guests, and thence start off on
to a disquisition about cookery. Telegrams were brought to him at table,
and he would open them, saying, “I beg your pardon, gentlemen, but the
affairs of France must pass before everything.” If he got disquieting
news he would sit pensive for a few moments, then call for a sheet of
paper and scribble off instructions to somebody, whispering directions to
his major-domo about the destination of the missive.
But if he received glad tidings, he would start from his chair and
frisk about, making jokes, his bright gray eyes twinkling merrily as
lamps through his gold-rimmed spectacles. After dinner there was always
a discussion, _coram hospitibus_, between him and Madame Thiers as to
whether he might take some black coffee. Permission to excite his nerves
being invariably refused, he would wink, laughing, to his friends, to
call their attention to the state of uxorious bondage in which he lived,
and then retire to a high arm-chair near the fire, where he soon dropped
off to sleep. Upon this, Madame Thiers would lay a forefinger on her
lips, saying, “Monsieur Thiers sleeps;” and with the help of her sister
she would clear the guests into the next room, where they conversed in
whispers while the President dozed—a droll little figure with his chin
resting on the broad red ribbon of his Legion of Honor, and his short
legs dangling about an inch above the floor. It was always very touching
to see the care with which M. Thiers’ wife and sister-in-law ministered
to him. The story has been often told of how M. Thiers having been
forbidden by doctors to eat his favorite Provençal dish of fish cooked
with garlic, M. Mignet, the historian, used to smuggle some of this
mess enclosed in a tin box into his friend’s study, and what a pretty
scene there was one day when Madame Thiers detected these two countrymen
enjoying the contraband dainty together.
M. Thiers had naturally a great notion of his dignity as president of
the republic, and he was anxious to appear impressively on all state
occasions; but the arrangements made to hedge him about with majesty were
always being disconcerted by his doing whatever it came into his head to
do. His servants were dressed in black, and he had a major-domo who wore
a silver chain and tried to usher morning visitors into the president’s
room in the order of their rank; but every now and then M. Thiers used to
pop out of his room, take stock of his visitors for himself, and make his
choice of those whom he wished to see first. Then the most astonishing
and uncourtly dialogues would ensue:
“Monsieur le Président, this is the third time I have come here, and I
have waited two hours each time.”
“My friend, if you had come to see me about the affairs of France, and
not about your own business, we should have had a conversation long ago.”
Precedence was always given by M. Thiers to journalists, however obscure
they might be. Ambassadors had to wait while these favored ones walked
in. A journalist himself, the quondam leader-writer of the _National_
extended the most generous recognition to the brethren of his craft, but
he also did this because he was wide awake to the power of the press, and
had generally some service to ask of those whom he addressed as “my dear
companions.” He had such a facility for writing that when a journalist
came to him “for inspiration” he would often sit down and dash off in a
quarter of an hour the essential paragraph of a leader which he wished to
see inserted. At the time of the Paris election of April, 1873, when his
friend the Comte de Rémusat, then foreign secretary, was the Government
candidate with the insignificant M. Barodet opposing him, a writer on
the _Figaro_ called at the Elysée and M. Thiers wrote a whole article
of a column’s length for him. It was printed as a letter in leaded type
with the signature “An old citizen of Paris;” and a very sprightly letter
it was, which put the issue lying between M. de Rémusat and his radical
adversary in the clearest light. However, the electors of Paris acted
with their usual foolishness in preferring an upstart to a man of note,
and within a month of this M. Thiers resigned in disgust.
Marshal MacMahon accepted the presidency without any desire to retain
it. If anything seemed certain at the time of his accession, it was that
Legitimists and Orleanists would soon patch up their differences and that
a vote of the Assembly would offer the crown to Henri V. The Ministry
formed under the auspices of the Duc de Broglie labored to bring about
this consummation, and the Marshal was prepared to enforce the decrees of
the Assembly whatever they might be. At the same time he established his
household at once on a semi-royal footing, as though he intended there
should be at least a temporary court to remind French noblemen of old
times, and to give them a foretaste of the pomps that were coming. M.
Thiers had been a _bourgeois_ president; the Marshal-Duke of Magenta was
a _grand seigneur_. Under Madame Thiers’ frugal management the £36,000 a
year allowed to the president sufficed amply to cover all expenses; under
the Duchess de Magenta’s management the presidential income did not go
half way toward defraying outlay. The Marshal had a comfortable private
fortune (not equal to M. Thiers’), but he was only enabled to hold such
high estate in his office by means of the assistance pressed upon him by
wealthy relatives.
The first signs of returning splendor at the Elysée were seen in the
liveries of the new president’s servants. Instead of black they wore gray
and silver, with scarlet plush, hair powder, and on gala occasions wigs.
M. Thiers, when he went to a public ceremony, drove in a substantial
landau, with mounted escort of the Republican Guard, and his friends—he
never called them a suite—followed behind in vehicles according to their
liking or means. Marshal MacMahon with the Duchess and their suite were
always enough to fill three dashing landaus. These were painted in three
or four shades of green, and lined with pearl gray satin; each would be
drawn by four grays with postilions in gray jackets and red velvet caps;
and the whole cavalcade was preceded and followed by outriders. Going
to reviews, however, the Marshal of course rode, and this enabled him
to make a grand display with his staff of _aides de camp_. M. Thiers
had a military household of which his cousin General Charlemagne was
the head; but this warrior never had much to do, and it was no part
of his business to receive visitors. Anybody who had business with M.
Thiers could see him without a letter of audience by simply sending up
a card to M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire. Marshal MacMahon, on the contrary,
was as inaccessible as any king. Visitors to the Elysée in his time
were passed from one resplendent officer to another till they entered
the smiling presence of Vicomte Emmanuel d’Harcourt, the President’s
secretary, and this was the _ne plus ultra_. Against journalists in
particular the Marshal’s doors were inexorably locked. So far as a man
of his good-natured temper could be said to hate anybody, the Duke of
Magenta hated persons connected with the press. For all that, he did not
object altogether to newspaper tattle, for whilst he read the _Journal
des Débats_ every evening from a feeling of duty, he perused the _Figaro_
every morning for his own pleasure.
The sumptuous ordinance of Marshal MacMahon’s household was rendered
necessary in a manner by the Shah of Persia’s visit to Paris in 1873.
It is a pity that M. Thiers was not in office when this constellated
savage came to ravish the courts of civilized Europe by his diamonds
and his haughtily brutish manners, for it would have been curious to
see the little man instructing the Shah, through an interpreter, as to
Persian history or the etymology of Oriental languages. In the Marshal,
however, Nasr-ed-Din found a host who exhibited just the right sort of
dignity; and all the hospitalities given to the Shah both at Versailles
and Paris—the torchlight procession of soldiers, the gala performance at
the opera, the banquet at the Galerie des Glaces—were carried out on a
scale that could not have been excelled if there had been an emperor on
the throne. In the course of the banquet at Versailles the Shah turned to
the Duchess of Magenta and asked her in a few words of French, which he
must have carefully rehearsed beforehand, why her husband did not set up
as emperor. The Duchess parried the question with a smile; but perhaps
the idea was not so far from her thoughts as she would have had people
imagine.
It was a really comical freak of fortune that brought M. Jules Grévy to
succeed Marshal MacMahon. The story goes that during the street fighting
of the Revolution of 1830, a law-student was kicked by one of the king’s
officers, for tearing down a copy of the ordinances placarded on a wall.
The officer was armed, the student was not; so the latter ran away and
lived to fight another day. For the officer, as it is said, was Patrice
de MacMahon, and the law-student Jules Grévy. M. Grévy is a man of talent
and great moral courage, but he owes his rise to an uncommon faculty for
holding his tongue at the right moment. “I kept silent, and it was grief
to me,” says the Psalmist. M. Grévy may have felt like other people at
times, an almost incomparable longing to say foolish things; but having
bridled his tongue he was accounted wiser than many who had spoken
wisely. Under the empire he practiced at the bar, continued to make
money, was elected in his turn _bâtonnier_, or chief bencher as we might
say, to the Order of Advocates, and in 1868 was returned to the Corps
Législatif by his old electors of the Jura—in which department he had by
this time acquired a pretty large landed estate. A neat, creaseless sort
of man, with a bald head, a shaven chin and closely-trimmed whiskers, he
looked eminently respectable. The only reprehensible things about him
were his hat and his hands. He always wore a wide-awake instead of the
orthodox chimney-pot, and he eschewed gloves. If his hands were cold he
put them into the pockets of his pantaloons. Some pretended to descry
astuteness in this contempt for the usages of civilized man, for the
wide-awake is more of a radical head-dress than a silk hat. But it never
occurred to M. Grévy at any time since he first achieved success, to
regulate his apparel, general conduct, or words, in view of pleasing the
Radicals.
The Assembly elected after the war at once chose M. Grévy for its
speaker, and he took up his abode in the Royal Palace, from which party
jealousies had debarred M. Thiers. But he did not alter his manner of
life one whit on that account. In Paris and Versailles he was to be
seen sauntering about the streets looking in at shop windows, dining in
restaurants, or sitting outside a café smoking a cigar and sipping iced
coffee out of a glass. He had a brougham, but would only use it when
obliged to go long distances. It often happened that setting out for a
drive he would alight from his carriage and order his coachman to follow,
and for hours the puzzled and disgusted coachman would drive at a walking
pace behind his indefatigable master, who took easy strides as if he were
not in the slightest hurry.
There is one point of resemblance between M. Grévy and the Marshal, for
M. Grévy is a keen sportsman; but in most other things the two differ,
though in sum M. Grévy differs more from M. Thiers than he does from
the Marshal. His manner of living at the Elysée is dignified without
ostentation. His servants do not wear gray and scarlet liveries; but the
arrangements of his household are more orderly than those of M. Thiers
could ever be. His servants in black know well how to keep intruders at
a distance. No mob of journalists, inventors and place hunters calls
to see M. Grévy in the morning. On the other hand, three or four times
a week a great number of deputies, artists, journalists and officers
may be seen going into the Elysée as freely as if they were entering a
club. They do not ask to see the President or the latter’s secretary, M.
Fourneret, but they make straight for a magnificent room on the ground
floor overlooking the garden, which has been converted into a fencing
saloon, and there they find M. Daniel Wilson, _le fils de la maison_.
All these _habitués_, who form the court of the Third Republic, keep
their masks, foils and flannels at the Elysée, and set to work fencing
with each other as if they were at Gâtechair’s or Paz’s. Presently a
door opens and the President walks in. For a moment the fencing stops,
the combatants all turn and salute with their foils, whilst the visitors
stand up. But, with a pleasant smile and a wave of the hand, M. Grévy
bids the jousters to go on, and then he walks round the room, saying
something to everybody, and inviting about half a dozen of the guests to
stay to breakfast.
M. Grévy has allowed his beard to grow of late, and he is almost always
attired in evening clothes, with the _moiré_ edge of his scarlet _cordon_
peeping over his waistcoat. But for the rest he is the same unassuming
man as ever, and he takes life very easily. Now and then the Cabinet
meets at the Elysée in the Salle des Souverains, and he presides over it.
It is worth observing that in this Salle there are the portraits of a
dozen sovereigns of the nineteenth century, including Queen Victoria, but
not a symbol of any kind to remind one that it is a Republican Government
that sits in this room. Even the master of the house has more in him of
the Constitutional Monarch than of the President. The Constitution has
conferred upon him large powers which he never uses; he seems to keep his
eye on the portrait of the English Queen whilst his ministers discourse.
Whatever papers are offered for his signature he signs, and then it is
_Bon jour, Messieurs; au revoir_; and while the ministers disperse the
President makes his way to his private apartments, where he finds his
daughter and his grandchild, in whose company he sometimes takes more
delight than in that of statesmen.
Now and then there is a dinner at the Elysée, twice a week at least there
are evening receptions, and about twice in the winter there are grand
balls. On all these occasions everything is done in the best possible
style, and the President discharges his functions of host with a serenity
which disarms all criticism. He says nothing much to anybody, but he
is the same to all. If by chance he falls into deep conversation with
any particular guest, nobody need suspect that state matters are being
discussed. The probabilities are that the President will be talking
about the next performance of his new breechloader at Mont-sous-Vaudrey.
Moreover, what makes M. Grévy more puzzling and interesting at once to
those who behold him so simple in his palace, is the knowledge which
all have, that when his time comes for leaving the Elysée he will walk
out of it as coolly as he went in, without wishing that his tenancy had
been longer, and certainly without doing anything to prolong it. His
only anxiety will be to see that his gun-case suffer no damage at the
door.—_Abridged from Temple Bar._
* * * * *
Thus God has willed
That man when fully skilled
Still gropes in twilight dim,
Encompassed all his hours
By fearfullest powers
Inflexible to him.
That so he may discern
His feebleness,
And e’en for earth’s success
To Him in wisdom turn,
Who holds for us the keys of either home,
Earth and the world to come.
—_Cardinal Newman._