In these modern days men live fast and forget fast; yet, since it was
barely twenty-six years ago, numbers among us must still vividly
remember the lurid autumn of 1870. Eastern and Northern France had been
deluged with French and German blood. During the month of fighting from
the 2nd of August to the 1st of September the regular armies of France
had suffered defeat on defeat, and were now blockaded in Metz or were
tramping from the catastrophe of Sedan to captivity in Germany. The
Empire in France had fallen like a house of cards; Napoleon the Third
was a prisoner of war in Cassel; the Empress and the ill-fated Prince
Imperial were forlorn exiles in England. To the Empire had succeeded,
at not even a day's notice--for in France a revolution is ever a
summary operation--the Government of National Defence with the
watchword of "War to the bitter end" rather than cede a foot of
territory or one stone of a fortress. The Germans made no delay. The
blood-tint had scarcely faded out of the waters of the Meuse, the
unburied dead of Sedan yet festered in the sun-heat, and the blackened
ruins of Bazeilles still smoked and stank, when their heads of columns
set forth on the march to Paris. The troops were full of ardour; but in
the Royal headquarters there was not a little disquietude. The old King
made a long stay in the old cathedral city of Rheims, while men all
over Europe were asking each other whether the catastrophe of Sedan had
not virtually ended the war and were hoping for the white dove of peace
to alight on the blood-stained land. But that happy consummation was
not yet to be. When King Wilhelm crossed the frontier he had proclaimed
that he warred not with the French nation but with its ruler. That
ruler was now his prisoner; but Wilhelm had for adversary now the
French nation, because it had taken up the quarrel which might have
gone with the _Déchéance_ and in effect had made it its own. In the
absence of overtures there was no alternative but to march on Paris.
But Bismarck, although he carried a blithe front, was far from
comfortable. He would fain have had peace--always on his own terms; but
the question with him was with whom could he negotiate, capable, in the
existing confusion, of furnishing adequate guarantees for the
fulfilment of conditions? That requisite he could not discern in the
self-constituted body which styled itself the Government of National
Defence, but of which he spoke as "the gentlemen of the pavement." He
had all the monarchical dislike and distrust of a republic, and before
the German army had invested Paris he already had begun to ponder as to
the possibility of reinstating the dethroned dynasty. Possibly indeed,
he had already felt the pulse of Marshal Bazaine on this subject.
It was on the 23rd of September when the Royal headquarters was at
Ferrières, Baron Rothschild's château on the east of Paris, that there
either presented himself to Bismarck an intriguant, or that the
Chancellor evoked for himself an instrument for whom the way was made
open to penetrate the beleaguerment of Metz and submit to Bazaine
certain considerations. In connection with this mission we heard a good
deal at the time of a mysterious "Mons. M." and an equally mysterious
"Mons. N." Both were myths: "M." and "N." were alike pseudonyms of the
real go-between, a certain Edmond Regnier who died in Paris on the 23rd
of January 1894, after a strange and varied career of which the episode
to be detailed in this article is the most remarkable. In a now very
rare pamphlet published by Regnier in November 1870, he describes
himself as a French landed proprietor with financial interests in
England yielding him an income of £800 per annum, and as having come to
England with his family in the end of August of that year in
consequence of the proximity of German troops to his French residence.
The painstaking compilers of the indictment against Bazaine give rather
a different account of the character and antecedents of M. Regnier.
Their information is that he received an imperfect education,
sufficiently proven by his extraordinary style and vicious orthography.
He studied, with little progress, law and medicine; later he took up
magnetism. He was curiously mixed up in the events of the revolution of
1848. He had some employment in Algeria as an assistant surgeon.
Returning to France he developed a quarry of paving-stone, and
afterwards married in England a wife who brought him a certain
competence. "Regnier," continues the Report, "is a sharp, audacious
fellow; his manners are vulgar--vain to excess he considers himself a
profound politician. Was he induced to throw himself into the midst of
events by one of the monomanias which are engendered by periods of
storm and revolution? Was he simply an intriguer, plying his trade? It
is difficult to tell. But however that may be, the established fact is
that we find him in England in September 1870 besieging with his
projects the _entourage_ of the Empress."
Regnier's siege of the forlorn colony at Hastings took the form of a
bombardment of letters, his principal victim being Madame Le Breton,
the lady-in-waiting of the Empress and the sister of the unfortunate
General Bourbaki, then in command of the Imperial Guard at Metz. He was
about to have his passport viséd by the German Ambassador in London,
rather an equivocal proceeding for a French subject; and on the 12th of
September he wrote thus to Madame Le Breton, desiring that the letter
should be communicated to Her Majesty:--
The Ambassador in London of the North German Confederation may possibly
say, "I think the King of Prussia would prefer treating for peace with
the Imperial Government rather than with the Republic." If so, I shall
start to-morrow for Wilhelmshöhe, after having paid a visit to the
Empress. The following are the propositions I intend to submit to the
Emperor: (1) That the Empress-Regent ought not to quit French
territory; (2) That the Imperial fleet _is_ French territory; (3) That
the fleet which greeted Her Majesty so enthusiastically on its
departure for the Baltic, or at least a portion of it, however small,
be taken by the Regent for her seat of government, thus enabling her to
go from one to another of the French ports where she can count upon the
largest number of adherents, and so prove that her government exists
both _de facto_ and _de jure_. Further, that the Empress-Regent issue
from the fleet four proclamations--viz. to foreign governments, to the
fleet, to the army, and to the French people.