2. M. Armand Fallières. Morocco and the Floods
A day or two ago, in the Presidential palace of the Élysée, M. Armand Fallières celebrated his seventy-second birthday. I do not know whether there were gifts, flowers, a birthday cake, champagne and speeches: but, according to an incorrigible gossip in a boulevard newspaper, M. le Président stated that this was the blithest birthday he had known for seven years. “I breathe again,” he is reported to have said. “This time next year, I shall pass my anniversary, not in a frock coat and varnished boots, but in a dressing-gown and carpet slippers.”
I believe this is the “mood” that would obsess anyone who had passed seven years of his life as President of the French Republic. It was M. Émile Loubet’s mood. Nothing in this world would have induced him to accept a second Septennat; and to-day M. Loubet lives in a quiet little flat on the Rive Gauche, where (in his slippers) he has often exclaimed: “Ce pauvre Fallières!” And then gone to bed tranquilly and comfortably; whilst his successor at the Élysée was in consultation with the Minister of Foreign Affairs over the miseries of Morocco. President Casimir-Périer endured just six months of Presidency. “On m’embête; je m’en vais,” said he. He was too elegant to care for slippers. But a day or two after his resignation he was discovered stretched in an easy-chair in the garden of a Bois de Boulogne restaurant, in white duck trousers. “I breathe again,” he stated—just as President Fallières has now declared on his seventy-second birthday.
Thus it would miraculously appear that one stops breathing upon being appointed President of the French Republic, and doesn’t regain one’s breath until one’s martyrdom at the Élysée has expired. Certain it is that the President of the French Republic, living as he does in the most amazing city in the world, must experience and endure amazing tribulations and adventures. President Loubet went through the Dreyfus Affair; President Fallières through the Floods. Up and down the Seine in a barge sailed M. Fallières, and because of his bulk and lest the barge might capsize, the boatmen had to implore M. le Président not to move. He was a heroic, but not a dignified, figure as he sat, massive and motionless, in that barge. Nor could he ever look other than bulky in the Presidential carriage (which, when he entered it, nearly tilted over) as he drove forth to meet foreign sovereigns, or to attend the great military review or gala performances at the Français and Opéra. That vast bulk has always been against him. Not a Parisian that has not commented on it, not an illustrated newspaper that has not depicted it, not a theatrical revue that has not exaggerated it.
Although M. Armand Fallières has left Paris for his country residence at Rambouillet, the French “Presidential Holiday” has not yet begun. To start with, Rambouillet is a State château, almost another Élysée, in that Cabinet meetings are held there, the Ministers motoring down from Paris with their portfolios and wearing their official, inscrutable expressions. Outside in the park, flowers, birds, winding paths, shady trees, hidden, tranquil corners; but within the Council Chamber, the old, eternal complications and miseries of politics.
No doubt, when the Ministers have left, M. le Président seeks to lead the simple, the ordinary life. But, as Rambouillet is a State residence, flunkeys abound, and not only gardeners, but detectives, haunt the park. Impossible, to put it vulgarly, to be “on one’s own.” Worse than that, how the majestic, powdered flunkeys wink and grin when M. Armand Fallières has turned his back upon them in his slippers, alpaca jacket and vast gardening hat! For M. le Président is burly, with a formidable embonpoint; and when he enters a carriage, it tilts; and when he steps into a rowing boat, it very nearly capsizes, and when——
“I am the most inelegant of Presidents,” M. Armand Fallières himself has admitted. “Heavens, how my servants despise me!”
At Rambouillet M. Fallières’ predecessor, most admirable M. Loubet, also aroused the disdain of the flunkeys by reason of his simplicity—and his real holiday did not begin until he had reached his native town of Montélimar, where he was treated—and liked to be treated—as un enfant du pays—a son of the soil. Because Montélimar is famous for its nougat, M. Loubet was dubbed by fierce, lurid old Henri Rochefort—“Nougat the First.” But Republican France liked to hear of her President hobnobbing with the people of Montélimar and gossiping with the peasantry of neighbouring villages, and leading forth on his arm a little brown-faced and wrinkled old lady, in the dress and cap of a peasant woman—his mother.
But those are all memories. We have nothing to do with Montélimar; we are only concerned with the wine-growing districts of Loupillon, where M. Fallières (released from official Rambouillet) will be amiable, pottering and peering about amidst his vineyards in a few days. Behold, just as last year, M. le Président, not only in slippers, but in his shirt-sleeves; and behold, too, the peasantry stretched over hedges and perched high up in trees, that they may view the burly Chief of the State inspecting and admiring his grapes. They are his hobby, his pride, his exquisite joy: and yet it is notorious that they are a very sour, a very inferior, one might almost say, a very terrible little grape.
Ask the Loupillon peasants and they will exclaim: “It is extraordinary, it is unheard-of that a Son of this Soil, and a President of the President, should produce such a grape! Look at it! Cré nom d’un nom, what a sad little thing!”
Ask those privileged, intimate friends who lunch en famille at the Élysée, and they will cry: “Ah, the white wine of Fallières! Ah, the Presidential grape from Loupillon! It makes one shudder to mention it.”
But, M. le Président ignores these criticisms and mockeries. After Morocco and Proportional Representation, his dear little grapes! In spite of their smallness, their sourness, how he loves them!
Six weeks of his grapes—then the Élysée, Morocco, once again; and then, in February next, nothing but holidays for the Chief of the State. For February will see the end of M. Fallières’ seven years’ Presidency, and, like his predecessor, he will not seek re-election. Like M. Loubet, too, his next Paris residence will be a comfortable, bourgeois third-floor appartement—its site, the Boulevard St Germain, within a few minutes’ walk of M. Émile Loubet’s flat in the rue Dante. No flunkeys, no detectives in plain clothes—and no telephone. Moreover, no pianolas, no gramophones, no parrots, no poodles, for M. Fallières (who owns the building of flats in which he has decided to reside) has warned his tenants that no such nuisance will be tolerated when he moves to his new quarters. The simple, the ordinary life! Morocco, etc., etc., etc.—only memories. Never ceremonious banquets, with Château Yquem, and Morton Rothschild, and Lafite, and the finest of Extra Secs. Modest luncheons and dinners en famille. And for wine, nothing but the sour, little white grape of Loupillon.
It has been said that the best rulers are those who feel an extreme disinclination to rule, and who only consent to accept authority under a strong sense of duty. If this be true, then unquestionably M. Émile Loubet and M. Armand Fallières were good and loyal presidents, who, without personal ambition and at the cost of their own tastes, as well as of their own interests, served the Republic—for seven years, each of them—to the very best of their knowledge and power. And upon this question of power one has to keep in mind that M. le Président, though he holds the title of Chief of the State, is very much in the hands of his ministers. He forms ministries? Yes; but here, too, it is not always the most competent and disinterested men, in France particularly, who are most eager for office. Nothing can be more unjust than to make admirable M. Émile Loubet, excellent M. Armand Fallières, responsible for everything that happened, and especially for everything that went wrong, during the two periods of seven years these patriotic French citizens devoted to the service of their country.
The difficulties of M. le Président, the impertinent disregard of his rank in the State shown by the very men he has called to power, is a favourite theme of playwrights and novelists. In L’Habit Vert, the brilliant, satirical comedy by MM. de Flers and de Caillavet, just produced at the Variétés theatre, a Cabinet Minister submits an important political telegram for the President’s official approbation. “Yes, that will do; send it off immediately,” says M. le Président. “That’s all right; it was sent half-an-hour ago,” replies the Minister. Then, in that famous comedy, Le Roi, which so rejoiced the heart of King Edward the Seventh, the French Premier to one of his colleagues: “Cormeau, the Minister of Commerce, has just resigned. Nearly a Ministerial Crisis, but we have escaped it. Telephone the name of Cormeau’s successor, and that all is well, to the Press, the Chamber, the Senate, the Palace of Justice, and—ah yes, I forgot—to the President of the Republic.”
On the top of all this, M. le Président, although practically in the hands of Messieurs les Ministres, is held responsible by the public for the possible blunders and follies and sins of the Cabinet. Salary, £40,000 a year, with all kinds of substantial “perquisites.” Residences: the Palace of the Élysée and the Château de Rambouillet. Ironical official title: Chief of the State. Result: Morocco, Floods, or the Dreyfus Affair, helplessness and worry, collapse of the respiratory organ. But, thank heaven! M. le Président recovereth his breath when the time comes for another to take his place: and he himself may drift into a dressing-gown and carpet slippers and exclaim of his successor, by the tranquil, unofficial fireside: “Ce pauvre——!” Successor at the Élysée. Who will he be? Of course, after the lofty and admirable statesmanship he has exhibited throughout the Balkan conflict, M. Poincaré, the Prime Minister, is hailed by the man in the street as the future Chief of the State? But elegant M. Paul Deschanel, of the French Academy, President of the Chamber of Deputies, and a would-be President of the Republic for the last fourteen years, is also mentioned; and impetuous, despotic, sallow-faced M. Georges Clemenceau, in spite of his recent delirious ups and downs, has hosts of followers. Solid M. Ribot is stated to be an eager candidate. M. Léon Bourgeois (who did such fine work at The Hague Peace Conference) would probably be elected, were there a Madame Bourgeois to “receive” officially at the Élysée. After that, M. Delcassé, M. Lépine, M. Briand, Madame Sarah Bernhardt, M. Dranem the comic singer, “Monte Carlo Wells.” But I am anticipating events. I am also in peril of appearing incoherent; so let me hasten to declare that the last-named candidates for the Presidency of the Third Republic are but the gay “selections” of that inveterate gossip in a certain boulevard newspaper. And, that made clear, let us for the moment leave the emptiness of political ambition and share in the dressing-gown and carpet-slipper mood of M. Armand Fallières.