THE COURTS OF THREE PRESIDENTS.
THIERS, MACMAHON, GRÉVY.
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.