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.