In 1834 Thiers married a beautiful young girl fresh from her pension, Mademoiselle Dosne, who was co-heiress with her mother and her father to a great fortune. Unhappily Thiers had fallen first in love with the mother; but he accepted the daughter instead. The early married life of Madame Thiers was saddened by her knowledge of this state of things. She was devoted to the interests of her husband, and watched over him as a mother might have watched over a child. She was an accomplished woman and most careful housekeeper, and had received an excellent education. She knew many languages, and turned all English or German documents required by her husband into French. She was also a charming hostess, but she lived under the shadow of a great sorrow.
When Thiers was to be married, he paid his father twelve thousand francs (about $2,500) for the legal parental consent which is necessary in a French marriage; but he was by no means anxious to have his irrepressible parent at his wedding. For three weeks before the event he hired all the places in all the stage-coaches running through Carpentras to Lyons.
In 1840 M. Thiers went out of office, in consequence of a dispute with England about the Eastern Question. The only charge that his enemies ever brought against him affecting his honor as a politician was that of employing the Jew Deutz to act the part of Judas towards the Duchesse de Berri; but for that he could plead that it solved a difficulty, and probably saved many lives.
During the Second Empire he kept much in retirement. At first he had thought that Prince Louis Napoleon, seeing in him the historian and panegyrist of the Great Emperor, would call him to his councils. But he was quite mistaken. He could not—nor would he—have served Louis Napoleon's turn as did such men as Persigny, Saint-Arnaud, De Maupas, and De Morny. When the coup d'état came, Thiers was imprisoned with the other deputies, the only favor allowed him being a bed, while the other deputies had no couch but the floor.
In 1869 there was a general election in France, which was carefully manipulated by the Government, in order that, if possible, no deputy might be sent to the Chamber who would provoke discussion on the changes in the Constitution submitted by the emperor. Thiers thought it time for him to re-enter public life and to speak out to his countrymen. At this time one of the gentlemen attached to the English embassy in Paris had a conversation with him. "For a man," he says, "of talents, learning, and experience, I never met one who impressed me as having so great an idea of his own self-importance;" but the visitor was at the same time impressed by his frankness and sincerity. Speaking of the Emperor Napoleon III., and foreseeing his downfall, he said: "What will succeed him, I know not. God grant it may not be the ruin of France!... For a long time I kept quiet. It was no use breaking one's head against the wall; but now we have revolution staring us in the face as an alternative with the Empire; and do you think I should be doing well or rightly by my fellow-citizens, were I to keep in the background? If I am wanted, I shall not fail." As he spoke, the fire in his eyes sparkled right through the glass of his spectacles, and all the time he talked, he was walking rapidly up and down. When greatly animated, he seemed even to grow taller and taller, so that on some great occasion a lady said of him to Charles Greville: "Did you know, Thiers is handsome! and is six feet high!"
When the fall of the Empire occurred, in September, 1870, M. Thiers was in Paris; but when the Committee of Defence was formed, he quitted the capital, before the arrival of the Prussians, to go from court to court,—to London, St. Petersburg, Vienna,—to implore the intervention of diplomacy, and to prove how essential to the balance of power in Europe was the preservation of France. His feeling was that France ought promptly to have made peace after Sedan, that her cause then was hopeless for the moment, and that by making the best terms she could, and by husbanding her resources, she might rise in her might at a future day. These views were not in the least shared by Gambetta, who believed—as, indeed, most Frenchmen and most foreigners believed in 1870—that a general uprising in France would be sufficient to crush the Prussians. Thiers knew better; his policy was to save France for herself and from herself at the same time.
LÉON GAMBETTA.
We already know the story. Gambetta escaped from Paris in a balloon, and joined Crémieux and Garnier-Pagès, the other two members of the Committee of Defence who were outside of Paris. At Tours they had set up a sort of government, and there, in virtue of being the War Minister of the Committee of Defence, Gambetta proceeded to take all power into his own hands, and to become dictator of masterless France. It was like a shipwreck in which, captain and officers being disabled, the command falls to the most able seaman. Gambetta had no legal right to govern France, but he governed it by right divine, as the only man who could govern it.
This is how a newspaper writer speaks—and justly—of Gambetta's government:—