Anglo-American Memories

by George W. Smalley

In the opinion of the King their time and his belonged to the public, and neither was to be wasted.

The whole truth about the late King's mission to Paris has, I think, never been told. It was not expedient that it should be told at the time, nor was it generally known. But until it is known full justice cannot be done to the King's courage and wisdom, or to his direct personal influence on the course of great affairs. For it was the man himself, the King himself, who won this great victory; not by diplomacy, not by statecraft, but because he was the man he was. I tell the story briefly, but the outlines will be enough.

When the King went to Paris to lay the foundations of a new friendship between France and England the feeling of the French against the English ran high. They had not forgotten nor forgiven the sympathies of England with Germany in 1870. They had not forgotten their own retreat from Egypt in 1882, and they scored up their own mistake against England. They had not forgotten Fashoda. The King was warned not to go. The French Government warned him. They could protect him, they said, against violence but not against insult. His own Government thought his visit, in the circumstances, ill-advised. Against all this he set his own conviction that the moment had come to make an effort for a better understanding between the two peoples. Danger did not deter him. For personal danger he cared nothing, and against the danger that any discourtesy to himself might embitter the two nations he set the hope of success. Like the statesman he was, he calculated forces and calculated wisely. He knew that the French, and especially the Parisians, had always liked him personally and he resolved to risk it.

Neither his courage nor his sagacity was at fault. At first things went badly. When he reached the railway station he was received in silence. When he drove from the station to the Embassy there was not a cheer. As he went about Paris the next day the attitude of the Parisians was still sullen, if not hostile. But the presence and personality of the King began after a time to soften hardness. Before nightfall a cheer or two had been heard in the streets, and next day all Paris was once more all smiles and applause. The King had conquered. He had won over the people. He had convinced Ministers. He had conciliated public opinion. He had laid a gentle hand upon old and still open wounds. He had shown himself for the first time a great instrument and messenger of peace, and had begun the work to which all the rest of his life was to be devoted.

Long before that ever-memorable visit, in France as in England, the Prince knew all sorts of people, and was popular with all, and did not mind being of service now and then to the people whom he did not know at all. Dining one night with the Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Bisaccia in the Faubourg St. Germain, he was asked by his host to go with him to the opening reception at the house of a banker in the Boulevard Haussmann. The banker had made a great fortune and had great social ambitions. The Prince knew very well why he was asked, but good-naturedly went. His going was chronicled and blazoned next day in every one of the seventy daily papers of Paris; and the banker's ambition was satisfied.

That was one incident. Another was his presence of course in the Prince of Wales period, at a supper given by the Figaro in its new offices. Celebrities of all sorts were there, and the Prince had to sit still while a too well-known actress from the Bouffes proposed the Queen's health. He raised his glass drank the toast, and said nothing. It was no fault of his. This also found its way into the French papers; not into the English. He had many friendships among artists, men of letters, soldiers, statesmen. Between the Prince and the late Marquis de Galliffet, the Marshal Ney of this last generation, there was a close tie; two chivalrous souls who understood each other from the beginning. He was often to be seen in studios—M. Detaille's, M. Rodin's, and many others. He knew the theatres in Paris as well as he knew the theatres in London; perhaps better. He went to the theatre primarily, I think, to be amused, and the theatres in Paris are more amusing than the theatres in London. The most patriotic Englishman may be content to admit that.

If the Prince had any politics abroad they were kept for his private use. To the French Republic, as Republic, and to successive Presidents of the Republic, he showed nothing but good-will. To French statesmen the same; to Gambetta, to Waldeck-Rousseau, and to M. Clemenceau, whose originalities and courage interested him long before that energetic individuality had become Prime Minister. They all liked the Prince, but not one of them ever guessed that from him when King would spring the new impulse of friendship which was to make France and England in all but name allies, and so impose peace upon the restless ambitions of another great sovereign. Gambetta, it is true, foretold a splendid future for the Prince, without explaining how it was to be splendid.

I think if you moved about among Englishmen one thing would impress you more than all others in their tributes to their late King. Not their full testimony to his greatness as King. Not their admiration of his capacities. Not their pride in him as a Ruler. Not their sense of the incalculable services he has rendered. Not their gratitude for these services, deep as that is. Not the Imperial spirit and the new value they set upon the Unity of the Empire. Not his virtues of any kind, though to all of them they bear witness.

The one thing which would impress you beyond all this is the affection they bore to him in his lifetime and now bear to his memory. He had known how to establish new relations between King and People, relations which had a tenderness and a beauty unknown before. They belonged to an earlier period of history. They were not quite patriarchal, as in really ancient days, but were like the relations which exist in an old family: ties of blood and of long descent. They did not exist in the last reign. There was immense respect for Queen Victoria; not much sentiment. She had withdrawn herself too much from general intercourse, and even from the ceremonial part of her royal duties. But this King, her son, went among the people, lived among them, lived for them, gave them his constant thought, won their hearts. His loss is to them a personal loss. They mourn for him as for a King, and they mourn for him as for a Friend who is gone. That seems to me the finest tribute of all.