At that moment Sadi Carnot was Minister of Finance. He had quite recently been the object of an ovation in the Chamber of Deputies when he had refused to exonerate M. Wilson from the payment of certain taxes which he owed to the State, and from which he had attempted to escape, thanks to his relationship with President Grévy. Carnot was the personification of that caste which is called in all the old memoirs of the eighteenth century, “les grands bourgeois de Paris.” His past career had been irreproachable, he had perhaps few friends, not being at all pliant, but he had a remarkable absence of enemies. His personal appearance was grave and solemn, not to say dull; he did not speak much, and his manners were always cold and distant. He made an excellent President, and had he not come to such a tragic end, it is probable that no one would ever have given him a thought after he had left office.
When he was murdered the Radical party had already secured a very large majority in the Chamber as well as in the Senate, and all thoughts as to the possibility of a Republic governed according to Conservative principles had long ago vanished. For a few brief months his successor, Casimir Périer, tried to fight against the tide of anarchism which was slowly rising, but after him no one attempted it, and the Republic fell entirely into the hands of M. Clemenceau and his friends.
CHAPTER XX
Leon Gambetta
Without being an intimate friend of Leon Gambetta, I used nevertheless to see him very often, and there existed between us one of those close relationships which sometimes draw together people whose opinions are totally different. I had first met him before the war, when he had not reached the fame which ultimately became his. I admired him more than I liked him, and to tell the truth he never was fully in sympathy with me, but it was impossible to see him often and not to be struck by his immense intelligence, and especially by the extraordinary powers of assimilation which distinguished him.
I have already mentioned that at the beginning of his political career he had little idea of social requirements, yet as soon as he found out his mistake he speedily made it his aim to acquire knowledge of the customs and manners current in the higher classes of society, and to make a special study of its code of etiquette. He realised quite well that sometimes trivial details bring about tremendous results, and that if a man wants to lead his country he must not begin by giving the public occasion to ridicule him. Besides, there lay at the bottom of the character of this extraordinary man a thirst for luxury, for power, for riches, for all the good things of the world, which alone would have been sufficient to make him study the refinements without which they become useless. Gambetta was an epicure in the fullest sense of that word, and the apparent carelessness which he had affected in outward appearance when he entered political life proceeded more from the desire to attract notice to himself than from anything else.
He wanted to impose his personality upon others, and not knowing how to do so, he tried to attain it by an apparent indifference to those outward things that rule the actions of ordinary men.
When once he was thrown into contact with good society, and especially after he had fallen under the influence of Madame Edmond Adam, or Juliette Adam as earlier I referred to her, his views of life changed considerably. He very soon became more refined in his tastes and habits, the equal in social deportment of those men and women whose judgments and opinions he had affected to despise in the days when he was a street orator who frequented the Café Procope and other meeting-places of the young Radical party who made it its business to attack the Empire at every opportunity.
The war sobered him, and his short sojourn in the responsible position of member of a government, such as it was, considerably changed his ideas. He at once perceived that it was easier to criticise men in power than to do their work. He was a great patriot in the sense that he put his country before anything else in the world, and that he was ready to sacrifice all that he held dear for its welfare, but he was no chauvinist, though so often accused of fomenting chauvinism in France. He had a very clear comprehension of every political situation, and also of the different ways in which it could be explained to the crowd, who generally see only the externals of questions without ever going into their details.
He wanted his country to regain its former power and fame, and he knew that this would be difficult if the idea of the humiliation it had endured was always put before its eyes, and if the wounds it had received were always made to smart. In a certain sense he was right, in another he was wrong, because France might have been more quiet now, and more prosperous even in the material sense of the word, if that idea of a revanche had not always been fostered, and had she been taught to reconcile herself to accomplished facts. In saying this I know that many among my readers will scream outright, but not being a Frenchman I may be allowed to express my opinion, that it would be to the advantage of a country for which I have always had the greatest sympathy if she began thinking more about herself and less about another war with Germany.
Gambetta exercised an unbounded influence on many people, and was the object of hatred to many others, but no one who met him could pass him by with indifference. If he had not been of a lazy disposition he might easily have become Prime Minister long before he did, and in this connection I must relate a story which probably will surprise more than one person. Gambetta, though he led his party, and though he was at one moment the most powerful man in France, showed always some reluctance when the question of his forming a government was raised. I ventured one day to ask him why. He replied to me that, now he understood the responsibility of the head of a Cabinet, and had studied European politics, he did not think himself up to the task, and also did not think that his presence in a ministry would be to the advantage of France, because his name had become synonymous with the principle of a war with Germany, for which he was but too well aware that his country was not prepared. “Later on,” he added, “my day may come, but I feel that now, though I may have a great deal more intelligence than some of the foreign ministers who lead the destinies of other countries, I haven’t their experience of affairs, nor their perfect knowledge of saying pretty things which they do not mean. This would make me appear inferior to them, and France must not be represented by a man to whom this reproach applies. France must hold her own, and something more, in the presence of Europe.”