LXVIII
From Tours, chief town of the Department of the Indre et Loire, 120 miles southwest of Paris as the crow flies, where Cremieux, Minister of Justice, and rather too doddery to be of efficiency at this crisis, had established the Administrative of the Provisional Government of the new French Republic;—whither M. Leon Gambetta, Minister of the Interior, Member of the Board of National Defense, had recently betaken himself, escaping from the besieged capital to Montdidier as a passenger in the car of a balloon—whither the veteran Garibaldi had now arrived to offer his services in the cause of Liberty—from Tours had come the famous diplomat and man of letters, contemptuously dubbed "Professor" by Count Bismarck, with the object of carrying out the peace negotiations in whose conduct the tragic patriarch Favre had broken down.
You saw the famous Minister and author of the Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire, as a little, stocky, black-clad old gentleman with a square gray head, round, clean-shaven face, and bright, round eyes, looking through gold-rimmed spectacles.... Above all, a patriot, heart and soul devoted to France, the position of this famous French statesman of seventy-five, newly returned, empty of all but fair words and vain courtesies, from a pilgrimage to the Courts of various neutral Powers, was horrible and painful beyond words.
Sad, distracted, anxious little gentleman, charged with the mission of obtaining those needed terms of peace, or at least an armistice from the conqueror upon the threshold, can you see him, in the shadow of the magnificent Temple erected by the Sun King, toiling and moiling with his secretary, the younger M. Remusat, in preparation for those anguish-fraught interviews with the German Chancellor.
The tables of his sitting-room at the Hôtel des Réservoirs were piled with books and papers—papers covered with abstruse calculations dealing with the most urgent need—the provisioning of Paris—papers dealing with the question of the Elections—papers dealing with the General Census—papers of every imaginable kind. And with these, from dawn till midnight, the little, grief-worn man wrestled while the Tinsel Rabble and their staffs of German officers reveled in the dining-saloons, and trampled and shouted and clanked and jingled up and down the corridors, and in and out of the bedrooms; and the roar of the guns from the forts of the beleaguered city shook the windows from time to time.
Now and then he would lie back exhausted in his chair, or lie down and sleep, if sleep ever visited him. He took his frugal meals in a private cabinet opening out of the great dining-hall of the restaurant. Since the thirtieth of October he had been engaged in this wise, save when, having been first compelled to apply to Count Bismarck for a pass and a military safe-conduct, he would meet and confer with Favre, or one of his other colleagues, at some chosen spot without the walls of the beleaguered capital.
Only the previous day he had trundled down in a little, shaky, hired brougham to the half-ruined and wholly deserted suburb of Sèvres, preceded by an officer of Uhlans with a White Flag on a pole.
Day after day the little brougham had drawn up before the modest house in the Rue de Provence, and the little gentleman, whose head seemed to whiten perceptibly, had stepped out with his portfolio under his arm, as now. Day after day the Chancery footmen would open the door to him, and Madame Charles Tessier, hovering in the background, would drop the representative of suffering France her lowest curtsey, and sometimes gain a brief word with his unfailing bow and smile. To-day, as Major von Keudell appeared in the doorway of the drawing-room—the Chancellor being closeted in his private interviewing-room upstairs with the Republican Mayor of Versailles—the little gentleman said simply, offering his hand to the eccentric-looking person in the cap with lappets and the white shawl:
"The sympathy that is expressed in looks and by silence can be very eloquent and very touching. From my heart I thank you for yours, Madame!"
And as she had burst out sobbing and kissed the hand, he had drawn it away with a murmured protest, and had passed on into the drawing-room where Von Keudell was to hold him in conversation until the Mayor had been polished off.