'This handsome youth had in 1868 just become notorious for his grossly impertinent and indecent reply to the President of the Tribunal at the trial of Prince Peter Bonaparte for shooting Victor Noir. Grousset was the principal witness, and when asked the usual first question of French law, "Witness, are you the husband, wife, father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, ascendant or descendant, or any relation of the prisoner?" replied: "It is impossible to say; Madame Letitia was not particular"—alluding to the mother of Napoleon the Great.
'Grousset had conducted the "Foreign Affairs" of the Commune of Paris, and had been so polite to the representatives of the Embassies that George Sheffield, the private secretary to Lord Lyons, who conducted British affairs at Paris, used to declare that of all the many French Governments he had known the Commune was the only one that knew how to behave itself in society….'
But this feeling was not universal.
'Mrs. Wodehouse (formerly Minnie King, an American beauty, and
afterwards Lady Anglesey) asked me to breakfast with her to meet
Grousset.' (She was receiving the refugee at the request of Madame
Novikoff.)
'When her butler, who was an old French gendarme, found who was coming to breakfast, he refused to serve, and a hired waiter had to be called in, the old man saying that he had had charge of Grousset to convey him from Versailles to the hulks before the Communalists had been sent to New Caledonia, and that Grousset had been so impertinent to him that nothing would induce him to wait upon him as a servant.
'This clever boy of all the persons deeply compromised in the Commune was, with one exception, the one who made his peace most rapidly with French society, and in 1890 he was received by the President of the Republic officially as elected Director of the federation of all the Gymnastic Societies of France.' [Footnote: It was perhaps on account of his youthful appearance that Pascal Grousset was described as a boy. He was only two years younger than Sir Charles, and was twenty- six at the time of the Commune. He was later, for twenty years, one of the Deputies for Paris.]
II.
Sir Charles in this Session contributed to the gaiety of Parliament by his motion upon unreformed Borough Corporations, and, said the newspapers, "kept the House of Commons in a roar."
'But the fact was that the subject was so funny that it was impossible to make a speech about it which would not have been amusing, and Randolph Churchill, who replied to me, was funnier than I was, though he was not equally regardful of the truth.'
'One of the Corporations which I had attacked was that of Woodstock, and Randolph Churchill brought the Prince of Wales down to the House to hear his defence of his constituency. I had said in my speech that the Mayor of Woodstock had been lately fined by his own Bench, he being a publican, for breaking the law in a house the property of the Corporation, and that he had said on that occasion in public court, after hearing the evidence of the police: "I have always had a high respect for the police, but in future I shall have none." Randolph Churchill, answering me, said that I had slightly mistaken the Mayor's words, and that what he had really said was: "I have always had a high respect for the police, but in future I shall have more." After this debate was over, Randolph came up to me outside, and said: "I was terrified lest you should have heard anything to-day, but I see you have not." I said: "What?" He said: "He was fined again yesterday."'