Through M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, a typical French statesman of the philosophical cast, I secured an invitation to the solitary meeting which Gambetta, as candidate for Belleville, was permitted to hold prior to the actual election. He was, as I have said, under remand in the prosecution by which the Government had sought to silence his voice in the Chamber of Deputies. They could not prevent his making this one speech to his constituents, for the law gave him the right to do so, and the meeting was therefore one of great importance. Gambetta spoke in a large circus which was crowded to excess. He was received with great enthusiasm, but before his speech was over he had wound up his audience to a still higher pitch of passionate fervour. He struck me as being, in some respects, the greatest of all the orators I had ever heard. He had that indispensable qualification of the orator, a voice at once clear, powerful, and melodious. His magnificent physique gave weight to the gestures in which he indulged so freely, and which enabled him to conceal the infirmity from which he suffered—blindness of one eye—whilst at the same time allowing him always to keep his living eye fixed on the crowd before him.
I trembled for him when he began his great speech, for, unlike any English orator I ever heard, he did not warm to his subject gradually, taking care to make his audience accompany him step by step, but sprang in a moment to a height of passionate and tempestuous eloquence from which it seemed inevitable that he must quickly fall to an anti-climax. But no anticlimax came. For more than an hour he continued to pour forth a torrent of burning words that seemed to keep the vast multitude before him in a state of excitement and enthusiasm hardly to be exaggerated. Never before and never since have I witnessed such an effect as this produced by an orator, and though he lacked the stately and sonorous delivery of John Bright, and had no pretension to the intellectual persuasiveness of Mr. Gladstone, I have always felt, since hearing that speech, that Gambetta was the greatest orator to whom I ever listened.
It was rumoured that Gambetta was to be arrested on leaving the meeting, and he himself believed this rumour to be true. Yet this did not cause him to moderate his defiance of the Government and the reactionary powers. I remember he closed his great oration with words to the following effect: "I said in the Chamber not long ago, 'Clericalism, that is the enemy.' I predict now that when this election is over, I shall say, 'Clericalism, that is the vanquished.'" I was introduced to him after his speech. He was lying on a couch in a little green room at the back of the stage of the circus, panting, and fanning himself furiously with his pocket-handkerchief, whilst one of his friends administered to him copious draughts of champagne. He talked to me of the probability of his arrest on leaving the building, but seemed absolutely confident as to the future. The Government made no attempt, however, to interfere with him, and but a few weeks later he was the ruling power in France.
The day on which the first ballot was taken was, according to French custom, a Sunday. This was the day on which the quidnuncs had fixed as the probable date of the coup d'état. The Conservatives, on the other hand, pretended to believe that it would witness a fresh Communist rising, of which Belleville was to be the centre. It was a beautiful September day, and the excitement which possessed the whole French people was visibly reflected in the streets of Paris. I spent the whole day in driving from one polling station to another, accompanied by a friend who had resided for many years in the French capital. What struck one was the good order that was everywhere maintained, and the simplicity of the arrangements for voting. There was nothing like the tumult that would have been witnessed in any ordinary general election in England. It was obvious, too, that much less care was taken to preserve the secrecy of the ballot than is customary in this country.
As a newspaper correspondent I was freely admitted into every polling station. It was not until two o'clock in the afternoon that I reached Belleville, the reputed storm-centre. I had been warned that it would be dangerous to venture into that district in the handsome carriage provided for me by my friend. Yet when I climbed the steep hill leading to the polling station where the Maire presided, I found everything perfectly quiet. On entering the ballot-room, however, I was received in a somewhat curious fashion by the Maire. "So you have come at last to poor calumniated Belleville," he said. "You are the first journalist who has been here to-day, and yet for a week past every journal in Paris has declared that we were going to break out into a revolution. If they really believed it, why did they not come and see how we behaved ourselves? I call it infamous." The worthy Maire would hardly be pacified by the thought that I, at least, had not been guilty of staying away. But one could sympathise with his feelings, for in this spot, regarding which the wildest stories were current in the Parisian Press, dulness reigned supreme, and the polling station itself was as solemn and as silent as a Quakers' meeting house.
It was different at night, when the first news of the result of the election poured into Paris from the provinces, and it was seen that Gambetta had been a true prophet, after all, and that Clericalism, and all the other reactionary forces, had indeed been vanquished. Between ten o'clock and midnight the long line of the boulevards was crowded with the gayest multitude of men, women, and children that I ever met. They cheered, they shouted, they sang for joy. The Republic had triumphed, and France was saved. This was the burden of their song. Never did I see a more good-natured crowd; but things would have been different if that historic election had resulted otherwise. Paris was delighted and good-humoured because she had won.
Five years after that great victory for Gambetta and the Republic I found myself again in Paris on a cold January day. All the town was once more in the streets, but there was no gladness on the faces of the people who crowded the Place de la Concorde and the long avenue of the Rue de Rivoli. They had gathered together to witness the funeral of the hero of the fight of 1877. Gambetta, wounded, whether by accident or design none can tell, by his dearest friend, had died at the very zenith of his fame, and all France was prepared to render homage to one of her greatest sons. His body lay in state in the palace of the Chamber of Deputies, and I was fortunate enough to find myself standing at the foot of the coffin at the same moment as Victor Hugo. The great poet had his two grandchildren clinging to his hands, and as he stood there, explaining to the children something of Gambetta's story and achievements, I could not help feeling that there was a fine opening for a historical painter.
Gambetta's funeral was notable above everything else for the profusion of the display of flowers. Every department, every town and hamlet in France, had sent a deputation to swell the solemn procession, and every deputation brought a colossal funeral wreath. It was the first week in January, yet the air was heavy with the perfume of violets, lilies, and white lilac. It was computed at the time that twenty thousand pounds was expended on the flowers borne by the mourners, and I do not think that this calculation was exaggerated. Yet the funeral itself was extremely dull and unimpressive. Those long lines of men in evening dress impressed nobody. It was only when the picked troops went by in their glittering uniforms that any emotion was displayed by the watching crowd. For the rest, all our attention and admiration were given to the colossal wreaths and crowns and chaplets of which there was so barbaric a profusion, and the poor coffin itself passed almost unnoticed.
It was different a week later, when the statesman's real funeral took place. His father, a simple bourgeois of Provence, had agreed to allow this mock funeral to take place in Paris on condition that his son's body was subsequently given to him for burial among his own people at Nice. I was present also at this second funeral. There were no flowers and there was but little display; but behind the coffin in which the body of the ill-starred political leader lay walked his father, bare-headed, his white hair streaming in the breeze; and the women around me cried as he passed, "Ah, le pauvre papa!" and wiped the furtive tear from their eyes. If anything could have inspired me with a greater horror for the pomp of a public funeral, it would have been the contrast presented by this simple but pathetic ceremony at Nice with the gorgeous spectacle of a few days before in Paris.
In the spring of 1878 I became a member of the Reform Club, Mr. Forster and Mr. Childers being my sponsors. Then, as now, there was a black-balling clique in the club, and nobody could be absolutely certain of election; but my personal friends—among whom William Black was foremost—worked hard on my behalf, and secured my election in spite of the fact that I had a considerable number of black-balls. Personal influence, indeed, goes further than anything else in securing admission to a club like the Reform. It is a mistake to trust to the mere eminence of a man's proposer and seconder; unless he has some personal friend who is a popular member of the club, and who will take the trouble to exert himself on the day of the election, the mere eminence of his proposer and seconder will not save him. One of the traditions of the Reform Club relates to George Augustus Sala. When that well-known writer was proposed for election, the taint of Bohemianism still clung to him, and it was very doubtful whether he would pass the ordeal of the ballot. Thackeray, with whom Sala had been associated in the early days of the Cornhill Magazine, believed that election to a club like the Reform would be the salvation of the younger man; and on the day when the ballot took place he remained in the saloon at the head of the steps for four mortal hours, asking every member as he entered to vote for Sala as a personal favour to himself. In this way he defeated the black-balling clique, and secured Sala's admittance to society of a somewhat graver type than that to which he had heretofore been accustomed.