“Hello!” said he, “how goes it?”
“Pray for us!” replied Odilon Barrot.
“Whew!” said Moskowa, “this is tragical!”
“What are we to do?” went on Odilon Barrot. “How are we to rebuild this old society in which everything is collapsing? Efforts to prop it up only help to bring it down. If you touch it, it topples over. Ah! pray for us!”
And he raised his eyes skywards.
I quitted the Elysee about 10 o’clock. As I was going the President said to me: “Wait a minute.” Then he went into an adjoining room and came out again a moment later with some papers which he placed in my hand, saying: “For Madame Victor Hugo.”
They were tickets of admission to the gallery of the Garde-Meuble for the review that is to be held to-day.
And as I went home I thought a good deal. I thought about this abrupt moving in, this trial of etiquette, this bourgeois-republican-imperial mixture, this surface of a deep, unfathomed quantity that to-day is called the President of the Republic, his entourage, the whole circumstances of his position. This man who can be, and is, addressed at one and the same time and from all sides at once as: prince, highness, monsieur, monseigneur and citizen, is not one of the least curious and characteristic factors of the situation.
Everything that is happening at this moment stamps its mark upon this personage who sticks at nothing to attain his ends.