On November 28, the Prussians occupied the city, one French officer, Commandant Vogel, falling at his post, which he refused to surrender. Count Lehndorff, appointed to be German Prefect of the Somme, came down upon the people heavily for war contributions, which were raised under the management of M. Dauphin, who had been the Imperialist mayor of the city ever since 1868, and who has of late years been a conspicuous Republican. As peace drew near, Amiens had to borrow five millions of francs, for which M. Dauphin agreed the city should pay M. Oppenheim of Brussels a commission of 10 per cent., and issued its obligations at 7½ per cent. for fifty years.

Naturally the Germans are not much liked at Amiens. Count de Chassepot thinks the Picards in general really want war with Germany. They turned out very generally during the contest. He commanded a battalion of National Guards who turned out in full force, not a man missing, though they were armed with wretched old muskets, and perfectly understood what that must lead to for them. On making his rounds very early in the morning, he found, in an advanced post, at a point of great danger, a picket, a sentinelle perdue, who proved to be one of the most respectable men in Amiens, the first president of the Upper Court of the city, nearly sixty years of age, doing his duty as a private soldier. 'In a hospital here,' said M. de Chassepot, 'I have six hundred patients. Every man of them is eager for another turn with the Germans.'

I was anxious to learn when and how it was that M. Goblet, just now the leading Republican personage of this part of France, began to appear conspicuously on the horizon. 'Not till Gambetta's new social strata began to appear,' I was told. This was in 1874. The finances of the city, left in a sad condition by the war, had been put into order by the municipal council which was elected during the German occupation in 1871; the public works had been restored, fine barracks built, and a sufficient number of school-houses. In return for those services the councillors who had rendered them were turned out in 1874, M. Dauphin among them, by the newly-organised 'Union républicaine.' This put M. Goblet at last into the council with his ally, M. Petit, the latter being the editor of a Radical journal, the Progrès de la Somme, which the military governor of Paris had ordered to be suppressed early in 1874, for its attacks on the then President, Marshal MacMahon. In 1876 M. Goblet became mayor of Amiens.

'The very next year, when the contest began between Gambetta as head of the Union of the Left and the President of the Republic, M. Goblet threw himself as ex-mayor of Amiens openly on the side of the ex-dictator, and made such speeches that he was dismissed from his office by the President in June 1877.'

'Did he like this?'

'No, he didn't like it at all. As Minister of the Interior, in more recent times, M. Goblet has knocked off the heads of a great number of mayors. But when his own head was knocked off in 1877, he loudly and scornfully denounced all municipal officers who would stoop to accept their positions from the national government.'

'In that you have the whole character of M. Goblet,' said another gentleman. 'I have known him from childhood. He is not a bad man, and, as you know, he is a man of ability, one of the very few able men to be found acting with President Carnot. But he is very vain, very ambitious, very excitable. As the associate of Petit, who is a rampant atheist, and of the anti-clericals generally, he has to pose as an unbeliever; but he is, in fact, nothing of the sort. His wife is a good woman, and he goes in great awe of her, which I think to his credit. I think if he felt his health suffering he would go to confession in a quiet way by night, just as the Gambetta prefect ran away from the Prussians in 1871. When the grand funeral of Admiral Courbet took place at Abbeville, and it was announced that Monseigneur Freppel would come and deliver the funeral service over that noble Christian sailor and patriot, the victim of Ferry, M. Goblet was in a dreadful state of mind. He said to me, "I think I shall not attend the funeral." "Pray why?" "Well, I wish to attend it, but I am sure that Bishop Freppel will say things offensive to me." "Pray accept my congratulations," I replied; "you really are in great luck that the first orator in France should take the trouble to come all the way to Picardy expressly to insult you on such an occasion!" So he thought better of it and attended, and his sensible wife afterwards thanked me for preventing her husband from behaving like a donkey.'

'An excellent woman, Madame Goblet!'

'Her husband owes her much, and he has some good friends. Comte de Chassepot prevented him from playing the stupid farce of a Roman son by sacrificing his father's funeral to a discussion on the laicisation of the schools; for, seeing what he had in his mind, Comte de Chassepot simply moved an adjournment of the council. His evil genius is M. Petit, now a senator, the present mayor of Amiens. I have caught M. Goblet offering the holy water with his hand behind my back to his wife; but M. Petit is an outspoken unbeliever, and a very type of the anti-christian demagogue.'

Upon this he told me a story which, as it is certainly typical of the proceedings taken against religion all over France by functionaries of M. Petit's way of thinking, I shall set down here.