Chapter 15

IN THE PAS-DE-CALAIS

CALAIS

The men who, in 1790, brought about the formal division of France into departments, no doubt thereby facilitated the ephemeral transformation, in September 1792, of the ancient French monarchy into a French republic, 'one and indivisible.' But they also put their improvised republic thereby at the mercy of the marvellous Italian who blew its flimsy framework into shreds with his cannon in October 1795.

In working out what George Sand calls 'the great practical joke' of the First Consulate, and the formidable reality of the Empire, Napoleon found, ready-fashioned to his hand and undamaged by the republican tinkers, a system of administration essentially despotic. This system did for him what Charlemagne did for himself when he got rid of the tribal dukes of the Merovingian epoch, and, as Gneist and Sir Robert Morier have shown, gathered into his own control the four unities which make up the unity of the State--the military, the police, the judiciary, and the finances. The counts of Charlemagne, removable at his pleasure, with no root in their _comitatus_ save his sovereign will, were the true prototypes of the modern French prefect. If the old provinces of France, which had a local life, organisation, and spirit of their own, had been taken as the units of government in 1790, the monarchy perhaps might hardly have been abolished in 1792 by a Convention so headlong and tumultuous that for one day it actually forgot, after abolishing the monarchy, to establish any government in its place.

But if a republic had been founded through the action of the provinces of France, it would probably have been harder for Napoleon to make an end of it, than it was for Charlemagne to dispense with the recognition of local rights to which the Merovingian kings had submitted in the appointment of their hereditary _subreguli_, from among the local magnates of the shires. This, it seems to me, may be inferred from the fact, admitted on all hands in France, that the departments remain to-day what they were at first--mere administrative divisions which have taken no hold on the feelings and sympathies of the people, while the 'local patriotism' of the provinces is still a vivid reality.

Frenchmen are still Gascons and Provençals, Bretons and Normans, Burgundians and Picards, and no country in the world is richer than France in local histories and chronicles. But so late as 1877 the local history of the Department of the Pas-de-Calais, in which I am now writing, could be described as 'unique in France,' and this local history is really a history, not of the department at all, but of the two important and interesting provinces of which it consists--Artois, namely, and the Boulonnais--each of which still preserves, after nearly a century, its own distinctive character in the physiognomy of the people, in their habits, their turn of mind, and their traditions. The attempt to fuse them into a new political entity has completely failed. No more has, apparently, come of it, locally, than would have come of an attempt to fuse Massachusetts and Rhode Island into a Department of Martha's Vineyard, or Kent and Sussex into a Department of New Haven. Possibly even less. For Artois and the Boulonnais never passed definitely under the French crown until the middle of the seventeenth century. Even Calais, after the Duke of Guise had wrested it from England, was conquered for Spain by the Archduke Albert, and a smiling little agricultural commune alone now commemorates, in its name of Thérouanne, the once great and flourishing episcopal capital of Morinia in which Clodion began the French monarchy, and which was mercilessly razed to the ground and abolished from off the face of the earth, little more than three hundred years ago, by the victorious emperor Charles the Fifth.

Of this artificial department Calais is neither the chief town nor capital. It has scarcely a third of the population of Boulogne, and not much more than half the population of Arras, which is the seat of the préfecture; and though it is by no means so dreary and uninteresting a place as the casual traveller, seeing only the landing-pier, and the new station, which bears the name of the heroic Eustache de St.-Pierre, is apt to take it to be, it cannot compare, in point of beauty and interest, either with Boulogne or with Arras. But as the French head of the great historic ferry between England and the Continent, and as the seat of sundry thriving factories, it is both a busy and prosperous town. I found its streets swarming with people and its houses a flutter of flags and banners, when I came to it on June 3, 1889, to see the 'inauguration,' by President Carnot, of the works on which the French Government has been spending millions of francs during the past decade, with an eye to deepening and enlarging the harbour. The weather was magnificent. Several men-of-war of the Channel squadron lay off the port. Excursion steamers came in from England, bringing members of Parliament and miscellaneous British subjects, of the sort once indignantly denounced to me by the little old verger of a Midland cathedral as 'them terrible trippers.' The active and good-natured railway porters at the station were worn out with throngs of travellers pouring in from all the country round about. There was much animation everywhere, but nowhere any enthusiasm, though Calais, I suppose, must be a republican town, as at the election of a deputy, held here in 1886, the Government candidate, M. Camescasse, received 5,196 votes against 2,233 given to his Conservative opponent, M. Labitte. I am told, too, there is a good deal of Socialism among the factory workmen; and I can see that the place is full of _cabarets_ and _débits_, flowing not only with light beer and sour wine, but with spirits of a sort to make the consumers more clamorous about the rights than solicitous about the duties of man.

I heard, in the course of the day, that at some points in his progress, the President was received with cries of 'Vive Boulanger!' but nothing of this sort passed under my own observation. What most struck me was that his presence appeared to be not an event at all, but merely an incident of a general holiday. Nor did the people seem to care much about the real event of the day, the 'inauguration' of the perfected port. Perhaps they knew that the port is not yet perfected. Those of them who went down to the pier at least knew, this--for a steamer of no very great size, the St.-André, I believe, trying to come in, grounded on the sand, and lay there thumping herself heavily for I know not how long. I heard this mishap described with much glee by a group of Boulonnais in the main street. 'Ah bah!' said one of them exultingly, 'they may spend what they like, Calais will never be Boulogne!'

I breakfasted with a friend who lives much on a property he has in Picardy, and who came down to Calais to meet me. When I first knew him, years ago, he was a republican of the type of Cavaignac and a bitter enemy of the Empire, some of his kinsfolk in the Gironde having been ill-treated during the persecution which raged against the republicans and the royalists alike, in and around Bordeaux, after the _coup d'état_ of the Prince President. Of later years he has been growing indifferent to public affairs, and is now, I think, simply a pessimist, whom nothing but a foreign invasion of France is likely to rouse into activity again.

'What is the matter with the people here?' I asked him. 'Are they Boulangists, or do they simply dislike Carnot?'

'No!' he replied, 'I don't think they care much about Boulanger, and why should they dislike Carnot? There is nothing in him to like or to dislike. He is not a personality. He is only a functionary, and Frenchmen care nothing about functionaries. They know that this is an electoral job, and they care nothing about it, one way or the other.'

'But I saw an inscription on a banner in one of the streets,' I said, 'to this effect: "Calais always faithful to the Carnots!" Does that mean that the Carnots are of this country?'

'Not at all! The grandfather of Carnot was born in Burgundy somewhere. He married a young lady of St.-Omer, and in that way came to be sent by the Pas-de-Calais to the "Legislative" and the Convention. The inscription is amusing though,' he added, 'for, like these other inscriptions reciting the names of Lazare Carnot, and Hippolyte Carnot, and Sadi Carnot, it shows how hard some people are trying to work the President up into a personality. They want to make him out the heir of a dynasty--Carnot III.!'

'That is not a very republican way of looking at a President,' I observed.

'Possibly not, but it is a very French way of looking at one! We should be the most monarchical people in Europe if we were not the most anarchical. Give a public man a legend and a grandfather, and he can go a long way with us. I don't know that the grandfather will do without the legend, even when, as in this case, the grandfather has a legend of his own.'

'Is that legend of grandfather Carnot very strong in this region?' I asked.

'Neither in this region nor anywhere else,' he replied. 'I think it is very foolish of the managers in Paris to provoke comparisons by sending a political bagman to Germany to bring back the ashes of Papa Victory, as the Prince de Joinville brought back the dead Emperor from St. Helena. Carnot I., after all, was simply a good war minister, who loomed into greatness only in comparison with the rogue Pache and the phenomenal booby Bouchotte who preceded him. He was certainly no better than his successor Pétiet, and it was Pétiet, not he, who finally "organised victory" by sending Moreau to the Rhine, and Bonaparte to Italy. Napoleon, who knew them both, made Pétiet governor of Lombardy, and chose him, not Carnot, to organise the great camp at Boulogne. When Pétiet died, not long after Austerlitz, Napoleon gave him a much grander funeral in the Pantheon than can be got up now for the grandfather of Carnot. Most people have forgotten Pétiet, and it is a blunder to remind them of him. But this is a government of blunderers. See what trouble the Ferrys and the Freycinets are taking to unmake the legend Clémenceau made for Boulanger! Do what they may, that black horse is worth more to Boulanger to-day than Carnot's grandfather ever will be to Carnot III.'

'But has Carnot III. no value of his own? Has he not shown more firmness than people expected of him when this Boulangist business began?'

'Carnot III. is simply the firm-name of Ferry and De Freycinet. I am not fond of the scurrilities of Rochefort, as you know, but he sometimes hits the nail on the head very hard, as he did when, on the day after that comedy of the presidential election, he said "the fact that a man, if you ask him to dinner, will not put your spoons into his pocket is not a sufficient reason for making him president of a republic." Only,' he added reflectively, 'that was not quite their reason for making him president. It was that they thought he would let other people pocket the spoons.'

This reminded me of what used to be said of Secretary Seward by his enemies, that he was 'honest enough himself, but cared nothing about honesty in other people.'

'I don't mean that exactly,' said my friend. 'What I mean is, that Carnot III. is not clever enough to know whether the people around him are or are not honest. His grandfather was. Carnot I. would have cut a great figure in our present Senate, and in the party of the "sick at heart"--the respectable gentlemen, I mean, who are always consenting, under the stress of some "reason of State," to vote for one or another piece of rascality, though it makes them "sick at heart" to do so. Carnot I. voted in this way for the murder of Louis XVI., and he takes pains to tell us that all his colleagues in the Convention who voted for it did so in dread of the mob in the galleries. Just in the same way he was sharp enough to join Napoleon during the Hundred Days, because he saw that his best chance of saving his own head and staying in France was to keep out the Bourbons. This Carnot III. is, I dare say, more honest and less calculating--for he is certainly more dull--than his grandfather. Perhaps he may turn out to be the Louis XVI. of the Republic.'

How much has actually been spent on the works here to make Calais a great seaport, it is not easy to ascertain; but the lowest estimates stated to me seem to be quite out of proportion with the results actually achieved.

My conversation on this point with my friend from Picardy is worth recording.

'Ten years ago,' he said, 'the amount to be spent on Calais was set down at eleven millions of francs. I feel quite sure that at least twice this sum has been actually spent here since the work began in 1881.'

'Why do you feel sure of this?'

'Because twice the first estimate has been avowedly spent everywhere in France on the whole scheme. Calais alone figures this year in the budget for sixteen millions and a half! You were in France, were you not, in 1880, and you must surely remember the songs that used to be sung in the streets:--

"C'est Léon Say, c'est Freycinet, C'est Freycinet, c'est Léon Say."

'These two men, both of them men of business, both financiers (though the "white mouse"[1] is a bit of a visionary) and both men of ability, deliberately adopted, in 1879, after a single conversation with Gambetta, a scheme improvised by him, who was neither a man of business nor a financier, but a declamatory Bohemian, for keeping up the war expenditure by committing France to the creation of a complete "commercial outfit."

[1] This is the popular nickname of M. de Freycinet.

'The Republicans won the elections in 1877 by frightening France into a belief that a Conservative victory at the polls would be followed by a new German invasion. I am not sure, mind you, that this was an idle scare. For under the Conservative administration of our affairs we had cleared off in six years' time the frightful burdens imposed upon us by the war, by the senseless Parisian revolution of 1870, and by the Communist insurrection of 1871; and it is likely enough that Bismarck may have made up his mind to attack us if he saw us persist in a sane and sensible public policy. Be that as it may, Gambetta, Léon Say, and Freycinet, between them, did his work for him by plunging the country back into the financial morass from which the Conservatives had rescued it. They carried the new chamber with them into Gambetta's scheme for doing systematically and successfully what had been clumsily attempted in the Ateliers Nationaux of 1848. France was to be made a republic by spending nearly the amount of the German War indemnity on the construction of railways, canals, and ports all over the country. The sum stated in the outset was four thousand five hundred millions of francs--rather a pretty penny you must see!'

'I remember it,' I replied, 'and I remember thinking, when the scheme was first developed, that the adoption of it was a wonderful evidence of the financial vigour and vitality of France.'

'Thank you,' he replied rather bitterly. 'It was just such a proof of vigour and vitality that Dr. Sangrado used to get from his patients with his lancet. It was a great political manoeuvre, no doubt, and it commended itself to all the hungry politicians in France so promptly and so warmly, that within three years' time, in 1882, M. Tirard, who was then Finance Minister, and who is now on the box of the Carnot coach, had to admit that the expenditure then contemplated in carrying out this great idea could not possibly fall short of nine thousand one hundred and fifty millions of francs! This, observe, was seven years ago. To-day it has swelled, at the least, into eleven and perhaps to twelve thousand millions of francs. Why not? Gambetta, Léon Say, and Freycinet proclaimed the millennium of civil engineers and local candidates. What becomes of equality and fraternity if the smallest hamlet in the recesses of the Jura is not as much entitled to a local railway at the public expense as the largest port on the Bay of Biscay? Once let it be understood that the Government means to spend ten thousand millions on public works, and all the voters are ready to believe the Government has found the philosopher's stone. Nobody but the tax-gatherer will ever make them understand where the money comes from. And between the tax-gatherer and the taxpayer, a truly clever finance minister can always interpose successfully, for a certain length of time, the anodyne banker with a new form of public loan! We are the sharpest and thriftiest people alive in private affairs, and in public matters the most absolute fly-gobblers in the whole world!'

I tried to console my friend by informing him that this particular kind of political financiering is not unknown in my own country. The scheme of Gambetta appears to me to be simply a development, on a grand scale, of the 'log-rolling principle,' on which, year after year, a measure known as the 'Rivers and Harbours Bill' is engineered, with more or less friction, through the Congress of the United States. It is regularly and diplomatically fought over between the two houses until an agreement about it is come to between the opposing forces, described by a recent American writer as 'the plutocracy at one end and the mobocracy at the other end' of our national legislature. In short, it has now become an 'institution,' and like other institutions it has its legendary hero, in a western legislator who is reputed to have re-elected himself for a number of years by 'putting through' successive appropriations for the 'improvement' of a stream which rose in an inaccessible mountain and emptied itself into an unfathomable swamp.

'That is very well,' said my friend gravely, 'very well indeed, but you have to do this thing every year, while Gambetta and Léon Say and De Freycinet committed France to it once for all and irremediably. And on what scale do you do this sort of thing?'

I was forced to own that, upon this point, Washington so far lags shamefully in the rear of Paris. Our grandest 'log-rolling' in finance is, to the colossal operations of Gambetta, Léon Say, and De Freycinet, as is the ordinary iron lamp-post of New York to the Eiffel Tower.

The 'Rivers and Harbours Bill,' in 1886, was only saved after a desperate struggle at the very end of the session, by a compromise over an 'ancient and fish-like' canal job in the North-West, the original promoter of which, long since passed beyond the hope, if not beyond the desire of hydraulic improvements, audaciously baptized it with the name of Father Hennepin, one of the glories of France in the New World. And yet the amount involved in the Bill did not exceed fourteen million dollars, or a beggarly seventy million francs.

'At that rate,' said my friend, 'it would take your great country more than a century to match what we have covered in ten years. And yet you are thought an enterprising people, and, what is more to the point, your treasury shows an annual surplus, while ours shows an annual deficit; and you have nearly twice our population, have you not, and more than ten times our area of territory?

'If I were to "improve" the roads and ponds on my property on the principle on which France has been "improving" her railway systems and her ports, I should bring up in bankruptcy. Where else can the country bring up? Nothing, so far, has saved us but the woollen stocking of the peasants. Come to my place in Picardy, and I will show you a dozen old fellows who go about dressed in blouses--who work like day-labourers--no! much better and harder than day-labourers now do. They will never tell you what they are thinking about; they will never tell me, though we are the best of friends; but you will see what they are--close at a bargain, shrewd, devoted to their farms and families. Well, they live on a third--yes, some of them on a quarter--of their incomes; they know just where every penny they have spent on the ground for twenty years has gone, and just what it has brought back to them, and every man of them can put his hand, if need be, on ten, twenty, thirty, forty thousand francs. That is the woollen stocking. But the most beautiful woman in the world can only give what she has. The woollen stocking holds no more than it holds. You can find the bottom of it if you keep on long enough--and then? And mark you, if I tell the shrewdest of these old fellows that the Government is spending ten thousand millions of francs on building railways from nowhere to nowhere, and digging ports in quicksands, what will he do? He will begin to think it is very hard that he can't get a railway built or a port dug. Do you wonder I am a pessimist?'

'But if this is the way in which they look at things, why do they clamour for Boulanger?'

'They don't clamour for Boulanger. That is to say the peasants, the rural people. It is in the towns--here in Calais, for example, at Boulogne, at Amiens--that they clamour for Boulanger. In the towns they read all manner of trash and listen to all manner of lies. You can get up a legend in the French towns for anybody or anything as easily to-day as in the middle ages--perhaps more easily. Look at this legend of Boulanger. It is a real legend to-day. You may be sure of that, and that is the real danger of it. The people who are fighting against it to-day are the people who made it. They wanted, they could not get on without, a great man. Ferry went to pieces, as you know, in 1885. Tonkin and the dead Courbet killed him. So they invented Boulanger. They made him War Minister. They put him on his black horse. They let him drive out the princes. Look at those five men seated there in front of that café. They are doubtless decent well-to-do shopkeepers, master mechanics--no matter what--I will wager you that of these five men, three believe Boulanger to be the first soldier of France, and that two of them believe the Government has driven him into exile to prevent the Germans from declaring war! That is enough to make them Boulangists.'

'Then they want war with Germany?'

'Yes, in this part of France I think they do. But the legend is just as effective where they do not want war with Germany. Last year I was in the country of Grévy, not far from Mont-sous-Vaudrey. There the peasants dread nothing so much as another war. They want peace there at any price. Well, then, a very shrewd old farmer told me he wanted to see Boulanger made Chief of the State. Why? Why because, as he said, Boulanger is the first general in Europe, and the Germans know it, and they go in fear of him; so that if Boulanger is made Chief of the State, they will think twice before they attack us! What do you say to that?'

'Is it not extraordinary,' I replied, 'that this legend, as you truly call it, should have been created so easily about a general who has no battle to show for it; not even a Montenotte, much less an Arcola or a Lodi?'

'What legend had Bonaparte when Barras put him at the head of the home army, and Pétiet sent him to Italy? He did not command at Toulon, and his one victory had been to blow the marshalled blackguards and lunatics of Paris into the Seine, as Mandat might and would have done on that dismal August 10, but for that hypocritical scoundrel Pétion. And didn't the authorities arrest Bonaparte after Toulon; and was he not struck from the active roll of general officers in France for refusing a command in La Vendée? So far as the army goes, there is better stuff for a legend to-day in Boulanger than there was in Bonaparte when he went to Italy.

'But observe that the Government made a legend of Boulanger, not for military but for political purposes. They were shut down to him. If they could have used M. de Lesseps, and if the Panama Canal had been a success, Lesseps would have served their purpose better than Boulanger. Without a "great Frenchman," I tell you the republic is impossible. Are they not trying to make a "great Frenchman" now of Carnot? If this could be done, if it were possible to make a "great Frenchman" of Carnot, I should not object. But it is absurd. And so for me, whatever the electors may do in September, the republic is hopeless. They made Boulanger to save it; now they are trying to unmake Boulanger to save it. It is childish, it is silly, it will not do! If they succeed in unmaking their legend of Boulanger, where are they? Not even where they were when they began to make it. On the contrary! They have made it perfectly plain that the republic is a parachute which falls without a balloon. Where are they to find the balloon? The Exposition has given the parachute a lift. The visit of the Prince of Wales gave it a lift. The Shah, if he comes, will give it a lift--not much--but a lift. But all these are expedients of a moment. All these will not give the republic a "great Frenchman."'

'All this,' I said, 'seems to bring us back to what you said this morning, that if you were not the most anarchical you would be the most monarchical people in Europe.'

'Precisely! and it is the plain truth. The republic was possible with MacMahon, for after all he was a personality. It was possible with Thiers, for though he was a little rascal and the greatest literary liar of the century except Victor Hugo, he was a personality, and a very positive personality. It might have been possible with Gambetta, for he too was a personality, odious and flatulent if you like, but still a personality. It was not possible with Grévy. It is not possible with Carnot.

'Let the elections go as they may, you will see that I am right. I wash my hands of it all. But when I think of it I see on the wall _Finis Galliæ_! For while I despair of the republic, I have no hope of a monarchy. Nothing but a personality can carry on the republic--and nothing but a personality can restore the monarchy.

'The friends of the poor little Prince Imperial understood this when they consented to let him go off to South Africa. If he had been in the hands of an English general of common sense, or of an English captain of common courage, he would no doubt have come back safe and sound. And in that case the odds are that we should be living to-day under the Third Empire instead of the Third Republic.

'As it is, the Empire, between the significance of Plon-Plon, and the insignificance of Prince Victor, is like the Republic between Ferry, the Tonkinese, and Carnot, who ought to spell his name _Carton_!'

'But how is it with the royalists?'

'Ah! their only "personality" known to the people--and that is the value of a personality in France--is the Duc d'Aumale--and who knows whether the Duc d'Aumale is a royalist? I have no doubt--absolutely no doubt,' he said with some emphasis, 'that Say and De Freycinet to-morrow would gladly join forces with the Conservatives to make the Duc d'Aumale president if the Conservatives would agree to it, and if the Duc would accept the place; for that would give the Republic a new lease of life in the first place, and in the second place it would utterly disintegrate the royalists, both white and blue. If the Duc is not a "great Frenchman" in the electoral sense of the phrase, he is the most creditably conspicuous of living Frenchmen, which is something.'

'More so than his nephew the Comte de Paris?'

'Yes, certainly, in the popular mind. Personally, I do not think he would make either so good a president of a republic, or so good a king as the Comte de Paris, whose manifesto I think shows him to be a man of clear and sound constitutional ideas, but the French people do not know him. It was a blunder, by the way, in my opinion,' he added after a moment, 'of Boulanger to expel the Comte de Paris. His exile and his action in exile have made him better known in France than he would have been, had he been left to live quietly at Eu and in Paris. Furthermore, what sort of a republic is it in which a family of princes cannot live without tempting the whole population to make one of them king? The expulsion of the princes belongs to the same category of political idiocies with the _pacte de famine_. Either the Republic is a reality accepted by the French people, or it is a sham imposed upon them by a party. If it is a reality, the princes are simply French citizens, as much entitled to live in France under the protection of the laws as if they were peasants. From this there is no escape logically or morally, and the men who voted for such an edict are neither good Republicans nor good Frenchmen. From the moment it was enacted and executed, the Republic ceased to be a national government. It was a _coup d'état_ and not a legal act, and every legislator who voted for it committed perjury at least as distinctly as the author of the _coup d'état_ of 1851. Could such a law possibly have been passed in your republic?'

'Certainly not,' I said. 'In fact, the people of many American States are free to treat with all possible public and private distinction a personage who not only was elected to a position which may be called princely, but who actually exercised for several years a greater authority over millions of American citizens than has belonged to any French king since Louis XVI., and, exercising it, waged war against the United States. But was there no pretence of constitutional authority for the passage of this law which you so strongly denounce?'

'Certainly not. There was no shadow of a legal pretext for passing it. It is, I think, the worst and also the silliest instance in our recent history of an appeal to that argument of rogues and tyrants called _salus populi_, as to which I am of the opinion of Louis Blanc, that the "safety" of no nation under heaven "is worth the sacrifice of a single principle of common justice."

'It was a blow struck in broad daylight at the personal rights of every French citizen; just as the removal of the princes from the army was a blow struck in broad daylight at the property rights of every French officer. That it was possible for a Government to strike these blows in cold blood, with no popular excitement instigating them, and with no public resentment following them, should show you, I think, how absurd it is to talk of the French people as a republican people. Any Government in power at Paris may be as arbitrary as it likes, but it must not be stupid. The expulsion of the princes was a crime against liberty; it was as arbitrary an act as the issue of a _lettre de cachet_. But it was also very stupid. It was stupid of the Government because it put them for a time under the thumb of Boulanger. It was stupid of Boulanger, because it put the Comte de Paris at once on a pedestal and forced him before France and Europe into the position of a saviour of society, for whom all the conservative forces of French society must henceforth inevitably work. Whatever becomes of Boulanger in the next elections, he has condemned the Opportunists irretrievably either to hew wood for the Socialists or to carry water for the Monarchists. And with them he has condemned himself. Wait and see if I am not right.

'Come and see me in Picardy. You will find more royalist farmers than I could have believed possible six years ago. If the Comte de Chambord had not kept the Legitimist country gentlemen so much apart as a caste from the peasants, there would be nothing easier than to sweep the country with a monarchist propaganda. It was the royalist peasantry who brought about the great emigration in 1789, long before the Terror, by burning and pillaging the châteaux all over France under orders from Paris, which they believed to be orders from the king. What puzzles them now is the notion lurking down in the bottom of their minds that the restoration of the monarchy will somehow put the country gentlemen over them, and this has much to do with making them, not republicans, but imperialists. As to the republic the overthrow of Grévy had a very bad effect upon the peasants and the farmers in my part of the country, and I believe it had everywhere.'

'Was M. Grévy, then, popular with them?'

'No, it was not that at all. It was the feeling that the Republic meant changes and uncertainty. A farmer--a fair specimen of this class in my country--expressed this to me in his own fashion only the other day. I asked him if he was coming to see the President here at Calais. "What is the use of that?" he said, "it is money out of pocket, and for what? Who knows how long he will be President? There was Grévy. Here is Boulanger. All that can do no good. With these short leases what can be done for the land?" There you have it. In Picardy and in Artois the people have long memories about the land. All these countries, as you know, were fought over again and again. There were so many wars that people got out of the way of making long leases, and the land suffered accordingly. In the last century these provinces, now so well and so richly cultivated, were in a very bad way through this. With leases of three, six, nine years, the farmers naturally took as few risks as possible in the way of improving the land. They were always making up the waste caused by the previous tenant, or shy of investing for the benefit of the next tenant. Towards the end of the century, and before the Revolution, small holdings began to increase, and the English fashion of long leases came in, and the agriculture improved accordingly. So you see why our farmers tend to monarchy from the point of view of long leases and land ownership, just as these sailors and fishermen here in the Boulonnais tend to it from the point of view of seamanship. You will make republicans of them when you get them to let the forecastle elect the cook captain. That will not be to-morrow nor, I think, next week.'

I left Calais late at night for Boulogne, my friend going into Picardy, where I promised to join him later on. There was an immense crowd at the station, and I could not help admiring the good nature and cheery civility of the porters. The sub-officials in silver lace were not so admirable, but then they were only strutting about and objecting to things. The honest fellows who were getting twice as many passengers into a train as the train could possibly take, and helping bewildered provincials to find out where they really wanted to go, were, I thought, miraculously amiable and intelligent.

At the last moment, just as we were moving off, a lively Parisian journalist tumbled into our compartment with his despatch-box and his portmanteau. He was in the full evening dress in which he had been parading about all day with the Presidential party; his white cravat was loose and awry, and the grey dust of the Calais streets and piers lay thick upon his glossy bottines; but he was in the best of spirits, for he had caught the train and would now reach Paris in the morning.

'But the President is going on to Boulogne, is he not?' I asked.

'Oh, yes! but what of that? It will be just what it was to-day, and I know what he is going to say. He will leave Boulogne early in the afternoon, and we shall have it all, an excellent account. It's not worth while to waste the time on Boulogne.'

He had been with the President ever since the party left Paris, and thought the progression the whole, a success. 'Not at Calais,' that he admitted. There had certainly been no great enthusiasm at Calais. He did not think there had been any cries for Boulanger, but there was no emotion. This he explained by telling me that the people had not been properly '_stylé_.' 'In these cases, you know,' he said with the air of a connoisseur in enthusiasm, 'you must have a certain subtle _stylage_.'

The word was new to me, but not so the thing. For I presently found that by a 'subtle _stylage_' of the people, my companion only meant what in America is known as 'working up a boom,' when the welfare of the Union requires that a President, or a presidential candidate, should perambulate a certain number of 'doubtful' States, or, in the picturesque language of the days of Andrew Johnson, go 'swinging round the circle.' If I am not misinformed, an analogous operation is occasionally performed in England, when some popular idol finds it worth his while to make an unpremeditated political tour.

'The thing was better done at Lens,' said my fellow-traveller. 'Do you know Lens? They are all miners there, you know--very curious people. I suppose they were glad to come up from under the ground and look at us. Some of the women, too, were pretty--really very pretty. It was all very well arranged. There is a good manager there, M.----. He made way, you know, in 1886, for Camescasse, to oblige the Government. The President gave him the Cross. It had a very good effect. At Bapaume, too, the President did a good thing. He decorated ---- there, who had so much trouble with the Christian Brothers.'

'For having trouble with the Christian Brothers?' I could not help asking.

'No! but the courts decided against him, and that was a misfortune. The President put it right by decorating him, for it is evident that he meant to do his duty, and a Government must stand by its friends. Do you know Bapaume? It is a pretty place--all factories. It was there, you know, that Faidherbe beat the Germans. A very pretty place.'