CHAPTER XIV

TWO GREAT MINISTERS

I have mentioned the Duc de Broglie and the Duc Decazes. They were the last two ministers of the old school of which the Third French Republic could boast. After them came mostly self-made men, who were perhaps cleverer than they had been but who did not possess the traditions of old France, and who brought along with them not only a change of policy but a change in political manners and customs. After the two great ministers of whom I am about to speak, the Republic became democratic, far removed from the aristocratic country it had been whilst they were ruling it.

The Duc de Broglie was the son of remarkable parents. His father, the old Duke Victor, had been a writer, a thinker, a politician and an orator of no mean talent; one, moreover, who, amidst the corruption which had prevailed at the time of the first restoration of the Bourbons, had succeeded in keeping his hands clean from every suspicion. He showed the great independence of his noble, straightforward character when almost alone among his colleagues in the House of Peers he refused to vote for the condemnation of Marshal Ney.

The old Duc’s wife was the lovely Duchesse de Broglie, Albertine de Stael, the daughter of the celebrated Madame de Stael, and the granddaughter of Necker. Madame de Broglie was one of those figures who leave their impress on posterity, and whose influence survives them for a long time. She had, allied to considerable beauty, a noble soul, a great intelligence, and strict Protestant principles, which had communicated a tinge of austerity to all that she said, did or wrote.

Her son Albert inherited much of this Calvinistic severity, which gave him sometimes a harsh appearance and harsh manners. He was one of those men who never will accept a compromise, or resort to diplomacy of whatever kind, to achieve anything they have made up their minds to do. He was unusually well read, a man of considerable erudition, who was more at his ease at his writing-table than in a drawing-room. He had never been frivolous, as one of his friends once said, and had but seldom shown himself amiable. This absence of human passions made him sometimes unjust towards those who had felt their influence, or allowed themselves to be carried away by them. One could not imagine a time when the Duc de Broglie had been young, nor a moment when he had not been absorbed by his duties or his studies. He was a living encyclopædia, and was continually improving his own mind by devoting his attention to some serious subject or other. When he was elected a member of the Academy no one was surprised at it, the contrary would have seemed wonderful because he appeared to have been born an Academician, and to be out of place anywhere else but among the ranks of that select company known as the Institut de France.

The Duc de Broglie possessed a high moral character. He had strong prejudices, no indulgence for others, perhaps because he had never had any for himself; he was narrow-minded in some things, but generous in everything that did not touch on the question of principles. He came from an Orleanist family, and never wavered in his allegiance to the younger branch of the house of France, and when he accepted office, under Marshal MacMahon, he certainly did so with the idea that he could in time bring back Philippe VII. to Paris as King.

In spite of his apparent coldness and austerity, he had strong political passions, the only ones that his soul had ever known. These passions made him sometimes lose sight of the obstacles in his way, and the natural hauteur of a grand seigneur made him despise adversaries that he ought either to have tried to conciliate or else to have reckoned with more carefully than he did. He was not sympathetic, and very few liked him, but this latter fact did not trouble him much. The only thing he cared for was to be respected, esteemed, honoured by his foes as well as by his friends. No man was ever more respectful of a given word than the Duc de Broglie, and he would rather have died than have broken a promise once made, no matter how rash that promise might have been. He was certainly not a politician of the modern school, and both for him and for his country it might have been better had he confined himself to the historical studies which have made for him such a great name in modern French literature of the graver sort.

An amusing anecdote is related of the Duc de Broglie. He was staying with one of his friends in the country, and one day took up a novel which, forgotten, had been left on the table. With the attention that he always gave to everything he did, he read it through--it was the “Histoire de Sybille,” of Octave Feuillet--and then gravely asked his host whether one of the heroes of it was still alive? When the latter, more than surprised, inquired what he meant, he found out that the Duke had thought the book treated of facts that had really occurred, and had not imagined that the tale was just a novel. “Why waste one’s time in writing about things that have never existed?” he remarked. “Life is too short to afford it!” And when Feuillet was elected to the Academy he would never consent to give him his vote, saying that through him he had lost a few hours he might have employed in reading something more useful than a mere romance. For he could not forgive the fact that it had interested him in spite of his abomination for that kind of literature.

One can imagine that a man with such strength of character could not well understand the weakness of Marshal MacMahon, and it is not to be wondered at that the two serious discussions during the few months that elapsed between the birth and the fall of that Cabinet were always known in the annals of Parliamentary France as “the Cabinet of the 16th of May.” The Duc de Broglie would have liked to carry through the elections under the flag of Orleanism, to which he was so very much attached, and for whose profit, he had imagined, the Marshal had decided upon his _coup d’état_ when he dismissed Jules Simon. When he perceived that the Duc de Magenta had simply given way to an attack of bad temper, the disillusion which he experienced was very great, but he did not think it right to desert the post which he had accepted under a misapprehension, and he and his colleagues only left office when the result of the elections made it but too apparent that their day had come to an end.

The Duc de Broglie never returned to political life after that effort. He spent the rest of his existence in retirement, absorbed in his studies, and seeking among his books an enjoyment that nothing else could give him. One did not meet him often in society, but sometimes he put in an appearance at the house parties given by his son, Prince Amédée de Broglie, at his splendid castle of Chaumont sur Loire, once the residence of Catherine de Medici.

Prince Amédée had married an heiress, Mademoiselle Say, the daughter of the great sugar refiner, who had brought him something like twenty million francs as her dowry. When her marriage took place one was not used yet in aristocratic France to these unions between the representatives of great names and daughters of the people, and one evening at a party given in honour of the young bride the Comte Horace de Choiseul, well known for his caustic tongue, approached her, and showing her a spot on her dress made by an ice that had fallen upon it, he said: “Vous avez une tâche de sucre sur votre robe, Princesse” (“You have a spot of sugar on your gown, Princess”). Madame de Broglie turned round, and instantly retorted: “Je préfère une tâche de sucre à une tâche de sang” (“I prefer a spot of sugar to a spot of blood”), thus alluding to the murder of the Comte de Choiseul’s mother, the Duchesse de Praslin, by her husband.

She is an amiable woman that Princesse de Broglie, in spite of her sharp tongue, and certainly she is one of the pleasantest in Paris society at present.

The Duc Decazes was a great contrast to the Duc de Broglie. Just as clever, though perhaps not so learned as the latter, he was, moreover, a most accomplished man of the world in the fullest sense of that expression. He made himself friends wherever he went, even among the ranks of his adversaries. During the seven years that he remained in charge of the Foreign Office, in several Cabinets, he succeeded in winning for France the respect of Europe, and in presenting the idea that though governments might change in that country, its foreign policy would not depart from the line it had taken. He was frank, loyal, a cultured, gentle, and an excellent, though not a brilliant, politician. Placed in office at a very difficult moment, just after the disasters of the Franco-German War had entirely destroyed the prestige of his fatherland, he contrived to raise it in the opinion of foreign governments, and to give them a high idea of its moral resources and dignity.

The advent of the Republic had, of course, been received with every feeling of apprehension and distrust, and the old Monarchists, who had already considerably hesitated before they admitted the Bonapartes as their equals, could not but look with distrust at the political adventurers who had replaced them. The Duc Decazes contrived to win for the governments of M. Thiers and of Marshal MacMahon the respect of all those with whom they had to be in contact; he continued, also, the tradition of the grand manners which had distinguished the Duc de Morny, Count Walewski, the Marquis de Moustiers, and all the high-born gentlemen to whom had been entrusted, for nearly a quarter of a century, the task of speaking in the name of France abroad. He renewed old links, and succeeded in forming new friendships which were to be very useful to him as well as to his country in the future.

The name of the Duc Decazes will always remain associated with the so-called German aggression in 1875, when, it is still currently believed in some quarters, the Prussian Government wanted to declare war against France, a war that was only averted by the intervention of the Emperor Alexander II. of Russia, to whom the French Foreign Minister had appealed for help. The story has been related a thousand times, but what has not been said is that with all his intelligence, his tact and his political experience the Duc Decazes fell a victim to the intrigues of the French Ambassador in Berlin, the Vicomte de Gontaut Biron.

M. de Gontaut was one of those noblemen of the old school who have forgotten nothing, and learned but very little. He had intelligence, tact, knowledge of the world, but he was devoted to himself, and entertained the greatest respect for and opinion of his personal capacities.

He had several relations at the Court of Berlin among the members of the highest aristocracy, who, unfortunately for him, were among the enemies and adversaries of Prince Bismarck. He listened to them, appealed to them to carry to the ears of the Emperor William, and especially to those of the Empress Augusta, many things he would have done better to keep to himself, or else to communicate direct to the German Chancellor; he persisted in carrying a personal line of policy, by which he hoped to put spokes in the wheels of the great minister who held the destinies of Germany in his hands, and he allowed himself to be influenced by gossip which was purely founded on suppositions and old women’s love of slander.

The result of such conduct became but too soon apparent. Bismarck was not a man to allow himself to be treated as a negligible quantity, and he very soon began in his turn a campaign against the Vicomte de Gontaut, making him feel by slights on every possible occasion that it would be advisable for him to retire from the field of action, at least in Berlin. M. de Gontaut was fond of his position as an ambassador. Moreover, his was such an extraordinary vanity that he allowed himself very easily to be convinced that by remaining at his post he was rendering the greatest of services to his country, because no other man in his place could use the resources he had at his disposal so successfully in learning the secrets of the Berlin Court and of the Prussian Foreign Office.

It was M. de Gontaut who started the war scare, which existed only in his imagination and had sprung from the importance he attributed to himself. Bismarck replied in his memoirs to the insinuations that were made against him at that time, and he proved that neither he nor Von Moltke and his staff had ever had the idea of attacking France in 1875. I do not think that any serious politician now believes that there was the slightest foundation for the alarm that the French Ambassador had raised. But at that time it was generally believed that European peace had been in peril for a few days until the Emperor of Russia had put in his word and, as it were, forbidden his Imperial uncle to fulfil intentions the latter had never had for one single moment.

To anyone who knew Prince Bismarck it would be needless to point out how these manœuvres of the Vicomte de Gontaut exasperated him. He judged them for what they were: Gontaut’s desire to make himself important, and to give himself the appearance of having been the saviour of France. In a conversation which he had many years later with Count Muravieff, at that time Councillor of Embassy in Berlin, and later on Minister for Foreign Affairs in Russia, the German Chancellor alluded to the incidents which had then taken place and expressed his astonishment that a shrewd politician like the Duc Decazes could have been taken in by the nonsense, _les bêtises_, as he termed them, that M. de Gontaut was continually writing to him. Count Muravieff, who had been in Paris at that particular moment, could have replied had he liked, that the Duc was not so guilty as it appeared, because he was surrounded by a group of partisans of the Orleans family, who all pretended to be _au courant_ of what was going on in Berlin, through their cousins who were living there, and who did their best to corroborate all that he heard from the Vicomte de Gontaut concerning the plans of Prince Bismarck and his treacherous intentions in regard to France.

At that period Orleanism was flourishing, and succeeded even in influencing the Minister for Foreign Affairs, who found it difficult to disbelieve all that was told him on every side, and which he did not suspect as coming from the same source. It is certain that he fell into the snare, and that when he appealed to Alexander II., it was in the firm belief that a new invasion of his country was about to take place. He found an ally in the person of old Prince Gortschakov, whose vanity seized with alacrity the opportunity that was given to him to appear before the world in the capacity of the saviour of France. Newspapers were put into motion. _The Times_, through its Paris correspondent, the famous Blowitz, started the alarm, and soon it became an established fact that it was through the intervention of Russia alone that France had been snatched from the grip of Germany. The legend still subsists with some people; its chief result was that we incurred the enmity of Prince Bismarck, who might have acted differently in regard to Russia during the Berlin Congress had it not been for this unwholesome incident.

Before closing with this subject I must relate the following anecdote. When the German Foreign Office insisted on M. de Gontaut contradicting in his dispatches to his government the alarming news he had been giving to it, he repaired to the house of a lady to whom he was related, and who occupied an important position at the Berlin Court, to ask her advice as to what he was to do. A council of war, if such an expression can be employed, was assembled, in which the old Duc de Sagan and his wife, the clever and amiable Duchesse, took part, and discussed gravely whether or not the desires of Prince Bismarck should be fulfilled, and his denial telegraphed to Paris. After long discussions it was at last decided that M. de Gontaut would write about it later on, but that it would be wisest to allow a few days to elapse before communicating the news to the French public, and that, consequently, it was not necessary to telegraph anything for the present. They could not allow the legend that the Vicomte de Gontaut had saved France from destruction to die so soon.

It would have been difficult for the Duc Decazes to have discerned right from wrong in such a mass of intrigue. It is to his honour that, notwithstanding the provocations he received, he succeeded in keeping calm, cool and dignified, and that he tried seriously to do his best for his country’s interest. He was a slow worker, and this, perhaps, was his bane, because the man whom he had put at the head of his private chancery, the Marquis de Beauvoir, who was his brother-in-law, having married the sister of the Duchesse Decazes, was careless in the extreme, and often allowed subordinates to do the work he ought to have kept entirely under his own control. All these circumstances produced a certain amount of confusion, but nevertheless in spite of these imperfections the administration of the Duc Decazes gave great dignity to the Foreign Office, and considerably raised the prestige of France abroad. He was not, perhaps, a genius, but he was a great minister on account of his honesty, his loyalty, the gentlemanly qualities that distinguished him and that kept him aloof from every dirty intrigue where his reputation might have foundered. When the ministry presided over by the Duc de Broglie had to retire, the Duc Decazes followed it in its retreat, though asked both by Marshal MacMahon and by the leaders of the Republican party whom the elections had brought to power, to keep his functions. He felt he had nothing in common with the men who were henceforward to rule his country, and he persisted in his determination to give up public life. He did not long survive the fall of his party, and when he died no one ever dared to raise one word against him nor to question his deep patriotism, and his devotion to the country he had loved so well and served so faithfully.