CHAPTER XX

LEON GAMBETTA

Without being an intimate friend of Leon Gambetta, I used nevertheless to see him very often, and there existed between us one of those close relationships which sometimes draw together people whose opinions are totally different. I had first met him before the war, when he had not reached the fame which ultimately became his. I admired him more than I liked him, and to tell the truth he never was fully in sympathy with me, but it was impossible to see him often and not to be struck by his immense intelligence, and especially by the extraordinary powers of assimilation which distinguished him.

I have already mentioned that at the beginning of his political career he had little idea of social requirements, yet as soon as he found out his mistake he speedily made it his aim to acquire knowledge of the customs and manners current in the higher classes of society, and to make a special study of its code of etiquette. He realised quite well that sometimes trivial details bring about tremendous results, and that if a man wants to lead his country he must not begin by giving the public occasion to ridicule him. Besides, there lay at the bottom of the character of this extraordinary man a thirst for luxury, for power, for riches, for all the good things of the world, which alone would have been sufficient to make him study the refinements without which they become useless. Gambetta was an epicure in the fullest sense of that word, and the apparent carelessness which he had affected in outward appearance when he entered political life proceeded more from the desire to attract notice to himself than from anything else.

He wanted to impose his personality upon others, and not knowing how to do so, he tried to attain it by an apparent indifference to those outward things that rule the actions of ordinary men.

When once he was thrown into contact with good society, and especially after he had fallen under the influence of Madame Edmond Adam, or Juliette Adam as earlier I referred to her, his views of life changed considerably. He very soon became more refined in his tastes and habits, the equal in social deportment of those men and women whose judgments and opinions he had affected to despise in the days when he was a street orator who frequented the Café Procope and other meeting-places of the young Radical party who made it its business to attack the Empire at every opportunity.

The war sobered him, and his short sojourn in the responsible position of member of a government, such as it was, considerably changed his ideas. He at once perceived that it was easier to criticise men in power than to do their work. He was a great patriot in the sense that he put his country before anything else in the world, and that he was ready to sacrifice all that he held dear for its welfare, but he was no chauvinist, though so often accused of fomenting chauvinism in France. He had a very clear comprehension of every political situation, and also of the different ways in which it could be explained to the crowd, who generally see only the externals of questions without ever going into their details.

He wanted his country to regain its former power and fame, and he knew that this would be difficult if the idea of the humiliation it had endured was always put before its eyes, and if the wounds it had received were always made to smart. In a certain sense he was right, in another he was wrong, because France might have been more quiet now, and more prosperous even in the material sense of the word, if that idea of a _revanche_ had not always been fostered, and had she been taught to reconcile herself to accomplished facts. In saying this I know that many among my readers will scream outright, but not being a Frenchman I may be allowed to express my opinion, that it would be to the advantage of a country for which I have always had the greatest sympathy if she began thinking more about herself and less about another war with Germany.

Gambetta exercised an unbounded influence on many people, and was the object of hatred to many others, but no one who met him could pass him by with indifference. If he had not been of a lazy disposition he might easily have become Prime Minister long before he did, and in this connection I must relate a story which probably will surprise more than one person. Gambetta, though he led his party, and though he was at one moment the most powerful man in France, showed always some reluctance when the question of his forming a government was raised. I ventured one day to ask him why. He replied to me that, now he understood the responsibility of the head of a Cabinet, and had studied European politics, he did not think himself up to the task, and also did not think that his presence in a ministry would be to the advantage of France, because his name had become synonymous with the principle of a war with Germany, for which he was but too well aware that his country was not prepared. “Later on,” he added, “my day may come, but I feel that now, though I may have a great deal more intelligence than some of the foreign ministers who lead the destinies of other countries, I haven’t their experience of affairs, nor their perfect knowledge of saying pretty things which they do not mean. This would make me appear inferior to them, and France must not be represented by a man to whom this reproach applies. France must hold her own, and something more, in the presence of Europe.”

I made a gesture of surprise, which he noticed.

“You are astonished at what I tell you,” he remarked, “but do you think me such a poor patriot to put my own personal advantage or ambitions before her welfare? This would be very miserable indeed, and I know of no meaner thing than accepting office when one is aware that it is not for the good of one’s fatherland. I know very well what is thought about me in Europe, and especially in Germany, and I do not wish to give the latter country the slightest excuse to say that she has been provoked, or that we are following a policy of aggression. Such policy is unworthy of a great nation, and we are a great nation, in spite of our reverses, and we must remain one, though some people would like us to come down from that height. We must work to consolidate our position, to become powerful enough and strong enough to be able to strike when the day comes, not only with the chance, but with the certitude, of success. What is the good of wasting one’s time in petty strifes or petty recriminations? Yes, I think about revenge, I think of nothing else, but I should be ashamed to be thought eager for it at once, and at any price; above all I would not like to risk losing it by such a miserable circumstance as my becoming head of the government at a time when the hour for it had not yet struck.”

I relate this conversation in its entirety as it shows the real patriotism which animated Gambetta, as well as his great foresight and intuition in politics in general. Very few statesmen would have viewed a situation with such entire self-abnegation. In France especially, where the thirst after power and official positions was so great, he constituted a solitary and noble exception. I think that the happiest time in Gambetta’s life was when he was President of the Chamber, and inhabited the Palais Bourbon. There he felt in his element, and also at the height, not of his ambitions, but of his wishes--a totally different matter. In the old home of the Duc de Morny he did not consider himself inferior to that clever councillor of Napoleon III., and reflected with some satisfaction on the circumstances that had brought him there, and placed him in the chair occupied with such authority by the illegitimate son of Queen Hortense. In his new position also he could give way to the luxurious tastes which he had always nursed and only appeared to scorn, because he had not been able to believe he would ever be in a position to gratify them.

Leon Gambetta also felt that in the capacity of leader of the representatives of the nation he would have more opportunities of learning the real wants of that nation, and thus, when the day came that he could do so, would be able to work for its welfare with better chances of success than he had had hitherto. His rare tact served him well, and his knowledge of mankind, something quite different from knowledge of the world, made him avoid many of the mistakes another placed in his position would inevitably have fallen victim to. He made an excellent President of the Chamber, just as he made an admirable host in the Palais Bourbon, where he displayed his epicurean tastes in a way that drew upon him the censure of the newspapers, which tried to ridicule the former Socialist leader, whose first care had been to get as his cook the most famous chef in Paris.

Madame Adam used sometimes to smile at the change which her influence, more than anything else, had brought about in Gambetta. But when he became President of the Chamber their intimacy slackened, for a very short time it is true, but slackened all the same. Gambetta, it must be owned, was very sensible to feminine charms and feminine blandishments. Strange as it may seem when one takes into consideration his extreme ugliness, the fact that he had but one eye, and was enormously fat, he yet exercised a great fascination on women in general, and he liked to use it, and to spend part of his spare time in the society of the fair ladies who worshipped at his shrine. This partly was the cause of his death. But about this we shall speak later on.

When at last circumstances arose which obliged Gambetta to accept the task of forming a Cabinet, it was with the utmost reluctance, in spite of all that has been said concerning this subject, that he undertook it. He had no faith in the possibility of being a long time at the head of affairs, and as he told one of his friends: “Why take such trouble when one is assured beforehand it is for nothing?” Nevertheless he started earnestly to work to give to the government the direction he thought the best for the interests of the country. But the composition of the Chambers was not congenial to him; he felt himself far superior to all those men upon the vote of whom his fate depended, and this made him impatient as to the control which they pretended to exercise over him. He despised them, if the truth must be said, and involuntarily he allowed this feeling to appear in the manner in which he handled them, a fact that had much to do with the short time he remained in power.

His advent as Prime Minister had excited considerable sensation abroad; even in France it was the signal for the retirement from public life of many people who felt that they could not remain in office under such a thoroughly Radical government as the one he was supposed to lead. Among those who resigned was the Comte de St. Vallier, at that time French Ambassador in Berlin.

When his resignation was accepted he thought himself obliged, nevertheless, to call on the Prime Minister when he returned to Paris, in order to express to him his regrets that the opinions which he held prevented him from working harmoniously with him. Gambetta received him with great affability and courteousness, and at once said: “You are wrong to go away, I shall not remain for long where I am now, and you would have rendered a greater service to France by remaining at your post than by a retreat which, as you will see, will prove to have been useless. Je ne suis qu’un bouche-trou (‘I am only a stop-gap’), and very probably the President of the Republic in entrusting to me the task of forming a government wanted to prove to France how impossible it is for a Radical ministry ever to maintain itself. The sad part of this is that, though I am a Republican, I have no Radical sympathies. I assure you that this is the fact, and that you would have found me far more inclined to sympathise with your opinions than with those of the people who are supposed to be my followers. The great mistake that we are constantly making in France is to mix up opinions with the way in which the country must be governed. We ought to have neither a Conservative, nor a Radical, nor even a Republican government; we ought to have a French one. This would be quite enough. I am sorry you have resigned; very sorry, indeed.”

But Gambetta did not convince M. de St. Vallier, and he insisted on retiring from the diplomatic service, a fact which I have reasons to believe he regretted later on.

The great dream of Gambetta was to establish a _modus vivendi_ and a kind of understanding with Germany. He knew very well how useless it is in life to go back on things which are already accomplished, and to cry over spilt milk. And he did not care for France to go on living in the state of _qui vive_ which had been hers ever since the disasters which had accompanied the war of 1870. He knew also that he had far greater chances to take into his hands the reins of government, and to keep them if once he had succeeded in doing away with this fear of a German aggression, which haunted the public mind. He was no partisan of compulsory service, and did not approve of too great military expenses, entered into by fear of an imaginary danger. That it was imaginary he was convinced, because he knew very well that Germany was in the same position in which Napoleon III. had found himself: that of risking the loss of everything and gaining nothing from a new campaign. But this conviction which was his alone he could not persuade others to share, and for this reason he tried to arrange an interview between himself and Prince von Bismarck.

A great deal has been written about this episode, and several of Gambetta’s friends have done their best to try to induce the public to forget it. I don’t know why they believed that it was not to his honour. Nor why, either, Gambetta could not have met the German Chancellor when other French political men had done so without anyone saying a single word against it. By every sensible person the idea of this interview could only have been hailed with pleasure. Two great minds like those could not but have found together the solution of many difficulties which divided the two nations, and it would have been doing the greatest injustice to Leon Gambetta to imagine that he would not have borne himself with the dignity necessary to the representative of a great country.

It was Count Henckel von Donnersmarck, the husband of Madame de Paiva, whose fame still lives in Paris, who was sounded by Gambetta as to the possibility of a meeting between himself and Bismarck, and he did his very best to arrange it in such a manner that it might not become known to the public, at least not until after it had actually taken place. Unfortunately outward circumstances interfered with this plan, and Gambetta had to forgo his intention, partly because his great friend Ranc told him that if he ventured on such a thing he would entirely lose the confidence of the Radical party. Whether it was this consideration or another one, the fact remains that he felt afraid at the last minute, in view of the hostility of his constituents, to incur the responsibility of a step which his intelligence and his intuition told him was the best for the interests of the France he loved so dearly.

Much has been written, and much surmised, concerning the death of Gambetta. It is now pretty certain that the wound which he received was not its immediate cause, which must be looked for elsewhere, and can be attributed partly to his general constitution, which was considerably impaired, and partly to the treatment which had been applied to him. But upon this point it must not be forgotten that at that time operations were not the usual thing that they have become since, and surgical intervention was generally dreaded, and resorted to only as a last resource.

As to the pistol shot, about which so many suppositions have been made, I think that in spite of Gambetta’s own denials there can be hardly a matter of doubt that it was a lady who, in a fit of fury, had inflicted the wound that disabled him. It is no secret now, that Gambetta was on the point of marrying a lady of high social standing, the Marchioness Arconati-Visconti, the daughter of the Senator Peyrat, and the widow of a Milanese nobleman. That union was to put the seal to his career, and to open for him many new vistas. As the husband of a beautiful, accomplished woman of the world, he could in time aspire to anything and, who knows, become President of the Republic for life, which was his dearest secret wish.

But in order to accomplish his desire, he had first to end a situation that did not date from yesterday, to cut off an intimacy of twenty years with a noble woman who had been his friend in the bad as well as in the good days, and who had given him innumerable proofs of her devotion. Gambetta was well aware of the difficulties which such a step presented, and for a long time he had not the courage to tackle the subject, hoping that she would hear something about his new plans, and herself begin the conversation on this delicate matter. The lady, however, kept silent, perhaps because she did not believe in the rumours which had reached her, and partly because she would not give her friend the opportunity he was seeking. At last Gambetta asked his old comrade Spuller to see her and to try to persuade her to have the courage to sacrifice herself to his welfare. He reasoned like a man, and an ungrateful man into the bargain, and she refused to accept the solution which was offered to her, and which might have soothed the pride of a person more devoid of feelings of attachment for her lover of long years than was the case with her. She dismissed Spuller with scorn, and rushed to Ville d’Avray, where Gambetta was residing, in order to seek an interview that could only be a stormy one.

It was during this interview that Gambetta was wounded. And those who were made aware of all the circumstances attending this drama of feminine jealousy, knew who it was that fired the fatal shot which lodged itself in the right hand of the French statesman. When he himself was questioned as to the accident, he always said that he had wounded himself in trying to clean a revolver, a circumstance that was the more unlikely because he was seldom in possession of such a weapon. Moreover, to some of his friends, like Spuller and Paul Bert, he only remarked that he had got nothing but what he had deserved.

Perhaps it was this consciousness which made him so patient during his illness, and also so shy of seeing anyone, even his friends, whilst it lasted. He used to lie quietly, with closed eyes, and avoid any conversations that could have touched upon the subject of the accident which had occurred to him. And when later on other symptoms made their appearance, he begged the people who surrounded him to say everywhere that these symptoms had nothing to do with his wound.

If, in his dying moments, he was conscious, he must have regretted deeply his ingratitude in regard to the woman who had loved him with such true affection, and who had been tempted to an act of despair when she learned that she was about to be forsaken for one who certainly did not have for Gambetta the same passionate affection. It was after all the sweet lady who had for so long had him in her affections who watched over his deathbed, and who closed his eyes for ever, whilst the proud lady for whose sake he had been about to sacrifice her never even made an appearance at Ville d’Avray. She went on living her former life as if no tragedy had crossed it, after death had removed from this worldly scene the great politician to whom ambition had very nearly united her.

And now that years have passed over this drama, since the removal from the scene of political France of the great patriot who was called Leon Gambetta, it is still very difficult to form a true judgment about him. He died before he had given the full measure of his qualities, or shown the real stuff he was made of. He was for too short a time in a responsible position to allow us to say whether he would have proved as able a leader of a government as he had shown himself to be a powerful leader of men. The two things are very different, and the man who can master one is found sometimes to be lacking in the other. What, however, cannot be taken away from him is his true, earnest patriotism, the absence of all vanity that distinguished him, his readiness to sacrifice everything in his power at the shrine of his fatherland, and his desire to serve it, according to what he considered to be its interests. He was fearless in his devotion, and worked for his country without paying any attention to the reproaches of the crowd.

The man was colossal in his way, and there was nothing mean about him. His conceptions were as great as his soul. Of course he was often mistaken, like every human being, but he was always sincere even in his errors, and he never hesitated to acknowledge the latter when they were shown to him.

Reared in different circumstances, and able to show his value otherwise than by starting on the road of revolution, which bordered very closely on anarchy, he might have become truly a great man. He had all the instincts of one--and all the imperfections. He was authoritative and could be very firm, but he tried always to be just, and avoided wounding others, even his adversaries, as much as it was possible for him to do so. He was invariably courteous, even in his exhibitions of rage, and essentially kind, a faithful friend, and a gallant enemy. Hated by those who had never known him, or met him personally, he contrived to fascinate all those who had done so; they always went away from him liking the man, even when condemning the politician. He had a careless manner in talking about his foes, which was superb in its way, and though he seldom spoke about himself, yet he liked to find that he was respected, feared, or even abused.

The one thing he never could have reconciled himself to would have been to be ignored, and this indignity was spared him. Perhaps it was better for his memory that he died in the full force of his talent, and before he had reached the maturity of his years--perhaps it was a pity. Who knows?