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One day, annoyed at the persistency with which a friend of Clemenceau's watched the queen of the disreputable in hopes to make her flagrancy a cause for legal annulment of the marriage, she denounced him as a traitor in an anonymous letter to the fretting husband, then in Rome. Her daughter agreed to make good the assertion that the friend had failed monstrously in his trust.
The way in which Italians accounted for M. Clemenceau's attitude was this. Although Italy has ceased to be the important political factor she once was when the Triple Alliance was in being, she is still a strong continental Power, capable of placing a more numerous army in the field than her republican sister, and her population continues to increase at a high rate.
Our eyes are fixed on the goal, namely, the crushing of Prussianism. What if Paris must decrease? It will only mean that civilization in France, and humanity, will increase." Reduced to the simplest terms, that is the substance of Clemenceau's appeal. Never was there courage more wonderful. Not even Leonidas at Thermopylæ ever breathed nobler sentiments. That is why Paris is safe to-day.
M. Georges Clemenceau's Homme Libre has ceased to appear. So also have the Gil Blas and Autorite. The Daily Mail has migrated to Bordeaux. Most of the newspapers that remain are published on a single sheet.
Our negotiations, however, had begun under Briand, and Clemenceau only came into power when the peace negotiations had become entangled and were beginning to falter. With regard to Austria-Hungary, both France and England would have welcomed a separate peace on our part, even during Clemenceau's period of office; but in that case we should have had to accept the terms of the London conference.
At this point the note, in considering questions of justice and of mere utility, becomes distinctly ironical. Having decided to bring to life new States, especially Poland and Czeko-Slovakia, why not give them safe frontiers even if some Germans or Magyars have to be sacrificed? One of Clemenceau's fixed ideas is that criterions of justice must not be applied to Germans.
They related that an envoy of a foreign union of unscrupulous capitalists had attempted to rob M. Clemenceau's residence of his inventions and France of a glory, but had been met by his dauntless wife and an assistant who had punished the brigand, although losing their own lives in defence of the patriotic trust.
He exchanged the time of day with the clerks hurrying to the railroad station; he did not disdain to ask the roadmender, seated on a pile of stones, how his labor was getting on, and where he would work next week; he leaned on the gate to listen as if enrapt to the groom and gardener of a neighbor of Clemenceau's, regretting that the hubbub of cracking guns and other ominous explosions was driving their master from home.
This laugh, loud but not jolly as it was intended to appear, routed Clemenceau's solemn thoughts. It seemed, like Pan's, from a statue, which gleamed in a vista, still to reverberate when the inventor went back to the house.
Everyone whose advice he sought said: Foch. So the redoubtable old radical and anti-clerical summoned General Foch. "I offer you command of the School of War." "I thank you," Foch replied, "but you are doubtless unaware that one of my brothers is a Jesuit." "I know it very well," was Clemenceau's answer. "But you make good officers, and that is the only thing which counts."
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