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Whether this was said in irony or ignorance, had General Grant taken with him to Paris his late Secretary of the Interior, the accomplished Z. Chandler, the pair might have furnished suggestions to Marshal MacMahon and Fourtou that would have changed the dulcet strains of Maître Gambetta into dismal howls.
W.'s ministry came to an end on the famous 16th of May, 1877, when Marshal MacMahon suddenly took matters in his own hands and dismissed his cabinet presided over by M. Jules Simon. Things had not been going smoothly for some time, could not between two men of such absolute difference of origin, habits, and ideas. Still, the famous letter written by the marshal to Jules Simon was a thunderclap.
My sleep was full of nightmares, and I had a relapse. The news was worse every day. After Saint-Privat came Gravelotte, where 36,000 men, French and German, were cut down in a few hours. Then came the sublime but powerless efforts of MacMahon, who was driven back as far as Sedan; and finally Sedan. Sedan! Ah, the horrible awakening!
Marshals MacMahon and Bazaine were represented as leading the enemy craftily into a snare, and the illusion was kept up that the Germans would be cut to pieces by the peasantry "before they could lay their sacrilegious hands," said Victor Hugo, "upon the Mecca of civilization."
Bosquet himself was in the sixth parallel; MacMahon, surrounded by his staff, was standing in the front trench with his watch in his hand. No one spoke in this group, in which the calm faces showed no sign of the excitement visible in the zouaves on either side of them, who, though silent, were trembling with impatience. Close at hand there was a corporal holding a little tricolor.
Two days later occurred a battle which decided the fate of the whole war, that of Worth-Reideshofen, where the army of the crown prince met that of MacMahon, and after a desperate struggle, which continued for fifteen hours, completely defeated him, with very heavy losses on both sides.
* The parliamentary revolution of May, 1873, by which M. Thiers was overthrown and Marshal MacMahon installed in his place with the object of restoring the Monarchy in France. Trans. M. Grevy's decree by which the Jesuits were expelled. Trans. "And so, my dear Gerard," he said to the young man seated beside him, "your marriage is really to come off this year?"
She travelled from Maudesley Abbey to Portland Place in the company of her nurse, a certain Elizabeth Madden, who had been Lady Louisa's own maid before her marriage with Captain Macmahon, and who was devotedly attached to the motherless girl. But Mrs. Madden was not Laura Dunbar's only companion upon this occasion.
Meanwhile MacMahon, on hearing of Douay's defeat, had marched to Reichshofen, received there the shattered remnants of Douay's division, and, with the emperor's orders under no circumstances to decline a battle, took up a position on the hills of which Worth, Froeschweiler and Elsasshausen form the central points.
MacMahon had some design of turning back, uniting with another army corps, and attacking the Prussians in the rear, thus hemming in part of their army between himself and the troops of Bazaine in Metz; but he seems to have been really in the position of a pawn driven about a chess-board by an experienced player.
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