United States or India ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I first began to take charge of public affairs in connection with an election that took place in the city where I found myself. M. DE LESSEPS opposed THIERS and GAMBETTA. He presented himself as an independent candidate. Was he? I suspected. Already I had my secret agents in every centre of population.
Gambetta moved that the representatives of the people had no confidence in a cabinet which was not free in its actions and not republican in its principles. The sudden death of Thiers, whose last writing was a defense of the republic, stirred the heart of the nation and added to the excitement, which soon reached fever heat.
M. Thiers appears to entertain a consciousness of his talents, but does not, I really think, overrate them. The Prince and Princess Soutzo with their family, spent yesterday with us. Their eldest daughter, the Princess Helena, is a beautiful girl, with captivating manners, and highly cultivated mind, and the little Mary, though still in infancy, is one of the cleverest children I ever saw.
He began to rail against Monsieur Thiers, but I stopped him, saying that the result of my Mission had been so completely successful, I was desirous of having everything of an unpleasant nature forgotten." Sir Moses expressed himself to all his friends as being greatly pleased with his reception by the King. Numerous visitors called and left cards.
The part Thiers had to play was a very difficult one; he knew that if Germany insisted on her full demands he must accept; he was too experienced a politician to be misled by any of the illusions under which Favre had laboured. He, as all other Frenchmen, had during the last three months learned a bitter lesson.
Every one was perfectly respectful to the duke, but the extreme Legitimists went away at once. We went quite often to Monsieur and Madame Thiers, who received every evening in their big gloomy house in the Place St. Georges.
Having quarrelled with the Doctrinaires, he led the attack which overthrew Guizot, and was one of three on whom Thiers was relying to save the throne, when the king went away in a cab and carried the dynasty with him.
Laughing the while, he took a sheet of paper from my drawer, asked me for a pen, asked Savatier-Laroche for a pinch of snuff, and wrote a few lines. This done he mounted the tribune and addressed grave and haughty words to M. Thiers, who had been attacking the revolution of February.
Finally, the leaders of this party itself, Thiers and Berryer the Orleanist and the Legitimist were compelled to proclaim themselves openly as republicans; to admit that their heart favored royalty, but their head the republic; that their parliamentary republic was the only possible form for the rule of the bourgeoisie Thus were they compelled to brand, before the eyes of the bourgeois class itself, as an intrigue as dangerous as it was senseless the restoration plans, which they continued to pursue indefatigably behind the back of the parliament.
His labors were prodigious; he rose at four in the morning, and wrote thirty or forty letters before breakfast. He was equally remarkable as an administrator and as a statesman, examining all the details of government, and leaving nothing to chance. No man in France knew the condition of the country so well as Thiers, from both a civil and a military point of view.