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The catastrophe of the treaty of the four powers, an insult to France, is now an established historical fact; but it is necessary to remind the reader that from July to the last of August the French funds, alarmed by the prospect of war, a fear which Monsieur Thiers did much to promote, fell twenty francs, and the Three-per-cents went down to sixty.
We have beheaded one monarch, exiled three generations of kings merely to have a dictator, 'mal né, mal fait, et mal élevé. There has been a rumour of a change of ministry, but no one believes it. The overthrow of Thiers would be the signal for a revolution, and the fortifications are not yet completed to master it. May not all these armaments be the precursors of some coup d'état?
In the page alluded to, one of the most thoughtful in the Consulate and Empire, Thiers is so far from putting the work of Sieyès on the British level, that his one purpose is to display the superiority of a government which is the product of much experiment and incessant adaptation to the artificial outcome of political logic.
I should have thought that the Prussians who have fought with us would have known better of what metal English soldiers were composed. But to return to M. Thiers; I should still say notwithstanding all that has past, his talents are held in such estimation, that certain changes might occur which would again place him at the helm of the nation.
Another event that happened early in 1873 further served to justify Thiers' contention that the Republic was the only possible form of government. On January 9, Napoleon III. died of the internal disease which for seven years past had been undermining his strength. His son, the Prince Imperial, was at present far too young to figure as a claimant to the throne.
The collections are there as he left them; the historical documents have been removed to the Archives. To Marseilles, his native city, he left his water-color copies of the chief works of the great masters in Italy. Thiers was childless. Whatever may have been the personal relations in which he stood to his wife, no woman was ever more truly devoted to the interests of her husband.
For homage to be rendered Lamartine in 1848 and Thiers in 1871, the stimulant was needed of urgent, inexorable interest. As soon as the danger was passed the parliamentary world forgot in the same instant its gratitude and its fright." I have quoted the preceding passage for the sake of the facts it contains, not of the explanations it offers, their psychology being somewhat poor.
Reeve's connexions were scarcely less numerous than in England. Guizot, Thiers, Cousin, Tocqueville, Villemain, Circourt in fact, nearly all the leading figures in French literature and politics during the reign of Louis Philippe were among his friends or correspondents.
Washburne on Saturday night that since M. Thiers had quitted Paris he had had no communication with the outer world, and did not even know whether the Tours delegation was still there.
So that this King of the French and M. Thiers realise, after a quarter of a century, that the hero who was driven to abdicate, and then banished from France, did defend his country and make it illustrious, and that the removal of his ashes to France was the "most efficacious means" of cementing the union of the country that forsook him in his misfortune with the country that sent him to perish on a rock.
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