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Updated: May 29, 2025
Possibly pig-headed obstinacy; but in these days of undisguised opportunism, it is rare to find a man who deliberately refuses a throne on account of his convictions. I do not think that the Comte de Chambord would have been a success in present-day British politics. A crisis was averted by extending Marshal MacMahon's tenure of the Presidency to seven years, the "Septennat," as it was called.
There it surprised a weak French division, the vanguard of MacMahon's army, commanded by General Abel Douay, whose scouts had found no trace of the advancing enemy.
Captain Barclay pointed out, to the boys, that the officers and men were somewhat to blame, also; for the utter confusion which prevailed among MacMahon's troops, in their retreat, showed that the whole regimental system was faulty; and that there could have been no real discipline, whatever, or the shattered regiments would have rallied, a few miles from the field of battle.
A gentleman sitting near me, evidently a Frenchman, politely begged me to show him the telegrams. "Oh," said he, "these are old ones, brought over from the evening papers. Let us look at the front page," and, turning the leaves, he pointed to a few lines printed in large letters, "Sedan, September 2, 8 p.m. MacMahon's army has surrendered and laid down its arms.
With the hemming in of Bazaine at Metz and the capture of MacMahon's army at Sedan the crisis of the war was passed, and the Germans practically the victors.
But he, to whom, up till then, nothing could have seemed so tedious as was all that pertained to the cosmopolitan life of Baden or of Nice, now that he learned that Odette had, perhaps, led a 'gay' life once in those pleasure-cities, although he could never find out whether it had been solely to satisfy a want of money which, thanks to himself, she no longer felt, or from some capricious instinct which might, at any moment, revive in her, he would lean, in impotent anguish, blinded and dizzy, over the bottomless abyss into which had passed, in which had been engulfed those years of his own, early in MacMahon's Septennat, in which one spent the winter on the Promenade des Anglais, the summer beneath the limes of Baden, and would find in those years a sad but splendid profundity, such as a poet might have lent to them; and he would have devoted to the reconstruction of all the insignificant details that made up the daily round on the Cote d'Azur in those days, if it could have helped him to understand something that still baffled him in the smile or in the eyes of Odette, more enthusiasm than does the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century Florence, so as to try to penetrate further into the soul of the Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli.
His father was a small proprietor. Diligence and energy rather than brilliancy distinguished the young Jules in his college career. When his college life ended, he went up to Paris and studied for the Bar. MacMahon's kick roused his pugnacity. He went home, took down an old musket, and joined the insurgents, leading an attack upon some barracks where the fighting was severe.
M. Thiers, his government, and his troops were established at Versailles; while Paris, for two months, was in the hands of these desperadoes, who were sending out their orders from the Hôtel de Ville. When finally routed by Marshal MacMahon's troops, after drenching some of the principal buildings with petroleum they set them on fire.
The fact seems to be that de Failly, in command at Bitsch, was a prey to conflicting orders from Metz, and therefore failed to bring up the 5th corps as he should have done. MacMahon's cavalry was also very defective in scouting, and he knew nothing as to the strength of the forces rapidly drawing near from Weissenburg and the east. Certainly his position at Wörth was very strong.
We may expect a great battle, in a day or two." The news came but too soon for two days later Dijon, as well as all France, stood aghast at the news of the utter rout of MacMahon's division, after the desperately contested battle of Woerth; and the not less decided, though less disastrous, defeats of the French left, at Forbach, by the troops of Steinmetz.
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