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Updated: May 9, 2025
I was indebted to the distinction of my manners, to the resonance of my voice, which the president of the administrative council has had a chance to appreciate at the meetings of the Caisse Territoriale, for the privilege of taking part in that sumptuous festivity, where I stood for three hours in the reception-room, amid flowers and draperies, dressed in scarlet and gold, with the majestic bearing peculiar to persons who exert some little authority, and with my calves exposed for the first time in my life, and sent the name of each guest like the report of a cannon into the long line of five salons, a resplendent footman saluting each time with the bing of his halberd on the floor.
To have seen the Caisse Territoriale as I have seen it, fireless rooms, never swept, covered with the dust of the desert, notices of protest piled high on the desks, a notice of sale on execution at the door every week, and my ragout diffusing the odor of a poor man's kitchen over it all; and to witness now the rehabilitation of our Society in its newly-furnished salons, where it is my duty to light ministerial fires, in the midst of a busy throng, with whistles, electric bells, piles of gold pieces so high that they topple over it borders on the miraculous.
There are those who are more unfortunate than we, M. Francis, for instance, whom I saw at the Territoriale this morning, pale and thin, with disgraceful linen and ragged cuffs, which he continues to pull down as a matter of habit.
But in that case, what would become of me and the Territoriale, and my advances and my back pay? That Francis left me with cold shivers running down my back.
Was that addressed to the director of the Caisse Territoriale or to the defaulting ex-receiver-general? In any event, the employment at the outset of the brutal method of formal summons, instead of a quiet notification, was sufficiently indicative of the seriousness of the affair and the firm determination of the authorities.
A thousand matters, the Caisse Territoriale, the arrangement of the picture gallery, races at Tattersall's with Bois-l'Héry, some gimcrack to go and see, here or there, at the houses of collectors to whom Schwalbach recommended him, hours passed with trainers, jockeys, dealers in curiosities, the occupied, varied existence of a bourgeois gentleman in modern Paris.
He wanted two things at that time, a seat in the Chamber of Deputies and the cross of the Legion of Honor. In his view those were the first two stages of the long ascent which his ambition impelled him to undertake. He certainly would be chosen a deputy through the Caisse Territoriale, at the head of which he was.
I realized then the danger of combinazioni, and that it was not always well to laugh at M. Gogo. One thing comforted me somewhat, however, and that was that, as I had never taken part in the deliberations of the Territoriale, I was in no way responsible for its transactions and swindles. But explain this.
He has adopted a very different tone and manners. Day before yesterday at the Territoriale, he made such a hullabaloo as you can't imagine. I heard him shout in the middle of the council meeting: 'You have lied to me, you have robbed me and made me as much of a thief as yourselves.
This village lay within a mile of the front line, and it seemed uncanny to be so near the enemy and yet to hear so few shots fired. Indeed it was almost too good to be true. The unit did not take over the defence of this area, and orders came soon that on the 15th the Battalion was to take over a sector on the Wailly front, where it was to relieve a battalion of the 81ième Régiment Territoriale.
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