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The French ministers, bombarded with reproaches by friends and foes, and most uneasy lest their troops in Italy should be destroyed before they could send reinforcements, did disown Oudinot's march on Rome, and Ferdinand de Lesseps was despatched nominally 'to arrange matters in a pacific sense, but actually to gain time.
But when the French Government disavowed their envoy-extraordinary the patriotic, able, straightforward De Lesseps instructing Oudinot to enter Rome by fair means or by foul, sending enormous reënforcements, promising to follow up with the entire French army if necessary, what could they do but recall Garibaldi with all possible despatch? Was it not a proof of their confidence in him?
Thirty years later Mr Montefiore also refused to take a leading part or directorship in the Suez Canal Company, which M. de Lesseps had offered him when in Egypt. I happened to be present at the time when M. de Lesseps called on him with that object.
These are simple facts to be pondered over by busy people who may possibly be in doubt as to whether the "father" of the isthmian enterprise was De Lesseps, Theodore Roosevelt, or Admiral Walker.
I will now challenge you once more, with great respect, and beg leave to remain, yours very truly, Hon. Ferdinand de Lesseps, Paris, France: DEAR SIR I have some shares in the canal which you have been working on, and I am compelled to hypothecate them this summer, in order to paint my house.
The mother thinks constantly of her child, the savant of his science, the artist of his art, the inventor of his inventions, the philanthropist of his endowments, Faraday of electricity, Stephenson of his locomotive, Pasteur of his microbes, De Lesseps of his isthmus, sisters of charity of their poor.
How she frightened me with her bedtime stories! They were all of men murdered or dead of fevers, crossing the trail, or building the railroad, or digging insufficient ditches for De Lesseps. Some of her best went farther back than that. They were thick with the ghosts of old Spaniards and the crimson hands of Morgan's buccaneers.
The first point in all tortuous diplomacy, Eastern or Western, is to gain time; and when General Gordon, intent on business, called on Lesseps the next day that is to say, two days after his arrival from Khartoum the French engineer met him with the smiling observation that he was off for a day in the country, and that he had just sent a telegram to Paris.
Whatever was the measure of confidence which Mazzini felt in Lesseps, he was firm as iron on the main point the non-admittance of the 'friendly' French troops into Rome. Lesseps dragged on the negotiations till his government had finished the preparations for sending to Rome a force which should not be much less than twice in number the whole military resources of the republic.
It was not until comparatively recent days, that is to say, in the time of your grandfather, that the attempt to cut a canal across the Isthmus was successful, and the man who did it was Ferdinand de Lesseps, whose statue stands on the breakwater.
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