Everyone exploded as at the best of jokes. From time to time some new dish was served and we ate; the excitement grew steadily as we drank and the heat became tremendous. At length Rochefort gave the order to open the windows, which all gave on the rue Royale and the great place.
Suddenly the cry came to us from the crowd outside: 'Vive Boulanger!' It was taken up by the thousand voices and carried in a great wave of sound to the Church and far up the Boulevard; and again the air throbbed with the cry:
'Vive Boulanger.' I went to find Laguerre: he was surrounded; Rochefort: he was perorating. I went to the window: you could have walked across the great open place on the heads of the crowd. I made my way downstairs and the head waiter whom I knew assured me that there were five thousand students in the crowd.
I returned to the dining room. The quietest man in the place was General Boulanger, drinking his coffee calmly at the head of the table. And again the cry went up, thrilling me: 'Vive Boulanger, Vive Boulanger! I could not keep still. I went to him and said, 'Surely, General, it is time. The hour has struck!'
'What do you mean?' he asked with perfect composure.
'The Elysee Palace is just over there,' and I pointed, 'hardly quarter of a kilometre to go!'
To my astonishment he shook his head. 'What!' I cried. 'When are we to start?'
'We have no forces,' he replied.
I laughed aloud. 'There are five thousand students below there waiting,' I cried, and again, as if to give weight to my challenge, came the great wave of sound: 'Vive Boulanger, Vive Boulanger!'
It affected him. He leant towards me and said, 'I'm willing and ready. See Rochefort and Dillon: if they agree, we'll start.' I passed behind him round the table and went to Rochefort, still talking; I drew him on one side and said,
'Boulanger's ready to go to the Elysee.'
Blank surprise came over his face: a moment's thought and then an imperious,
'Non, non! restons dans l'ordre.'
'Order is a first-rate resting place,' I said, 'but you don't find crowns in it.'
'We're not ready,' retorted Rochefort. 'We've made no preparations!'
'First-rate'; I said, 'perhaps the others are equally unprepared. Our force is there in the street ready. Listen!' And again the cry arose: 'Vive Boulanger, Vive Boulanger!' Rochefort shook his head resolutely and turned away.
Suddenly it came to me: that was why Napoleon the Third had succeeded, because he was ready to try and try again. Had he not failed twice before he finally won? I went back to Boulanger. 'What does Rochefort say?' he asked at once and I told him. 'But he's wrong,' I went on. 'That's why Napoleon won.
He tried and failed, tried and failed again, but the third time he won. Try! Try again! They can't eat you!'
Le brav' General shook his head. 'We've made no preparations,' he said, repeating Rochefort's foolish word. And a minute or two later Laguerre had the same answer: 'Not prepared'-as if preparation was necessary.
'I can't act against Rochefort,' was le brav' General's last word. 'What do you risk?' I cried. 'Nothing. They can't punish you for wishing to pay a visit to the President?' He shook his head slowly; he was in doubt. I turned away: kings who daren't crown themselves are not worth crowning. I went round and shook hands with Rochefort, Laguerre and le Comte Dillon. They were all talking eagerly, hopefully of their chances, of what might happen, no one of them seeing the plain fact that unless they could get an election to sweep France as Paris had been swept that day, they'd never have a better chance than that moment.
I went out into the street, almost at the door was met by a young man who asked, 'Is he coming?' I shook my head, grinning as he turned away, evidently disappointed. I hesitated; if they had been Englishmen I'd have asked the young fellow to come up with me and speak to Boulanger himself.
But no! They might resent it. I've heard since that Naquet, the Senator, also advised Boulanger to go to the Elysee that night. It may be true. This is sure:
the crowd of students expected the General to do something, to have at least a try for a crown!
His opponents, or one of them, was wiser: it was Mr. Constans who had just come into the Government with a speckled reputation from the Far East.
Mme. Laguerre's word for him was the best; ni conscience, ni tete, mais du poing. He now showed resolution. Scenting the danger, he threatened Boulanger, or sent some false friend to him with the intimation that his arrest had been resolved, and at once Boulanger fled to Brussels. In the summer he came over to London, a damp squib. Everyone saw when he fled from Paris that he had lost his chance. I asked him to dinner in Park Lane and had Wyndham and half a dozen friends to meet him. A witty and pretty Irishwoman insisted that he should talk English to her, and to my surprise he talked quite fairly for a Frenchman, and in answer to my question said that he had been at school in Brighton, 'but after thirty years or so one forgets a language.'
I dined with him a little later once or twice in Portland Place, but it was depressing and the champagne was appalling, sweet as sugar. His friends, the ubiquitous Rochefort among them, tried a little later to get up a demonstration at the Alexandra Palace and a banquet, but only a few people went out of curiosity; and poor Boulanger issued an immensely long address 'to the People, my sole Judge,' meaning the people of Paris. But they had already judged and condemned him by default, though he didn't seem to know it.
No one knew or cared how long he stayed in London or when he left it: his bolt was shot. Suddenly, a couple of years later, the news came to us that he had killed himself in Brussels on the grave of his bonne amie, Madame Bonnemain, and so went into the shrouding silence, this poor Antony, who we fancied might have been a Caesar. But greatness was not in him.
Many are called; but few chosen.
The whole incident set me watching. If the French were determined on la revanche, interesting things would soon happen, and now as editor of the Fortnightly Review, it behoved me to keep in touch with France. But M. Ferry made me alter my opinion. Everyone knows how he made war and annexed Tonquin, but when I saw him later in Paris and congratulated him on his achievement, he told me it had ruined him. 'Even in my own district,' he said,
'my constituents won't forgive me the lives lost and the cost. The French peasant won't have war: he cares nothing for Alsace-Lorraine. You may take it from me: there'll never be a war of revenge!' But the next generation was of a different spirit; they went in for athletics and practiced bodily exercises even in the army, and Caillaux told me in 1912 that the chief French generals thought that Russia and France or France and England could easily whip Germany. I didn't share the opinion, but it was impossible not to recognize that there was a new spirit abroad in France, the exact opposite to what M.
Ferry had predicted twenty years before.
Now I must recall the chief event to me of this decade, the Colonial Conference of 1887 and my meeting with three men: Cecil Rhodes, Alfred Deakin and Jan Hofmeyr. Sir Henry Holland presided at the meetings of twenty or thirty colonial ministers with a courteous good nature that did not exclude dignity, but it was Jan Hofmeyr, whom I had previously met in Cape Town on my first voyage round the world, that I most wished to see. I wanted to meet him and find out whether my first estimate of him ten years ago or so before was justified. He came to lunch and dined with me; I got to know him really well and considered him from that time on one of the ablest and best men I've ever met. The breadth of view and imperial fairness of his fine Dutch mind taught me to understand and appreciate the best English mind.
I began to see that the English race had high qualities in profusion, and above all a genius for government founded on individual character and a recognition of the real forces in practical life, which did not exclude ideal strivings. Strange to say, though gifted with a singular sense of physical beauty, as I have, I think, shown, the English don't even attempt to foster or develop this, which I regard as their highest endowment. The French establish opera houses and national and municipal schools of music, and subsidize even provincial art galleries and so forth, and the Germans spend money freely, endowing chemical and physical laboratories; but the English and Americans close their eyes to all such spiritual needs. The object of all civilized life is the humanization of man, and it must be admitted that less is done in this direction by England and America than by almost any state in Christendom. Jan Hofmeyr was too much occupied with the possible conflict between Briton and Boer and the pressure of the coloured races to care much for national theatres or municipal art schools.
Nor did I talk with him about them, the Dutch caring even less for art than the English. It was Hofmeyr, I think, sturdy, broad, sensible Boer that he was, who introduced me to Cecil Rhodes, but Rhodes at first did not
