'"Against the sentence which condemned you put this proof of esteem and sympathy. Honest people and Republicans will think this testimony at least as good as any other. Accept, Madame, the assurances of my most distinguished consideration.
'Ulysses bewailing the departure of Calypso is charming, is it not?' said my friend. 'M. Petit is a cotton-velvet manufacturer, and his classics are cotton classics. But what do you say to the applause of "honest people" acclaiming a mayor who puts his hand into the public treasury and makes a present out of it to soothe the injured feelings of a schoolmistress fined by a public tribunal for ill-treating her pupils? Can you ask for a more flagrant illustration of the state to which this Republic is bringing our public services? And the mayor who wrote this letter, and took this money out of the public treasury, and offered this open insult to the tribunals of the city of Amiens, has since then been made a senator of the Republic, with the help and concurrence of M. Dauphin, then First President of our Courts, whose plain official duty it was to revoke his commission as mayor as soon as this letter was published! With such men as this in the French Senate do you wonder the country laughs at senatorial courts of justice? I have no great opinion of General Boulanger, though I have as good an opinion of him as of M. Clémenceau, who invented him. But really is it not grotesque to see such cotton-velvet senators as this mayor of Amiens going about to decide questions of fidelity to public duty? Take my word for it' he continued, 'it is the direct personal knowledge which the people have of just such personages as the mayor of Amiens all over France, which makes two-thirds of the popular strength of General Boulanger. If the Senate and the Government succeed in putting about the impression that General Boulanger is no better than they are, they will no doubt weaken him with the people, but they will not strengthen themselves. This Third Republic is dying, not of any passion for the monarchy, not even of the Imperialist legend, which is very strong in the country--more because France was so prosperous under the third Napoleon than because France dominated Europe under the first Napoleon: it is dying of popular contempt. It is dying of the Goblets, the Petits, the Dauphins. They are to be found all over France--under different names--yes--but always the same: shallow, vain, vulgar sycophants of universal suffrage while they are out of place, bullies and traders when they are in power. And then!' he exclaimed after a pause, 'what most exasperates me is that they are such a pack of wordmongers, for ever ranting about things which may have intoxicated our grandfathers in 1792--they don't seem to me to have invented gunpowder, our grandfathers!--but which simply make sensible men sick to-day.