voter had deposited a single vote for General Boulanger! 'Had
there been any disturbances anywhere?' No, none at all. 'We cheered when
we got the returns,' said the giant; 'we cheered for M. de Witt, and we
cried "Vive le Roi!" They didn't like it, but they were so badly beaten,
they kept quiet. I believe though,' he added, 'they would have arrested
us if we had cried "Vive Bocher!" That is more than they can bear!' and
therewith he laughed aloud, a not unkindly, but formidable laugh.

M. Bocher, who was made Prefect of the Calvados by M. Guizot, and who is
now a senator for that department, is, I am assured, the special _bete
noire_ of the Third Republic in Normandy. His long and honourable
connection with the public service has won for him the esteem of all the
people of the Calvados, while his thorough knowledge of the political
history of the country and of his time, his cool clear judgment, his
temperate but fearless assertion through good and evil report of his
political convictions, and his keen insight into character, must give
him long odds in any contest with the ill-trained and miserably-equipped
political camp-followers who have been coming of late years into the
front of the Republican battle.

They gave M. Bocher a banquet not long ago at Pont-l'Eveque, at which he
made a very telling speech, and brought down the house by inviting his
hearers to contemplate M. Grevy and M. Carnot as typical illustrations
of the great superiority of a republic over a monarchy, and of the
elective over the hereditary principle! The Republicans, he said, had
twice elected to the chief magistracy an austerely virtuous Republican
whom they had finally been compelled to throw out at the window of the
Elysee, as 'the complaisant and guilty witness, if not the interested
accomplice, of scandals which revolted the public conscience!' And whom
had the elective principle put into his place, under the pressure of
irreconcilable personal rivalries, and of a threatened popular outbreak?
A man whose recommendations were his own relative personal obscurity and
the traditional reputation of his grandfather!

With M. Grevy and M. Carnot the Norman farmers have a special quarrel
which gave zest to the caustic periods of M. Bocher. The all-powerful
son-in-law of M. Grevy, M. Wilson, proposed in the National Assembly in
1872, and with the influence of M. Thiers, then President, succeeded in
passing a law heavily taxing, and in an inquisitori