chist majority of 19,868 in a total poll of 82,216. This
gives us a falling off in the total poll of 6,848, and an increase in
the Monarchist majority of 6,497 votes!

I called M. Conrad de Witt's attention, after the legislative elections
were over, to an article in an English periodical by a French Protestant
writer, M. Monod, in which the Monarchist majority of 1889 in the
Calvados was attributed to the bad harvest of pears and apples. The
veteran Protestant President of the Society of Agriculture in the
Calvados smiled in a quiet and significant way, and simply said, 'Ah! I
think we are more solid than that!'

So indeed it would seem!

The 'apple-blight' of the Calvados must obviously have extended into the
neighbouring department of the Eure, or at least into the great and busy
arrondissement of Bernay, which gave the Monarchist candidate in
September 1889 the tremendous majority of 5,550 votes in a total poll of
12,772. Possibly, too, there may be some occult relation between this
remarkable result and the presence in this arrondissement of one of the
most distinguished of living Frenchmen, and one of the most outspoken
champions of the Constitutional Monarchy. An able man with a mind of his
own, and the courage to speak it, is a force in any country at any time.
In France at this time such a man is a determining force. The obvious
weakness of the Monarchical party in France was touched by the
Committee of the Catholic Association in their report to which I have
alluded in another chapter. It is the association in the popular mind of
the monarchical idea with the traditions of Versailles and with the
'pomps and vanities' of what is ridiculously called '_le high-life_' of
modern Paris. As a matter of fact, all that was silliest and most
scandalous in the Court life of France in the eighteenth century was
reproduced and exaggerated under the Directory. What is there to choose
between Louis XV. doffing his hat beside the coach of Madame Du Barry,
and Barras ordering Ouvrard to keep Madame Tallien in diamonds,
opera-boxes, coaches and villas, out of the profits of public loans and
contracts for the service of the 'Republic one and indivisible'? Formula
for Formula (to speak after the manner of Mr. Carlyle), is not the
Republican Formula of the two the more demoralizing, dismal, degraded,
and altogether hopeless? What is called '_le high-life_' of Paris is
neither Royalist nor Republican. It is merely shallow and vul