t I am right. I wash
my hands of it all. But when I think of it I see on the wall _Finis
Galliae_! For while I despair of the republic, I have no hope of a
monarchy. Nothing but a personality can carry on the republic--and
nothing but a personality can restore the monarchy.

'The friends of the poor little Prince Imperial understood this when
they consented to let him go off to South Africa. If he had been in the
hands of an English general of common sense, or of an English captain of
common courage, he would no doubt have come back safe and sound. And in
that case the odds are that we should be living to-day under the Third
Empire instead of the Third Republic.

'As it is, the Empire, between the significance of Plon-Plon, and the
insignificance of Prince Victor, is like the Republic between Ferry, the
Tonkinese, and Carnot, who ought to spell his name _Carton_!'

'But how is it with the royalists?'

'Ah! their only "personality" known to the people--and that is the value
of a personality in France--is the Duc d'Aumale--and who knows whether
the Duc d'Aumale is a royalist? I have no doubt--absolutely no doubt,'
he said with some emphasis, 'that Say and De Freycinet to-morrow would
gladly join forces with the Conservatives to make the Duc d'Aumale
president if the Conservatives would agree to it, and if the Duc would
accept the place; for that would give the Republic a new lease of life
in the first place, and in the second place it would utterly
disintegrate the royalists, both white and blue. If the Duc is not a
"great Frenchman" in the electoral sense of the phrase, he is the most
creditably conspicuous of living Frenchmen, which is something.'

'More so than his nephew the Comte de Paris?'

'Yes, certainly, in the popular mind. Personally, I do not think he
would make either so good a president of a republic, or so good a king
as the Comte de Paris, whose manifesto I think shows him to be a man of
clear and sound constitutional ideas, but the French people do not know
him. It was a blunder, by the way, in my opinion,' he added after a
moment, 'of Boulanger to expel the Comte de Paris. His exile and his
action in exile have made him better known in France than he would have
been, had he been left to live quietly at Eu and in Paris. Furthermore,
what sort of a republic is it in which a family of princes cannot live
without tempting the whole population to make one of them king? The
expulsion of the princes belon