miens, 'that he was sure of his
election. My reason was that while I saw little real enthusiasm for him
at Amiens, none at all indeed among the middle classes, and no open
display of any on the part of the workmen, I found the peasants for him
almost to a man. They crowded about his railway carriage. They insisted
on shaking hands with him, many of them kissed his hand (that ancient
form of homage lingering still in their traditions), they fired off
guns, and, above all, the women held up their children to be kissed by
him. This settled the question for me. When I saw him kissing the little
girls, I knew that he had captured the mammas, and the mammas govern the
rural regions of Picardy.

'At Doullens I said to him, "You may be sure of your results now. You
will win by twenty-five thousand majority." He was very modest about it;
but, though he certainly is not a great politician, he seemed to
understand the meaning of this unquestionable popular interest in him
and his progress. I could not help, however, calling his attention to
the evidence it gave of what I believe to be the profoundly monarchical
instincts of the peasantry in this part of France.'

'How did he take it?

'Oh! he said nothing, but smiled in a way which might mean anything. Of
course his idea of a republic of honest men means, and can mean, nothing
but a republic with a chief who is beyond the reach of deputies and
contractors.'

'That,' I said, 'seems to have been simply Lafayette's idea, in 1792, of
an American republic for France, with a hereditary executive; or, in
other words, a French edition of the English "republic with a crown."'

M. Fleury replied, that this is rather the aim of the monarchists than
of the Boulangists. One of General Boulanger's lieutenants, M. Mermeix,
already cited, told him frankly that the Boulangists want a sort of
consulate stopping short of the Empire--a strong republic with a
nationally nominated chief, freedom of conscience, freedom of education,
no more parliaments, a simpler public administration, and the cutting
out of the financial cancer which is destroying the resources of France.
The coalition now existing between the royalists, the imperialists, and
the Boulangists, in view of the elections of 1889, obviously rests upon
the conviction, common to all these parties, that the Republic, as at
present constituted, is so far committed to a policy of reckless public
expenditure and of deliberately irreligious p