How many great events, in which those two men were to be concerned, were still in the "abysm of time," as we sat listening to them at Admiral Maxse's dinner-table!--Clémenceau, the younger, and the more fiery and fluent; Chamberlain, with no graces of conversation, and much less ready than the man he was talking with, but producing already the impression of a power, certain to leave its mark, if the man lived, on English history. In a letter to my father after the dinner-party, I described the interest we had both felt in M. Clémenceau. "Yet he seems to me a light weight to ride such a horse as the French democracy!" [Footnote 1: These lines were written shortly before, on the overthrow of M. Panlevé. M. Clémenceau, at the age of seventy-seven, became Prime Minister of France, at what may well be the deciding moment of French destiny (January, 1918).] In the following year, 1885, I remember a long conversation on the Gordon catastrophe with Mr. Chamberlain at Lady Jeune's. It was evident, I thought, that his mind was greatly exercised by the whole story of that disastrous event. He went through it from step to step, ending up deliberately, but with a sigh, "I have never been able to see, from day to day, and I do not see now, how the Ministry could have taken any other course than that they did take." Yet the recently published biography of Sir Charles Dilke shows clearly how very critical Mr. Chamberlain had already become of his great leader, Mr. Gladstone, and how many causes were already preparing the rupture of 1886. * * * * * I first met Mr. Browning in 1884 or 1885, if I remember right, at a Kensington dinner-party, where he took me down. A man who talked loud and much was discoursing on the other side of the table; and a spirit of opposition had clearly entered into Mr. Browning. _À propos_ of some recent acting in London we began to talk of Molière, and presently, as though to shut out the stream of words opposite, which was damping conversation, the old poet--how the splendid brow and the white hair come back to me!--fell to quoting from the famous sonnet scene in "Le Misanthrope": first of all, Alceste's rage with Phillinte's flattery of the wretched verses declaimed by Oronte--"_Morbleu! vil complaisant, vous louez des sottises_"; then the admirable fencing between Oronte and Alceste, where Alceste at first tries to convey his contempt for Oronte's sonnet indirectly, and then bursts out: "_Ce n'est que jeu de mots, qu'affectation pure, Et ce n'est point ainsi que parle la nature_!" breaking immediately into the _vieille chanson_, one line of which is worth all the affected stuff that Célimène and her circle admire.