The Panama affair had disgusted all self-respecting Frenchmen. “Is the Republic to be a failure?” they were asking. Nothing so gives heart to the leaders of lost causes, disappointed political groups, advocates of panaceas and particularly to the radical-minded, as a rousing political scandal. Panama stirred all the parties of France to action—Bourbons and Bonapartists, extreme conservatives, socialists of all the many varieties, and particularly the anarchists. There were four groups of the latter, no one of which would have anything to do with any of the others. It was the Independents who now went into action. Members of this group worked alone, letting not even their fellows know what they had in mind. A branch of the order existed in the United States, and it was one of them, Alexander Berkman, who attempted this same year, 1892, to assassinate Henry Frick in Pittsburgh. The Independent who acted first in Paris was Jules Ravachol by name, a man some thirty-three years old, a dyer by trade, with a courageous but not a criminal face. So I thought when, a little later, I secured his photograph and measurements from the Criminal Identification Bureau for _McClure’s Magazine_. Ravachol began by blowing up various houses. It was like a tocsin. All over France similar outrages followed, and they continued at intervals for two or more years—the crowning one a bomb thrown in the Chamber of Deputies in December of 1893 by a notorious anarchist known as Auguste Vaillant. Several Deputies and eighty or more spectators in the gallery were wounded seriously. It was a ghastly affair. The outbreaks and the rumors of outbreaks as well as the actual destruction had a bad effect on the nerves of many of the French. There was Alphonse Daudet. Madame Daudet had offered to get me a _pensée_ for the collection I was making for _McClure’s Magazine_, and arranged for me to call for the copy. After we had tea she took me to the library to see how “Alphonse was getting on.” It was my first glimpse of him: a little man, with a shock of straight black hair which stood out rather ferociously at the moment, evidently from running his fingers through it. His face was pale, his eyes astonishingly black and bright. He had lost two or three teeth, and the remaining ones were not very good. He was terribly excited. He had not finished his _pensée_, he said, because he had just had a visit from an anarchist. The servant had let in a man who had demanded twenty francs to buy a wagonload of dynamite to blow up the Hôtel de Ville. He grew more and more excited as he talked. “I really expected the man to kill me,” he said, “and I got out this revolver which I always keep in the drawer.” And he pulled it out to show it to me. “A pretty affair,” he said, “if while you two were visiting in there a tragedy had gone on in here.”