For the next quarter of a century Clemenceau was exclusively occupied with politics. In 1870 he was settled in Montmartre, in a circle of workmen and little employés whose bodily maladies he relieved, and whose souls he inflamed with his ardent dreams of a humanitarian paradise when once the hated Empire should fall. Suddenly the war broke out, and the Empire was shattered. The government of defence nominated Dr. Clemenceau Mayor of Montmartre, the most violent centre of revolutionary emotion, where the excesses of the Commune presently began. He represented Montmartre at Bordeaux in 1871, and in 1876 Montmartre, which had remained faithful to its doctor-mayor, sent him again to the Chamber of Deputies as its representative. This is not the occasion on which to enter into any detail with regard to the ceaseless activity which he displayed in a purely political capacity between 1870 and 1893. It is enshrined in the history of the Republic, and will occupy the pens of innumerable commentators of French affairs. We can only record that in 1889, M. Clemenceau, who had refused many pressing invitations to leave Paris for Draguignan, consented to take up his election as deputy for the Provençal department. The career of M. Clemenceau as deputy for the Var came to an end in 1893, after the explosion of the Panama scandal. On the 8th of August in that year he pronounced an apologia over his political life, an address full of dignity and fire, in which the failure of his ambition was acknowledged. His figure was never more attractive than it was at that distressing moment, when he found himself the object of almost universal public disfavour. He had, perhaps, over-estimated the vigour of his own prestige; he had browbeaten the political leaders of the day, he had stormed like a bull the china-shops of the little political hucksters, he had contemptuously exposed the intrigues of the baser sort of political politician. He disdained popularity so proudly, that one of his own supporters urged him to cultivate the hatred of the crowd with a little less coquettishness. But he was a political Don Quixote, not to be held nor bound; he could but rush straight upon his own temporary discomfiture.