At this time Clemenceau, owing to his apparently resolute determination not to take office, no matter how many Ministries he might successfully bring to naught, had got into a backwater. He had become permanently Senator for the Department of the Var in 1902, a startling, almost incomprehensible move when his continued furious opposition to that body is remembered. However, having thus made unto himself friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, he found their "eternal habitations" a not unpleasing dwelling-place. His position as publicist and journalist was assured and nothing could shake it; his criticisms by speech and pen were as telling and vigorous as ever. But at sixty-five years of age he was still a free-lance, a force which all parties were obliged to consider but with which no Ministry could come to terms. It was a strange position. So his countrymen thought. Those who most admired his ability and his career saw no outlet for his marvellous energy that would be permanently beneficial to the country in a constructive sense. Perhaps no politician of any nation ever so persistently refused to "range himself" as did Clemenceau for thirty-five years of stormy public life. He revelled in opposition: he rejoiced in overthrow. He was on the side of the people, but he would not help them to realise their aspirations in practical life. He was a political philosopher compact of incompatibilities. As an individualist he was a stalwart champion of individual freedom: as a man of affairs he advocated the use of State power to limit the anarchic domination of personal power. There was no understanding such a man. He would remain a brilliant Frenchman of whom all were proud until the end, when he would be buried with public honours as the champion Ishmaelite of his age. "When I saw he doubted about everything, I decided that I needed nobody to keep me ignorant," wrote Voltaire. Much the same idea prevailed about Clemenceau. He was the universal sceptic: the man whose sole intellectual enjoyment was to point out the limitless incapacity of others with epigrammatic zeal. I myself, who had watched him closely, was afraid that he would allow all opportunities for displaying his really great faculties in a ministerial capacity to slip by and leave to his friends only the mournful task of writing his epitaph: "Here lies Clemenceau the destroyer who could have been a creator." But this was all nonsense. "_Ce jeune homme_"--Clemenceau will die young--"_d'un si beau passé_" had also before him _un bel avenir_. Nothing is certain with Clemenceau but the unforeseen. At the very time when people had made up their minds that he was a back number, he had a brand-new volume of his adventures ready for the press. After a few conversations with M. Rouvier and then with M. Sarrien, he became Minister of the Interior in the latter's Cabinet. He took office for the first time on March 12th, 1906, at a very stirring epoch.