Towards the close of this historic sitting Clemenceau himself entered the Senate. He received an astounding welcome. Everyone present rose to greet him. Men who but yesterday were his enemies, and are still his opponents, rushed forward with the rest to applaud him, to shake hands with him, to thank him, to embrace him. The excitement was so overwhelming that Clemenceau, for the first time in his life, broke down. Tears coursed down his cheeks and for some moments he was unable to speak. When he did he, as always, refused to take the credit and the glory of the overthrow of the Germans and their confederates to himself. In victory in November, as when he was confronting difficulty and danger in March and July, his first and his last thoughts were of France. The spirit of France, the citizens of France, the soldiers and sailors of France: these were they who in comradeship with the Allies had achieved the great victory over the last convulsions of savagery. He had been more than fully rewarded for all he had done by witnessing the expulsion of the foreigner and the liberation of the territory. His task had merely been to give full expression to the courage and determination of his countrymen. Clemenceau spoke not only as a French statesman, as the veteran upholder of the French Republic, but as one who remembered well the horrors and defeats of 1870-71, now followed, forty-eight years later, by the horrors and the triumphs of 1918. The Senators who heard him and acclaimed him felt that Clemenceau was addressing them as the man who had embodied in himself, for all those long years, the soul of the France of the Great Revolution, and now at last was able to show what he really was. This moving reception in the Senate had been preceded by an almost equally glowing display of enthusiasm in the Chamber of Deputies. There too--with the exception of a mere handful of Socialists whose extraordinary devotion to Caillaux and Malvy blinds them to the genius of their countryman--the whole Assembly rose up to welcome and cheer him. Clemenceau, speaking there, also, under strong emotion, after two stirring orations from M. Deschanel and M. Pichon, assured the Deputies that the armistice which would be granted to Germany could only be on the lines of those accorded to Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Marshal Foch would decide the details, which now all the world knows. But, after having dealt with the armistice implored by Germany, Clemenceau went back to the past and said: "When I remember that I entered the National Assembly of Bordeaux in 1871, and was--I am the last of them--one of the signers of the protests against the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine . . . it is impossible for me, now peace is certain and our victory assured, to leave the tribune without paying homage to those who were the initiators and first workers in the immense task which is being completed at this moment.