No sooner was Boulanger cured of his self-inflicted wound than he went on much as he did before. Having ceased to be Minister for War, he was sent down to command an army corps at Clermont-Ferrand. According to all discipline, and regulations duly to be observed by generals at large, this kept the man appointed out of Paris. Not so Boulanger. He visited the capital at least twice. Thereupon he was deprived of his command and his name was removed from the Army List. That, by the rules of war and politics, ought to have finished him. But it didn't. The Radicals and Republicans had still no idea what an ugly Frankenstein they had created for themselves. True, Clemenceau had declared definitely against his own protégé the moment he saw the line he was taking; but he underrated entirely the position to which Boulanger had attained, not only among the reactionaries but in the hearts and minds of the French people. For Boulanger, now gifted with a free hand, went into the political arena at once, and was a candidate simultaneously for the Nord and the Dordogne: provincial districts with, of course, a totally different sort of electorate from that of the capital, where the _brav' Général_ with his fine figure on horseback was already the hero of the Parisians. He was elected and sat for the Nord. Still Clemenceau, far-seeing and sagacious as he generally is in his judgment of political events and personal character, failed to appreciate what his cousin had drifted into rather than had deliberately worked for. Nor perhaps did he estimate highly enough either the cleverness or the unscrupulousness of the men and women who were backing him. Certain it is that, although Boulangism was now becoming a powerful political cult, Clemenceau and other advanced men, such as my old friend Paul Brousse, President of the Paris Municipal Council, were still of opinion that Boulanger was going down rather than up. It was a mistake that might have cost not only the Radicals but the French Republic as a whole very dear. For the General had the qualities of his defects. Agreeable, good-natured, frank, accessible and friendly to all who approached him, with enough ability to gauge fairly well what was going on around him, loving display for its own sake, and ever ready to pose in dignified and pleasing attitude, before a populace by no means averse from well-managed advertisement, while not apparently bent upon forcing his own will or dictatorship upon the country--Boulanger, both before and after his election for the Nord, was much more formidable than he looked to those who only measured his power from the standpoint of wide intelligence. This the rather because there was no lack of money to push his pretensions to high place.