All sorts of excuses and explanations were made for the hesitation of the General to provoke civil war. But on that one night he should have made his position secure or have died in the attempt. Success was, so far as a foreigner on the spot could judge, quite possible. It might even have been achieved without any forcible action. There was no certainty that, when the move decided upon was actually made, either troops or the people would have sided against the hero of the day. But that hero failed to rise to the level of the occasion, and the result was fatal to the immediate prospects of himself and his followers. A warrant was issued for his arrest and he ran away from Paris. He now became an object of pity rather than of alarm. He was condemned in his absence, and not long afterwards his suicide on the grave of his mistress, in Brussels, ended his career. Thus the estimate which Clemenceau had formed of his permanent influence was justified. But it was a narrow escape. The three pretenders who had come to France to watch the final development soon found their way across the frontier. Nevertheless, General Boulanger, with all his weakness and hesitation, was for many months the most dangerous enemy the Republic ever faced. His downfall helped also to add to the number of Clemenceau's bitter enemies, and was partly instrumental in bringing about the political disaster which befell him later. For the Radicals who had been deceived by Boulanger cherished animosity against the Radical leader for reasons which, though quite incompatible, were decisive for them. CHAPTER IX PANAMA AND DRAGUIGNAN The great Panama Canal Affair was only one of many financial scandals which seriously damaged the good fame of the French Republic founded upon the fall of the Empire, and consecrated by the collapse of the Commune of Paris. But this Panama scandal was by far the most important and most nefarious, alike in respect to the amount of money involved, the position and character of the people mixed up in it, and the wide ramifications of wholesale corruption throughout the political world that were in the end revealed.