Good nature abounds in M. Ferry’s character, and this quality, in combination with perseverance and a quiet talent for picking up other people’s ideas, has been the secret of his success. During the last years of the Empire while he wrote for the _Temps_, he was a daily frequenter of the Café de Madrid, and there he was appreciated as an attentive listener to no matter whose stories. He had then, as he has now, a face such as is only to be seen on the shoulders of old-fashioned French barristers and Belgravian footmen. The judges of the Second Empire did not allow _avocats_ to wear beards, so M. Ferry shaved his upper lip and chin, but his whiskers were of stupendous size. Add to these a Roman nose, a fine forehead, shrewd playful eyes, a well shaped smiling mouth, and a certain plumpness of girth which removed him altogether out of the category of those lean men whom Shakespeare thought dangerous. He always shook men’s hands with a hearty grip; he could laugh loud and long even when not amused; if conversation flagged he could light it up suddenly with a few crackling jokes, but he generally preferred to sit silent, smoking penny cigars (for he was not rich), sipping absinthe, and taking mental notes of what was being said around him. Now and then, especially if a talker appealed to him, he would nod approval with a grave closing of the eyes, which is the supreme politeness in the art of listening. He never squandered his knowledge in small talk, so that his public speeches always took his most intimate friends aback. Gambetta once said to him: “You are the most secretive of chatter-boxes,”[16] the truth being that Ferry used commonplace ideas in private intercourse, just as some men keep half-pence for beggars. To stake gold in conversational games over a _café_ table was more than his intellectual means could afford. A _blagueur_ himself in a small way, he knew the destructive power of that light chaff which can be thrown upon a good idea while it has the bloom of novelty on it. Then he was not combative. Gambetta, a millionaire in talents, could scatter his best thoughts broadcast without ever impoverishing himself. At the Café Procope, at Brébant’s, and in the dining-room of his friend, Clément Laurier, he would pound his fists on the table and thunder out long passages of the speeches which he intended to deliver, and this without caring whether political opponents heard him. “You are showing your hand,” Laurier[17] and the still more prudent Arthur Ranc used to say. But Gambetta could win without hiding his trumps, or he could win without trumps. [16] “Tu es le plus cachotier des bavards.“