Why indeed? If Jules Simon had shown spirit he would have been accounted the foremost man of the Republican party after Thiers’s death, and he might eventually have been President of the Republic in place of M. Grévy. As it was, the Republicans, after their victory at the general election of 1877,[22] refused to rank him as one of their number, and he has ever since been in the humiliating position of a pariah. His speeches in the Senate are always applauded, but not by the Republicans. It has become the fashion among his former allies to speak of him as a renegade, and facetious party-newspapers have not scrupled to play practical jokes upon him. One of these pleasantries was rather funny. A paper announced that M. Simon had inherited a large sum of money, and that, in the excess of his philanthropy, he had taken to distributing twenty ‘napoleons’ every morning among the first five score beggars (being true Republicans) who knocked at his door. For days the Place de la Madeleine, where the unhappy statesman lived was infested by hordes of vagabonds, howling “Vive la République,” and the police found it difficult to disperse these believers in M. Simon’s munificence. [22] There were mistakes all round in that 15th May business. The Conservatives should have allowed the Republicans a little more rope. If the Simon Cabinet had been overthrown by a vote of the Left, and if another Liberal Administration had been put up to meet with the same fate—then would have been the time to dissolve the Lower House. But the Royalists were too impatient. They called for a national condemnation of Republicanism before the nation had grown tired of Republican dissensions. The 16th May was the making of Gambetta as a leader, for up to that time he had only been a free lance—“_un fou furieux_,” as Thiers called him. He stepped into the place which ought to have been Simon’s.