'I don't mean that exactly,' said my friend. 'What I mean is, that Carnot III. is not clever enough to know whether the people around him are or are not honest. His grandfather was. Carnot I. would have cut a great figure in our present Senate, and in the party of the "sick at heart"--the respectable gentlemen, I mean, who are always consenting, under the stress of some "reason of State," to vote for one or another piece of rascality, though it makes them "sick at heart" to do so. Carnot I. voted in this way for the murder of Louis XVI., and he takes pains to tell us that all his colleagues in the Convention who voted for it did so in dread of the mob in the galleries. Just in the same way he was sharp enough to join Napoleon during the Hundred Days, because he saw that his best chance of saving his own head and staying in France was to keep out the Bourbons. This Carnot III. is, I dare say, more honest and less calculating--for he is certainly more dull--than his grandfather. Perhaps he may turn out to be the Louis XVI. of the Republic.' How much has actually been spent on the works here to make Calais a great seaport, it is not easy to ascertain; but the lowest estimates stated to me seem to be quite out of proportion with the results actually achieved. My conversation on this point with my friend from Picardy is worth recording. 'Ten years ago,' he said, 'the amount to be spent on Calais was set down at eleven millions of francs. I feel quite sure that at least twice this sum has been actually spent here since the work began in 1881.' 'Why do you feel sure of this?' 'Because twice the first estimate has been avowedly spent everywhere in France on the whole scheme. Calais alone figures this year in the budget for sixteen millions and a half! You were in France, were you not, in 1880, and you must surely remember the songs that used to be sung in the streets:-- "C'est Leon Say, c'est Freycinet, C'est Freycinet, c'est Leon Say." 'These two men, both of them men of business, both financiers (though the "white mouse"[1] is a bit of a visionary) and both men of ability, deliberately adopted, in 1879, after a single conversation with Gambetta, a scheme improvised by him, who was neither a man of business nor a financier, but a declamatory Bohemian, for keeping up the war expenditure by committing France to the creation of a complete "commercial outfit." [1] This is the popular nickname of M. de Freycinet.