The years 1865 and 1866 had been spent in administrative experiments. At first French officers detached from the service were placed in the various departments of the government as undersecretaries, in the hope of bringing about an honest and efficient organization without giving undue umbrage to the Mexicans. Members of the marshal's own household served thus in the War Department and in the Emperor's military office. But the efforts of the French to introduce regularity into the various offices of the administration were so hampered that, even had the task been an easy one, it is not likely that much could have been accomplished. They had everything against them, even their allies and the monarch whom they wished to serve. When, however, in 1866, the situation was found to be desperate, the Emperor, seriously alarmed, became more earnest and called the French to the rescue. Colonel Loysel was made chief of the military office of the Emperor, and the full control of the departments of War and of Finance was given respectively to Colonel Osmont, the chief of staff of the Corps Expeditionnaire, and to M. Friant, the chief of its commissariat. But at this time there was not a dollar in the treasury; the sources of imperial revenue were daily diminishing; and the expenses of the government were now paid by the marshal out of the French treasury, under his own responsibility. The hour had been allowed to go by when organization was possible. The marshal felt--and this feeling was shared by others--that neither Colonel Osmont nor M. Friant should have accepted a position of trust impossible to fill with credit at a time when France had resolved to withdraw its support from Maximilian. Their action was attributed to personal motives. The marshal declined to cooperate with or to help them, and they became an additional source of trouble. Later on, when, the Liberal cabinet having withdrawn, Maximilian once more turned to the reactionary party and called to power the clericals, he retained the above-mentioned Frenchmen in their departments. This affectation of confidence only added to the general ill feeling. Under the conditions of open hostility then existing between the French and Mexican governments the interests of each were too wide apart for such a connection to continue without danger. A request from the commander-in-chief to MM. Osmont and Friant that they choose between their present ministerial functions and their respective positions in the Corps Expeditionnaire gave rise to a correspondence between the marshal and the Emperor, in the course of which the aggressive insistence of the latter compelled the former to refer the matter to the home government.