The new Chambers assembled at Versailles in November. The Broglie cabinet was out, but a new ministry of the Right faced the new Parliament. Their life was very short and stormy; they were really dead before they began to exist and in December the marshal sent for M. Dufaure and charged him to form a Ministère de Gauche. None of his personal friends, except General Borel at the War Office, was in the new combination. W. was named to the Foreign Office. I was rather disappointed when he came home and told me he had accepted that portfolio. I thought his old ministry, Public Instruction, suited him so well, the work interested him, was entirely to his taste. He knew all the literary and educational world, not only in France but everywhere else--England, of course, where he had kept up with many of his Cambridge comrades, and Germany, where he also had literary connections. However, that wide acquaintance and his perfect knowledge of English and English people helped him very much at once, not only at the Quai d'Orsay, but in all the years he was in England as ambassador. The new ministry, with Dufaure as President of the Council, Léon Say at the Finances, M. de Freycinet at Public Works, and W. at the Foreign Office was announced the 14th of December, 1877. The preliminaries had been long and difficult--the marshal and his friends on one side--the Republicans and Gambetta on the other--the moderates trying to keep things together. Personally, I was rather sorry W. had agreed to be a member of the cabinet; I was not very keen about official life and foresaw a great deal that would be disagreeable. Politics played such a part in social life. All the "society," the Faubourg St. Germain (which represents the old names and titles of France), was violently opposed to the Republic. I was astonished the first years of my married life in France, to see people of certain position and standing give the cold shoulder to men they had known all their lives because they were Republicans, knowing them quite well to be honourable, independent gentlemen, wanting nothing from the Republic--merely trying to do their best for the country. I only realised by degrees that people held off a little from me sometimes, as the wife of a Republican deputy. I didn't care particularly, as I had never lived in France, and knew very few people, but it didn't make social relations very pleasant, and I should have been better pleased if W. had taken no active part. However, that feeling was only temporary. I soon became keenly interested in politics (I suppose it is in the blood--all the men in my family in America were politicians) and in the discussion of the various questions which were rapidly changing France into something quite different. Whether the change has been for the better it would be hard to say even now, after more than thirty-five years of the Republic.