Out in the passage, and on the staircase, I encountered four or five of Jules Guérin’s clerks and assistants; coarse, powerful young men, with bull-dog faces, who had been recruited by the chief of the Anti-Semites from the ghastly slaughter-house of Villette. In the garden I paused to inspect the stony flower-beds and the dilapidated well. “The future cemetery of my enemies. Ah, the traitors, the brigands, the assassins! Let them come.” At an open window, in his sombrero and smoking his eternal cigarette, stood fierce Jules Guérin. “Lépine in _that_ flower-bed,” he shouted, and then closed the window. But reopened it, when I reached the gateway, to cry: “And Loubet, in the well.” A month later, Paris in uproar. On the afternoon of the 3rd June the Cour de Cassation ordered the revision of the Dreyfus Affair; the same night official arrangements were made for the return to France of the shattered prisoner of the Devil’s Island; next day, during the race-meeting at Auteuil, President Loubet’s hat was smashed over his head by the stick of a certain Baron Christiani, a Royalist Anti-Dreyfusard. Then, the fall of the Dupuy Ministry, and M. Loubet in a dilemma. M. Poincaré, astutest of statesmen, was summoned to the Élysée; but, with characteristic shrewdness, declined the task of forming a Cabinet in such unfavourable circumstances. M. Léon Bourgeois (absent on a Peace mission at The Hague) was telegraphed for, but could not be persuaded to exercise a pacific influence in his own country. M. Waldeck-Rousseau was next requisitioned; and left the Élysée with the assurance: “Monsieur le Président, I will do my best to succeed.” Nothing could have been more admirable than his subsequent exertions, for, in making them, M. Waldeck-Rousseau, the most distinguished and most prosperous lawyer at the Paris Bar, had nothing to gain and everything to lose; and he must have been dismayed at the refusal, or the reluctance, of highly esteemed politicians to serve their country by fighting a just if an unpopular cause. Well, for a whole week the most painstaking, the most level-headed and truly patriotic Prime Minister who has yet worked for the Third Republic, visited prominent statesmen with the earnest desire to form a _ministère d’apaisement_, founded on the principles of disinterestedness and justice. Throughout that week, he was hooted in the streets, and ridiculed and insulted by MM. Rochefort, Millevoye, Drumont and Jules Guérin, who triumphantly predicted in their newspapers that “Panama Loubet”—like “Père Grévy” before him—would be compelled to resign for want of a ministry. And biting was the satire, and more savage became the contumely, when at last the Waldeck-Rousseau Ministry was completed, by the inclusion of such opposite, hostile personages as the “citizen Millerand” and fierce, aristocratic and despotic old General the Marquis de Galliffet. “After this,” wrote Henri Rochefort, “the deluge.” “At last,” declared M.