What, it may be asked, was the reason of M. Loubet’s unpopularity? Well, the Dreyfus days had begun: those wild, frenzied days of feuds, duels and hatreds; of frauds, riots and conspiracies, when Parisians allowed themselves to be governed and blinded by their passions and prejudices. M. Loubet was notoriously in favour of granting the unhappy prisoner on the Devil’s Island a new trial. Paris, on the other hand, misled, intimidated, deceived by the Nationalists, was Anti-Dreyfusard. And hence the tempestuous reception—at once spontaneous and “organised”—accorded the new President on his return from Versailles. However, in the present paper, it is not my intention to examine the political situation in France during the tumultuous winter, summer and autumn of 1899. My aim is to portray certain scenes and to record certain incidents which may convey an idea of the state of Paris in that epoch, and of her attitude towards M. Loubet. And here let me return without further ado to the crowd before the St-Lazare station, where, after the President’s departure, there appeared yet another amazing agitator in the person of M. Déroulède. He has been likened to—Don Quixote. And it has also been good-humouredly agreed that in his devoted lieutenant, M. Marcel Habert, he possesses an admirable Sancho Panza. For M. Déroulède is an _exalté_. M. Déroulède is extravagant, theatrical, often absurd: yet with a noble sincerity in him and an attachment to the idea. And as he stood in the thick of the St-Lazare crowd, with his official Deputy’s sash, with his decoration in his button-hole, with fire in his eye, with a flush on his cheeks and with burning “patriotic” utterances on his lips—as he stood there haranguing and gesticulating, M. Paul Déroulède held everyone’s attention. At that moment, he was passionately inviting his hearers to follow him to Joan of Arc’s statue, there to hold a “patriotic” demonstration. Often, he made such a pilgrimage. Often, too, he made pilgrimages to the Strasbourg monument on the Place de la Concorde: and to the cemeteries where rest the “heroic victims” of Germany. There were many who laughed at him, but his courage and honesty no one, not even his adversaries, doubted. He had fought valiantly in the Franco-Prussian War, and ever since that appalling campaign he had looked after the interests of the scrubby little soldier—_le pioupiou_—and composed songs and poems in his honour. “Vive l’Armée!” and “Vive la France!” were the eternal, emotional cries of M. Déroulède. At his bidding, Paris echoed those cries. And Paris also “supported” him enthusiastically when he made his pilgrimages to the Place de la Concorde, and the cemeteries, and Joan of Arc’s statue; for in what is essential and fine in him, his noble sincerity and devotion to the idea, even when in the wrong, M. Déroulède stands as the outward and visible type of a quality that belongs to the soul and the genius of France.