Everyone charmed with Émile Loubet, and Émile Loubet charmed with everything. Of course, King and President held little private conversations; it is certain that Lord Lansdowne and M. Delcassé met often and talked long. Then, Paris again—and crowds in the street once more to shout: “Vive Loubet.” Heavens, what a change since the February afternoon four years ago! To-day, nothing but sympathy and esteem for the President, part author of the Anglo-French Agreement. To-day, nothing but sincere pleasure at the Agreement, which brings together two naturally friendly and sympathetic countries. “Perhaps the most important Treaty ever signed in time of peace,” said an enthusiastic Parisian to me. And then, with equal enthusiasm: “Vive Loubet!” [9] M. Loubet was Premier and Minister of the Interior at the time of the exposure of the Panama scandal. In November, 1892, he was forced to resign, but retained his post of Minister of the Interior under M. Ribot, the new Premier. Two months later, disgusted by the calumnies of their adversaries in the Chamber, both M. Loubet and his colleague M. de Freycinet (Minister of War) retired. 2. M. ARMAND FALLIÈRES. MOROCCO AND THE FLOODS A day or two ago, in the Presidential palace of the Élysée, M. Armand Fallières celebrated his seventy-second birthday. I do not know whether there were gifts, flowers, a birthday cake, champagne and speeches: but, according to an incorrigible gossip in a boulevard newspaper, M. le Président stated that this was the blithest birthday he had known for seven years. “I breathe again,” he is reported to have said. “This time next year, I shall pass my anniversary, not in a frock coat and varnished boots, but in a dressing-gown and carpet slippers.” I believe this is the “mood” that would obsess anyone who had passed seven years of his life as President of the French Republic. It was M. Émile Loubet’s mood. Nothing in this world would have induced him to accept a second Septennat; and to-day M. Loubet lives in a quiet little flat on the Rive Gauche, where (in his slippers) he has often exclaimed: “Ce pauvre Fallières!” And then gone to bed tranquilly and comfortably; whilst his successor at the Élysée was in consultation with the Minister of Foreign Affairs over the miseries of Morocco. President Casimir-Périer endured just six months of Presidency. “On m’embête; je m’en vais,” said he. He was too elegant to care for slippers. But a day or two after his resignation he was discovered stretched in an easy-chair in the garden of a Bois de Boulogne restaurant, in white duck trousers. “I breathe again,” he stated—just as President Fallières has now declared on his seventy-second birthday.