Thus it would miraculously appear that one stops breathing upon being appointed President of the French Republic, and doesn’t regain one’s breath until one’s martyrdom at the Élysée has expired. Certain it is that the President of the French Republic, living as he does in the most amazing city in the world, must experience and endure amazing tribulations and adventures. President Loubet went through the Dreyfus Affair; President Fallières through the Floods. Up and down the Seine in a barge sailed M. Fallières, and because of his bulk and lest the barge might capsize, the boatmen had to implore M. le Président not to move. He was a heroic, but not a dignified, figure as he sat, massive and motionless, in that barge. Nor could he ever look other than bulky in the Presidential carriage (which, when he entered it, nearly tilted over) as he drove forth to meet foreign sovereigns, or to attend the great military review or gala performances at the Français and Opéra. That vast bulk has always been against him. Not a Parisian that has not commented on it, not an illustrated newspaper that has not depicted it, not a theatrical revue that has not exaggerated it. Although M. Armand Fallières has left Paris for his country residence at Rambouillet, the French “Presidential Holiday” has not yet begun. To start with, Rambouillet is a State château, almost another Élysée, in that Cabinet meetings are held there, the Ministers motoring down from Paris with their portfolios and wearing their official, inscrutable expressions. Outside in the park, flowers, birds, winding paths, shady trees, hidden, tranquil corners; but within the Council Chamber, the old, eternal complications and miseries of politics. No doubt, when the Ministers have left, M. le Président seeks to lead the simple, the ordinary life. But, as Rambouillet is a State residence, flunkeys abound, and not only gardeners, but detectives, haunt the park. Impossible, to put it vulgarly, to be “on one’s own.” Worse than that, how the majestic, powdered flunkeys wink and grin when M. Armand Fallières has turned his back upon them in his slippers, alpaca jacket and vast gardening hat! For M. le Président is burly, with a formidable _embonpoint_; and when he enters a carriage, it tilts; and when he steps into a rowing boat, it very nearly capsizes, and when—— “I am the most inelegant of Presidents,” M. Armand Fallières himself has admitted. “Heavens, how my servants despise me!”