We all read in the newspapers how, on the day when the Duke of Albany’s lamentable death occurred, M. Jules Ferry, the French Prime Minister and Secretary for Foreign Affairs, gave a dinner party. An Englishman having expressed astonishment that this dinner had not been put off, a Frenchman answered by asking whether Lord Granville would countermand a banquet in case M. Wilson, M. Grévy’s son-in-law, were to die? Our countryman seems to have concluded that Lord Granville would not let his hospitalities be interfered with by M. Wilson’s decease; and perhaps he was right. M. Daniel Wilson holds more effective power than was ever possessed by a Dauphin of France; but his father-in-law is only the chief of a government, not the head of a court, and M. Wilson’s existence has therefore never been brought officially to the cognizance of foreign rulers. It does not follow, however, that because M. Wilson is a private person, the French government is bound to look upon the relations of foreign monarchs as being exactly in the same position as this gentleman. It is more than probable that if Marshal MacMahon were still president, the foreign secretary would not have given a dinner on the day when a child of the Queen of England had died suddenly on French soil. It is equally probable that there would have been no such dinner if M. Thiers or M. Gambetta had been president. Presidents are not all alike. In their views as to the functions of a republic—in their opinions as to the amount of authority which a republican ruler may exercise over his ministers, as to the more or less pomp in which he should live, as to the etiquette which he should enforce, and as to the relations which he should personally maintain with the rulers of other countries, M. Grévy and his predecessors have all differed from one another. The three presidents who have governed France since 1871 have in fact been so dissimilar in their characters, tastes, principles, and objects, that it is really curious to compare their various methods of living and ruling. M. Thiers was seventy-four years old when he became supreme ruler of France, after the siege of Paris. After the first vote of the Assembly, which appointed him chief of the executive, M. Thiers took up his residence at the Préfecture, in the apartments which M. Gambetta had vacated.