“Pah! what a smell of tobacco!” he exclaimed, when he strutted into the ex-dictator’s study; and presently Madame Thiers, her sister Mdlle. Dosne, and the solemn M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, added their lamentations to his. They had been going the round of the house, and found all the rooms tenanted by hangers-on of M. Gambetta’s government, who had not yet received notice to quit, and who hoped perhaps that they might retain their posts under the new administration. All these gentlemen smoked, read radical newspapers, refreshed themselves with absinthe, or beer, while transacting the business of the state; and played billiards in their leisure moments. They were dismissed in a pack before the day was over; but Madame Thiers decided that it would require several days to set the house straight; and so M. Thiers’ removal to the Archbishop’s palace, where Monseigneur Guibert (now Cardinal), whom he afterward raised to the see of Paris, offered him hospitality. M. Thiers would, no doubt, have liked very much to sleep in Louis XIV.’s bed, and to have for his study that fine room with the balcony, on which the heralds used to announce the death of one king and the accession of another in the same breath. His secretary and faithful admirer, M. Barthélemy St. Hilaire, went about saying that it was fitting the “national historian” should be lodged in the apartments of the greatest of the kings; but this idea did not make its way at all. M. Thiers ended by saying that the rooms were too large, while Madame Thiers despised them for being full of draughts and having chimneys which smoked. Nevertheless, M. Thiers was nettled at seeing that the Republicans objected quite as much as the Royalists to see him occupy the royal apartments. “Stupid fellows!” he exclaimed on seeing a caricature which represented him as a ridiculous pigmy, crowned with a cotton nightcap, and lying in an enormous bed surrounded by the majestic ghosts of the Bourbon kings. Then half-angry, half-amused, he ejaculated with his usual vivacity: “Louis XIV. was not taller than I, and as to his other greatness I doubt whether he would ever have had a chance of sleeping in the best bed of Versailles if he had begun life as I did.” Shortly after this, M. Mignet meeting Victor Hugo spoke to him in a deprecating way about the fuss which had been made over this question of the royal apartments. “I don’t know,” answered the poet. “Ideas of dictatorship would be likely to sprout under that tester.” This was reported to Thiers, who at once cried: “I like that! If Victor Hugo were in my place, he would sleep in the king’s bed, but he would think the dais too low, and have it raised.”