At this very moment M. Léon Renaud, Deputy to the French parliament, arrived in Tunis. It was at once rumoured that he was intrusted with a special mission to the Bey, that he was an emissary of M. Gambetta, and that he was come to bring matters to a crisis with the Italians. These reports emanated chiefly from the Musallis and M. Roustan’s personal friends, and when M. Renaud took up his abode at the French Residency, the uninitiated made up their minds that Tunis was on the eve of great events. M. Roustan at once presented M. Renaud to the Prime Minister, and it soon became everybody’s secret that the cut-and-dried draft of a concession had been presented to the Bey for signature. The Bey became very much perturbed, and at once communicated with the representatives of Italy and England. There was certainly some ground for this alarm, as the projected Credit Foncier of M. Renaud combined in itself the _imperium in imperio_ of the Italian Agricultural Company, and the ambiguity of the De Sancy cessions. In a word, M. Renaud asked for an exclusive permission to issue bank-notes to the value of all sums advanced by him as loans in the country, and required the Government to give a guarantee “in order that the bank should lose nothing by the loans it contracted.” I have the draft _in extenso_ before me, but everything is summed up in these words. M. Géry had already got a promise of all the railways, and M. Renaud wanted a promise of every financial operation present and to come. The Bey himself suggested the means of escape. From the dusty archives of the Bardo were hunted up the protests which M. De Botmiliau had induced all the _corps consulaire_ to make against the far less innocuous English bank seven years before. On the 23d May 1873, the French Chargé d’Affaires had declared that a permission granted to Messrs. Ranking of London to issue bank-notes was illegal, “comme exposant le pays à des sinistres consequences trop faciles à prévoir,” and on the 23d of December 1880, the same functionary asked the same Government not only to allow M. Renaud to issue bank-notes to a practically unlimited amount, but to guarantee him against all ultimate loss! When M. Renaud went next day to receive an answer, the Bey put the protests into his hands and said he would act according to the advice contained in them, and refused to sign the draft M. Renaud had been good enough to prepare for him. The Bey asked his secretary to return the original scheme to M. Renaud. “Keep it, Highness,” answered the Deputy of Corbeil (I quote the _Gaulois_), “I will leave you my project. Think over it, and although you refuse it now, you will some day, after useless struggle, accept it. You will have once more to acknowledge the preponderating influence of France, but you will have lost all claims to her gratitude!” The parting interview with Mustapha was even more stormy, but, to be just to M. Renaud, it is not