St. Remy-sur-Adre. Mr. Sykes claimed descent from Richard Pendrell, who hid Charles II. in the oak after the battle of Worcester, but he was not himself born or bred in England; in both these respects he was a Dutchman.

Sykes had an only daughter who married a Mr. William Waddington, of London, who settled in France and joined his father-in-law in business in 1816. His eldest grandson, William Waddington, the ambassador, was called after him.

The cotton mills and the family have grown in importance and prestige, and M. Richard Waddington, senator, is the leading man in the Norman capital, a strong protectionist, which means an ardent champion of high duties on Lancashire yarns and textiles. This, however, does not prevent him from being a charming host in his tranquil country seat among the hills, scarcely more than a stroll from the busy valley with its clattering mills and all the smoke and dust and din of a factory town, yet dominating a wide expanse of that reposeful Norman scenery, which made Freeman (I think it was) say that he felt there so much at home that he resented the natives speaking a foreign language in a land so English.

CHAPTER VIII

BOULANGER'S BLUFF

At the beginning of April, 1889, my wife and I were staying at the Hotel de Saxe at Brussels, whither we had gone to hear the famous Viennese singer Materna, whose rendering of Brunhilde in the "Walküre," as a great musical event within reach by a six hours' journey, had brought many amateurs from Paris. I had long since given up my post of correspondent of The Times, though I remained one of its occasional contributors. We had just returned from the Monnaie, and were discussing with some friends the curious effect of hearing Materna sing in German, while all the other singers sang in French, when the hotel manager asked to speak to me. Boulanger, he said, had telegraphed him to reserve rooms and was arriving about midnight. The news was indeed astounding. That he should leave Paris, in the midst of his campaign, betokened some new and startling strategy on one side or the other. I waited to see him arrive, but the hall porter came back from the station to say that Boulanger, on learning that the landlord of the Hotel de Saxe was a German, had gone to the Hotel Mengelle, which belonged to a Belgian!

I did not know the General personally, but once a journalist always a journalist, and I determined, all the same, to call on him the next morning. Anyhow I knew many of his friends well.

General Boulanger was a new type of French

adventurer-neither a soldier of fortune sprung from the ranks, nor an indigent aristocrat. Nothing about him reminded you of the gallant officer or dashing commander. His swollen eyes, somewhat bald head, unexpressive countenance, and slight stoop were suggestive rather of the overworked editor of a morning paper, while his square figure stamped him as a son of that bourgeois class which produces the characteristic Frenchman of the latter-day Republic. He talked sullenly, as if he were on the defensive, and with that tendency to exaggerate which marks a man's doubt of his own qualifications. I should have summed up Boulanger as timid, boastful, sly, and cabotin.

How he got to the front with the poor qualities he was ultimately revealed to possess, is only explicable by the fact that he knew and remained among the class from which he had sprung and was not of the class from which, as a rule, officers in the army are recruited. He was a Republican, guaranteed, as it were, by his class affiliation, whereas the environment of most of the commanding officers was reactionary and suspect.

Boulanger's father was an homme d'affaires in the Rue Feydeau. At least, so I was told by Hy, the wellknown barber on the Boulevard des Italiens, who had many interesting stories to tell of his old customers in the time of the Empire. Le père Boulanger, who was one of them, he told me, was a tremendous talker and very proud of his son, about whom he never lost an opportunity of discoursing with other customers waiting their turn.

Hy's shop or shed occupied the little courtyard of 25, Boulevard des Italiens, where the British Chamber of Commerce and Potel and Chabot's famous shop used to be located. In pre-Republican times, Hy told me, every self-respecting man used his hair as a decoration, and cultivated a moustache, which was a work of art. Under the Republic men had grown less careful of their persons, cut their hair short, and let their beards grow anyhow or reduced them to an inartistic moustache, if they did not cut them off altogether; and the skilled barber, l'artiste, as Hy called him, had lost his vocation. In the good old time the barber's shop was like a club-house. The "clients" knew each other, and the barber was a sort of gazette who collected the news as it came in and retailed it as a part of his business.

But to return to Boulanger: he was not equal to the task he had undertaken, that of upsetting the then Republic, and instead of becoming the master of the situation, he became the mere tool of cleverer conspirators. The dowager Duchesse d'Uzès was understood to have given him two millions of francs without any expectation that he would be successful, but in order, as she said, " to rattle up the pots and pans in the Republican cuisine and cause a general stir which would bring merit to the surface and send down to the dregs, to which they belonged, a crowd of hungry place-seekers and tenth-rate adventurers." Others helped him with money in the hope that the collapse of the Republic would give the other régimegamblers a chance.

Boulanger started off with every trump card in his hand. The enemies of the Republic, after fighting

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each other and enabling the Republic to become firmly established through their ungovernable jealousy of each other, had coalesced. They had agreed at length to abandon warfare against each other until the Republic was destroyed. Boulanger led the attack in the name of the plébiscitaires, those who held that a system somewhat analogous to that of the United States should be adopted in France; he expected to be appointed president under the first plébiscite.

A couple of days before, I had been in the midst of the commotion in Paris and seen with my own eyes the anxiety, almost dread, of the Republican politicians that the Republicans might not be equal to this new coalition of its enemies. Boulanger's sudden appearance at Brussels was therefore an event of enormous significance. Several of his political staff had come in by the night train and were already in consultation with him when I called.

The General took me into a large adjoining bedroom, where he walked up and down nervously and talked to me. I cannot describe the visit better than by quoting the passage of the article on the subject which I sent to The Times,1 and which gave an instantaneous record of my then impressions of the man and his object.

"BRUSSELS, April 4, 1889.

"The sudden irruption of General Boulanger in the Belgian capital has caused the greatest excitement here. If you overhear a conversation in the streets or in the hotel, meet a friend, or have any other opportunity of noting public feeling, it is invariably one of amazement that events have been so quietly passing in France which warranted such a tremendous step. Why should the General have found it dangerous to remain on the territory of the Republic? We have an answer 1 See The Times, April 8, 1889.