who had checkmated the Royalist reaction of 1877 and driven MacMahon
from power; and in the year after we first met him he was to bring Jules
Ferry to grief over _L'affaire de Tongkin_. He was then in the prime of
life, and he is still (1917), thirty-three years later,[1] one of the
most vigorous of French political influences. Mr. Chamberlain, in 1884,
was forty-eight, five years older than the French politician, and was at
that time, of course, the leader of the Radicals, as distinguished from
the old Liberals, both in the House of Commons and Mr. Gladstone's Cabinet.

How many great events, in which those two men were to be concerned, were
still in the "abysm of time," as we sat listening to them at Admiral
Maxse's dinner-table!--Clemenceau, the younger, and the more fiery and
fluent; Chamberlain, with no graces of conversation, and much less ready
than the man he was talking with, but producing already the impression
of a power, certain to leave its mark, if the man lived, on English
history. In a letter to my father after the dinner-party, I described
the interest we had both felt in M. Clemenceau. "Yet he seems to me a
light weight to ride such a horse as the French democracy!"

[Footnote 1: These lines were written shortly before, on the overthrow
of M. Panleve. M. Clemenceau, at the age of seventy-seven, became Prime
Minister of France, at what may well be the deciding moment of French
destiny (January, 1918).]

In the following year, 1885, I remember a long conversation on the
Gordon catastrophe with Mr. Chamberlain at Lady Jeune's. It was evident,
I thought, that his mind was greatly exercised by the whole story of
that disastrous event. He went through it from step to step, ending up
deliberately, but with a sigh, "I have never been able to see, from day
to day, and I do not see now, how the Ministry could have taken any