No pains were spared to induce him to give in his adhesion to one of the candidates for royalty.  His best friend wrote thus to him:—­

“Those wretches the Communists have destroyed all my illusions, but perhaps I could have forgiven them but for their ingratitude to you.  See how their newspapers have reviled you!  A time may come when a republic may be possible in France; but that day is not with us yet.  Let us acknowledge that we have both made a mistake.  As for you, with your unrivalled genius you have now a patriotic career open before you, if you will cast in your lot with the men who are now going to try and quell anarchy."[1]

[Footnote 1:  Clement Laurier, Cornhill Magazine, 1883.]

Besides this, offers were made him of the prime minister-ship, a dukedom, a Grand Cordon, and other preferment; but Gambetta only laughed at these proposals.  He was a man who had many faults, but he was always honest and true.  Both he and M. Thiers were devoted Frenchmen, patriots in the truest sense of the word, and each took opposite views.  That Thiers was right has been proved by time.

On March 16 the Government of the Provisional Republic removed from Bordeaux to Versailles.  Nobody dreamed of the pending outbreak of the Commune; all the talk was of fusion between the elder Bourbon branch and the House of Orleans.

Thiers was decidedly opposed to taking the seat of government to Paris, nor did he wish a new election for an Assembly; he preferred Fontainebleau for the seat of government, but fortunately (looking at the matter in the light of events) Versailles was chosen.

Then, to the great indignation of Madame Thiers, the Royalists at once took measures to prevent M. Thiers from installing himself in Louis XIV.’s great bedchamber.  “The Chateau,” they said, “was to become the abode of the National Legislature, the state rooms must be devoted to the use of members, and the private apartments should be occupied by M. Grevy, the president of the Assembly.”

“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 from which the heralds used to announce in the same breath the death of one king and the accession of another.  His secretary could not help saying that it seemed fit that the greatest of French national historians should be lodged in the apartments of the greatest of French kings; but as this idea did not make its way, M. and Madame Thiers yielded the point, saying that the chimneys smoked, and that the rooms were too large to be comfortable.”

On seeing a caricature in which some artist had represented him as a ridiculous pigmy crowned with a cotton night-cap and lying in an enormous bed, surrounded by the majestic ghosts of kings, Thiers was at first half angry; then he said:  “Louis XIV. was not taller than I, and as to his other greatness, I doubt whether he ever would have had a chance of sleeping in the best bed of Versailles if he had begun life as I did."[1]