It can be easily imagined how provoked and disappointed were all those who had rallied to the king’s party.  There remained nothing to do but to strengthen the Republic and to provide it with a permanent constitution.  A Committee of Thirty was appointed to draw up the document.  The constitution was very conservative.  It has now been in force nineteen years, but it has never worked smoothly, and the object of the extreme Republicans, who have clamored for “revision,” has been to eliminate its conservative elements and make it Red Republican.  It is impossible for a people who change their government so often to have much respect or love for any constitution.

The Marshal-Duke of Magenta had accepted the presidency without any great desire to retain it; nevertheless, he established his household on a semi-royal footing, as though he intended, as some thought, that there should be at least a temporary court, to prepare the way for what might be at hand.  M. Thiers had been a bourgeois president; the marshal was a grand seigneur.  M. Thiers’ servants had been clothed in black; the marshal’s wore gay liveries of scarlet plush, and gray and silver.  When M. Thiers took part in any public ceremony he drove in a handsome landau with a mounted escort of Republican Guards, and his friends (he never called them his suite) followed as they pleased in their own carriages.  But the marshal’s equipages were painted in three shades of green, and lined with pearl-gray satin.  They were drawn by four gray horses, with postilions and outriders.  To see M. Thiers on business was as easy as it is to see the President at the White House.  Anybody could be admitted on sending a letter to his secretary.  To journalists he was always accessible, believing himself still to belong to their profession.  But to approach the marshal was about as hard as to approach a king, and he hated above all things newspaper writers.

In 1873 the Shah of Persia came to Paris, and the marshal entertained him magnificently.  He gave him a torch-light procession of soldiers, a gala performance at the Grand Opera, and a banquet in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles.  The Parisians regretted that the visit had not been made in M. Thiers’ time, when society might have been amused by stories of how the omniscient little president had instructed the shah, through an interpreter, as to Persian history and the etymology of Oriental languages; but society had a good story connected with the visit, after all.  During the state banquet at Versailles the shah turned to the Duchess of Magenta, and asked her, in a French sentence some one had taught him for the occasion, why her husband did not make himself emperor.

The marshal was content to hold his place as president, and the Duc de Broglie governed for him, except in anything relating to military affairs.  On these the marshal always had his way.