This book is true, I have seen the events narrated in it pass before my own eyes, and I can say, as a spectator greatly interested in what I see, that I am delighted, my old fellow-traveller, to write your great and honored name on the first page of my book as a witness to the sincere affection and true comradeship of

Your devoted,

Jules Claretie.

PREFACE

There was once a Minister of State who presented to his native land the astonishing spectacle of a Cabinet Minister dying whilst in office.  This action was so astounding to the nation at large that a statue has since been erected to his memory.

I saw his funeral procession defile past me, I think I even made one of the Committee sent by the Society of Men of Letters to march in the funeral convoy.  It was superb.  This lawyer from the Provinces, good honest man, eloquent orator, honest politician that he was, who came to Paris but to die there, was buried with the greatest magnificence.

De Musset had eight persons to follow him to the grave; his Excellency had one hundred thousand.

I returned home from this gorgeous funeral in a thoughtful mood, thinking how much emptiness there is in glory, and particularly in political glory.  This man had been “His Excellency the Minister” and not only his own province, but the whole country had placed its hopes on him.  But what had he done?  He had left his home to cast himself into the great whirlpool of the metropolis.  It was the romance of a great provincial plunged in Paris into the reality of contemporary history, and become as ordinary as the commonplace items of the Journals.  “What a subject for a study at once profoundly modern and perfectly lifelike!” The funeral convoy had hardly left the church of the Madeleine when my plot of this romance was thought out, and appeared clearly before me in this title, very brief and simple:  His Excellency the Minister_._

I have not drawn any one in particular, I have thought of no individual person, I even forgot all about this departed Minister, whose face I hardly caught even a glimpse of, and of whose life I was completely ignorant; I had only in my mind’s eye a hero or rather a heroine:  Politics with all its discouragements, its vexations, its treacheries, its deceptions, its visions as fair as the blue sky of summer, suddenly bursting like soap bubbles; and to the woes of Politics, I naturally endeavored to add those of the pangs of love.