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[Illustration:  A COLD RECEPTION:  OR PARLIAMENT MEETING IN A BLIZZARD.]

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STILL ANOTHER CHAPTER OF MY MEMOIR.

(IN SUPPLEMENT OF “HARPER.")

BY MONSIEUR VAN DE BLOWITZOWN TROMP.

[Illustration]

Forget at this moment where I was born, but I lived long enough at Marseilles to be married in that great southern French city.  My wife’s father had been in the Marines; her uncle (on the grandfather’s side) had been a Sapeur pompier.  Thus did I, as it were, become lie with the sea and land forces of my adopted country.  My wife’s mother was a descendant of a noble but anonymous family in the Vosges, whilst her maternal uncle was accustomed to attach to himself some local unpopularity by preferring for investigation a complicated sheet which set forth his genealogy, tracing his origin back to the Bourbons.

You ask me which Bourbon?  I frankly answer, I cannot tell.  My wife’s maternal uncle spoke of them as “the Bourbons,” just as you talk of “the Groceries,” and no one asks you Lequel?  As for my own ancestry, I do not speak of it.  I have never been in the habit of thrusting myself on the attention of the public.  It is sufficient for me that my wife’s maternal uncle’s ancestors were Bourbons.

I first began to take charge of public affairs in connection with an election that took place in the city where I found myself.  M. DE LESSEPS opposed THIERS and GAMBETTA.  He presented himself as an independent candidate.  Was he?  I suspected.  Already I had my secret agents in every centre of population.  One, whose letter bore the post-mark the Pyramids, placed in my hand proof that DE LESSEPS was an official candidate of the Empire.  I secretly conveyed this information to a local newspaper.  The news burst like a tempest on the public of Marseilles, and swept away in its irresistible whirl the candidature of M. DE LESSEPS.

This was pretty well for a first newspaper paragraph, worth at the time, as I remember thinking, more than the paltry three sous a line that became my due.  But I had made more than a few sous—­I had made an enemy!  Years after, BISMARCK told me how, chatting with NAPOLEON THE THIRD at Donchery, that fallen monarch had recalled this incident, in which his prophetic eye justly discerned the beginning of the end.  He admitted that he had said to the EMPRESS, “France is too small for me and VAN DE BLOWITZOWN TROMP.  One of us must cross la Manche.”

Sublime!  One of us did.