One more great service he rendered to his country.  Prince Bismarck, alarmed by the state of things in France, showed symptoms of intending to seize Belfort, that fortress in the Vosges which had never surrendered to the Germans, and which France had been permitted to retain.  Thiers induced Russia to intervene, and went to Switzerland to thank Prince Gortschakoff personally for his services on the occasion.

Thiers died at Saint-Germains four years after his downfall, at the age of eighty-two.  His last earthly lodging was in the Pavilion Henri IV. (now an hotel), where Louis XIV. was born.

By his will he left the State, not only all his collections, which so far as possible he had restored, but the numerous historical materials which he had gathered for his works, as well as his house, after his wife’s death, in the Place Saint-Georges.  The collections are there as he left them; the historical documents have been removed to the Archives.

To Marseilles, his native city, he left his water-color copies of the chief works of the great masters in Italy.

Thiers was childless.  Whatever may have been the personal relations in which he stood to his wife, no woman was ever more truly devoted to the interests of her husband.  She seems to have lived but for him.

People in society laughed at her plain dressing and her careful housekeeping; but “her heart dilated with gladness when she felt that the eyes of the world were fixed with admiration on M. Thiers.”  Her manner to him was that of a careful and idolizing nurse, his to her too often that of a petulant child.  She always called him M. Thiers, he always addressed her as Madame Thiers,—­indeed, he is almost unknown by his name of Adolphe, nor do men often speak of him simply as Thiers.  “Monsieur Thiers” he was and will always be in history, whose tribunal he said he was not afraid to face.  Even his cards were, contrary to French custom, always printed “Monsieur Thiers.”

Both M. and Madame Thiers were very early risers, and both had an inconvenient habit of falling asleep at inopportune times.

To the last, Madame Thiers took a loving interest in Belfort, because her husband had saved it from the Germans.  Its poor were objects of her especial solicitude.  Only an hour before her death, hearing that the Maire of Belfort had called, she expressed a wish to see him, and endeavored to address him, pointing to a bust of M. Thiers; but she was unable to make herself understood; her powers of speech had failed her.

Two rules M. Thiers never departed from:  one was, as he said himself, “to defend ferociously the public purse,” the other, never to give house-room to any but first-rate objects of art.  Some of his pictures were very dear to him.  Several of his bronzes, which were pillaged by the Commune and never recovered, were mourned by him as if they had been his friends.  He had been wont to call them “the school-masters of his soul.”