MONOTONOUS DAYS IN THE BESIEGED  CITY.   185
republicanism. They managed to overthrow M. Thiers
and drive him out of the presidency. While it did not
•change the form of the government, yet it elected a
President deadly hostile to a republic, who selected
ministers equally hostile, and who did everything in
their power to overthrow the government which they
were bound by every obligation of honor and good
faith to sustain. But that assembly was to come to an
end.
In the fall of the year 1877, a new election for mem-
bers of the assembly was to take place. The two par-
ties, Monarchical and Republican, were brought face to
face at this election, and the world has never seen a
more bitter contest or a fiercer political struggle.
Though in comparative retirement, M. Thiers gave the
Republican party the benefit of his wise counsel, while
Gambetta was its right arm, arousing everywhere the
utmost enthusiasm by his arguments and his eloquence.
It was in the height of this terrible struggle that M.
Thiers suddenly died at St. Germain-en-Laye. His
body was soon moved to his residence in the Place
St. Georges, in Paris, and his funeral took place on
Sunday, September 8th, 1877. As I had perfected all
my arrangements to leave France for my return home
on the following Monday, I went to the Place St.
Georges, before the hour of the funeral, to take leave
of Madame Thiers, and her sister, and it was there
that I met Gambetta for the last time. He spoke to
me in accents of the deepest emotion of the affliction
that M. Thiers's death had caused, and of the irrepara-
ble loss that France had sustained by the sudden de-
mise of that great man, coming as it did at the moment
of the fiercest political struggle that had ever taken
place in France.