The new Chambers assembled at Versailles in November. The Broglie
cabinet was out, but a new ministry of the Right faced the new
Parliament. Their life was very short and stormy; they were really dead
before they began to exist and in December the marshal sent for M.
Dufaure and charged him to form a Ministere de Gauche. None of his
personal friends, except General Borel at the War Office, was in the new
combination. W. was named to the Foreign Office. I was rather
disappointed when he came home and told me he had accepted that
portfolio. I thought his old ministry, Public Instruction, suited him so
well, the work interested him, was entirely to his taste. He knew all
the literary and educational world, not only in France but everywhere
else--England, of course, where he had kept up with many of his
Cambridge comrades, and Germany, where he also had literary connections.
However, that wide acquaintance and his perfect knowledge of English and
English people helped him very much at once, not only at the Quai
d'Orsay, but in all the years he was in England as ambassador.
The new ministry, with Dufaure as President of the Council, Leon Say at
the Finances, M.
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