FIRST OF THE BOURGEOIS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9139, 15 July 1908, Page 4

FIRST OF THE BOURGEOIS.

London papers emphasise the simplicity and solidity of f.he character of. President Fallieres, recently the nation's guest. He is a typical example of the French middle-class—"first of the bourgeois" one Paris correspondent calls him. He dislikes the ceremony of the Elysee, and one of his first acts on being appointed President was to dismiss between twenty and thirty ornamental officials whose t presence he held to be out of keeping with democracy. He is really happy only

when he id a farmer again on his country estate, where he gets in'o old clothes and wooden shoes, talks in Gascon patois to his labourers, prunes his vines, and hob-nobs with his neighbours. A correspondent says he has seen the President really interested but once, and tnat, was when he was looking at some!agricultural exhiliits in the Colonial 1 Exhibition at Ma-seilles. For a few minutes he forgot that he was in full dress surrounded by officials. "He munched corn, he; puncheU a fat cow in the ribs, he tickled a pig behind the ear, he pushed his top-hat to the back of his head, thrust his two hands deep into his trouser pockets, then suddenly remembered himself, and with a sonorous southern expletive, put hid hat straight again and marched ott* with the official troop in hot pursuit." Yet he is an acute thinker, an orator of charm and power, and has been very successful in politics and at the Bar. He has plenty of tact. For over twenty years he was not on speaking terms with the man who is now his Prime Minister, M. Clemenceau. He could not forgive him for bringing about the downfall of that eminent statesman, M. Jules Ferry, who first gave France a colonial policy. But, when M. Fallieres sent for M. Clemenceau to ask him to form a Cabinet, he held out his hand to him, recalling: the circumstances of their old feud, and said: "My dear Clemenceau, in those days Jules Ferry was a far better man than you were, but I admit that nowadays you are a3 good a man, as Jules Ferry then was."