is post, which he refused to surrender.
Count Lehndorff, appointed to be German Prefect of the Somme, came down
upon the people heavily for war contributions, which were raised under
the management of M. Dauphin, who had been the Imperialist mayor of the
city ever since 1868, and who has of late years been a conspicuous
Republican. As peace drew near, Amiens had to borrow five millions of
francs, for which M. Dauphin agreed the city should pay M. Oppenheim of
Brussels a commission of 10 per cent., and issued its obligations at
7-1/2 per cent. for fifty years.

Naturally the Germans are not much liked at Amiens. Count de Chassepot
thinks the Picards in general really want war with Germany. They turned
out very generally during the contest. He commanded a battalion of
National Guards who turned out in full force, not a man missing, though
they were armed with wretched old muskets, and perfectly understood what
that must lead to for them. On making his rounds very early in the
morning, he found, in an advanced post, at a point of great danger, a
picket, a _sentinelle perdue_, who proved to be one of the most
respectable men in Amiens, the first president of the Upper Court of the
city, nearly sixty years of age, doing his duty as a private soldier.
'In a hospital here,' said M. de Chassepot, 'I have six hundred
patients. Every man of them is eager for another turn with the Germans.'

I was anxious to learn when and how it was that M. Goblet, just now the
leading Republican personage of this part of France, began to appear
conspicuously on the horizon. 'Not till Gambetta's new social strata
began to appear,' I was told. This was in 1874. The finances of the
city, left in a sad condition by the war, had been put into order by the
municipal council which was elected during the German occupation in
1871; the public works had been restored, fine barracks built, and a
sufficient number of school-houses. In return for those services the
councillors who had rendered them were turned out in 1874, M. Dauphin
among them, by the newly-organised 'Union republicaine.' This put M.
Goblet at last into the council with his ally, M. Petit, the latter
being the editor of a Radical journal, the _Progres de la Somme_, which
the military governor of Paris had ordered to be suppressed early in
1874, for its attacks on the then President, Marshal MacMahon. In 1876
M. Goblet became mayor of Amiens.

'The very next year, when the contest began be