ge.

One of the 'working sub-prefects' of the Boulangist party in Picardy
gave M. Fleury a very frank estimate of the expense of electing the
General in 1888, in the Somme. He put it, in round numbers, at nearly or
quite one hundred and twenty-five thousand francs, or five thousand
pounds. This unusual outlay was made necessary by the great efforts of
the Government to defeat the General. Furthermore, it was swollen by the
disinterested devotion of many of the General's friends. Some of these
auxiliaries spent days at the best hotels in Picardy labouring for the
cause, with the result of a special hotel account, amounting to several
thousand francs. Nothing makes men so thirsty as political emotion.
Another partisan, at the head of a journal, sent in a bill for
forty-five thousand francs expended by him upon printing and stationery,
no charge being made for his personal services! The chief agents
received about two thousand francs apiece. One of them must have worked
very hard, for he earned no less than fifteen thousand francs. While all
this expense was incurring in Picardy, furthermore, two other elections
were pending, in each of which the General was a candidate, one in the
Charente and one in the Nord. It would seem to be probable enough,
therefore, that on these three elections In 1888 General Boulanger, or
the Boulangists, must have spent at least two hundred and fifty thousand
francs, or ten thousand pounds.

'Where did all this money come from?' is a not unnatural question. For
M. Fleury tells me the General's bills were paid much more promptly than
the bills of the Government candidates. It is an open secret apparently
that the Government candidates are very bad paymasters when they are
beaten. Some of the bills incurred by them in 1885, when the
Conservatives swept so large a part of Northern France, were still due,
it appears, in 1888. But the bills of General Boulanger were settled
very soon after the close of the campaign.

M. Mermeix insisted to M. Fleury that the General's war-chest was
supplied by voluntary subscriptions. 'Every day,' he said, the General
finds some ten thousand francs in his mails, and his followers 'are all
either beggars or millionaires.'

Another of the General's managers gave M. Fleury the names of two very
rich persons, one of them a cattle merchant at La Villette, who
subscribed between them a hundred and forty thousand francs to carry on
the campaign in Picardy. The enormou