GENERAL BOULANGER.

Auckland Star, Volume XVIII, Issue 271, 17 November 1887, Page 5

GENERAL BOULANGER.

How He Attained Power in Military ; Circles of France.

The son of a notary of the town of Rennes,! it is not the accident of birth that has advanced General Boulanger to the highest attainable grade of tne French army. Hβ has but to thank his Breton perseverance, his indomitable strength of will, his extra-' ordinaiy audacity; in a word his own power and ability to recognise, seize, and make the most of the various opportunities that have come in his way. Though .by birth a Frenchman, and the son of a Frenchman, he can still claim some kinship with, England, his mother being an English woman, of whoso comely features her son is. said to inherit no small share. Things did not prosper with the Rennes solicitor, and shortly after the birth of his son, which took place on the 29th of April, 2837, he sold his practice and removed to Nantes, where he obtained employ-. ment as an inspector of the insurance company La 'Bretagne. It will be understood, then, that the subject of this sketch was not brought up in enervating luxury. Indeed, as tho Breton phrase goes, " There was more bread than butter in that family." The early school days of the young Boulanger were passed on British; soil, at Brighton, where he was placed under the care of his maternal uncle?. It is open to doubt whether the reminiscences of a few years spent in England are of the brightest description, for the young Frenchman was treated in no tender manner by his British schoolfellows, to whom his nationality appeared to offer every excuse for various descriptions of bullying. His appeals and complaints to hie relatives passed unheeded, for they had apparently resolved that even at that early date he should learn to fight his own battles. It was doubtless a hard lesson for the young French boy, in a foreign land, away from parents and home, but it was one which has borne good fruit in his after life. On January 15 1855, in his eighteenth year, George Ernest Jean Maria Boulagner was entered at the famous military college of St. Cyr, and it was here that his predominant qualities first manifested themselves. Though a persevering and attentive student, he was not negligent in other matters, and as the child is said to be father of the man, so was Georges Boulanger's youth prophetic of his maturer years. A story is told, on his own authority which indicates the bent of his character better than whole pages of psychlogical argument, to the effect that on"liberty clays " [lee jours de scrtie) he would content himself for breakfast with a dish of potatoes, bought at some street stall or unpretensious shop, in order to treat himself to a pair of light yellow kid gloves with the balance of his dinner allowance.. But General Boulanger is probably not the only eminent man to whose account a similar- charge might be laid.

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