A HISTORIC MEETING.

Evening Post, Volume L, Issue 42, 17 August 1895, Page 1 (Supplement)

A HISTORIC MEETING.

The famous meeting of the French Emperor with Bismarck after the Battle of Sedan took place in a weaver's cottage at Donchery, occupied by a Mme. Fournaise. In an article in an American magazine, Mr. Archibald Forbes, the celebrated war correspondent, gives a pathetic and interesting account of the interview, based on a narrative of Mme. Fournaise. "It was about seven in the morning, said the good woman, that the Emperor, finding it distasteful to meet the crowd of German soldiers on the road to Donchery, alighted and came up her narrow staircase. To roach the inner room he had to pass through her bedroom, where she had just got out of bed. The furniture of the inner room consisted merely of two straw-seated chairs, a round table, and a press. Bismarck, 'in a rough dress,' presently joined the Emperor, and for a considerable time they coaversed in low tones, of which she, remaining in the outer room, occasionally caught a word or two. Then Bismarck abruptly rose and came clattering out. When she ventured to enter the room in which the Emperor was left, she found him seated at the little table, with his face buried in his hands. ' Can Ido anything for your Majesty ?' she asked, much moved by his evident suffering. ' Only to pull down the blinds,' was Napoleon's reply, without lifting his head. He woul 1 not see General Lebrun, who desired to be with him In about an hour Bismarck returned, now in full dress. After a short conversation he preceded the Emperor down the stairs, facing towards him so as to ' ushor him with a certain honour.' On her threshold the Emperor gavo her four napoleons. 'He put them into uiy own hand, and he said in a voice iv which there were tears, 'This hospitality of yours is, perhaps, the last I shall ever receive in France.' With a kindly word of farewell, ' which I shall never forget,' concluded Mme. Fournaise, the Emperor quitted the poor house in which he had undergone so much misery, and entered the carriage which conveyed him to the Chateau Bellevue." In the autumn of 1892 Mr. Forbes revisited Sedan. On his way back from looking at the monument, near the manse, which France had raised to the memory of her dead, he halted in front of the historic cottage. He writes: — "I found it uninhabited and in dilapidation. The door was locked, and the key far away, in the possession of the proprietor, a farmer of Carignun. There was no longer access to the upper room, wherein sat Napoleon and Bismarck on that memorable morning two-and-twenty years ago. And what of Mme. Fournaise ? In one of the adjacent cottages I found a crone, who told me she was dead years ago. She lies in the Donchery graveyard, and on her deathbed she had directed that the four napoleons she had cherished so long should be dedicated to the payment for her grave, and to defray the funeral expenses of the poor woman who had given to the unfortunate Emperor ' the last hospitality he received in France.' "