Hubert LYAUTEY (1854-1934) marshal. 3 L.A.S., [1892-1895 ?], to Dr. Henri Cazalis (Jean Lahor); 11 pages and a half in-8 (split folds repaired to one letter). Very nice correspondence. St. Germain May 15 [1892 ?]. He expresses reservations about the ideas defended by Paul Desjardins: "I am fully of your opinion. I suffer intimately from everything. [...] We need 3 men of action, mysterious, resolute, imposing a firm will and a firm formula and admitting no discussion"... St. Germain, October 11, 1892. Desjardins is "an excellent theosophist, full of good intentions, but the antithesis of the man of action, [...] what a disproportion between vague dreams and the hardness and urgency of present problems. [...] We would be several that the people would swallow and follow - but we are stuck in this marshmallow jam from which we do not know how to disentangle ourselves. [...My dream of the transformation of the intimate life of the army, of the urgency and the possibility of killing the stagnation, of throwing life, light, cheerfulness, lively cordiality into it, all this is only a particular point, a small side - and it is the only one to which I have the right to devote myself, and yet I am a serf, having the right neither to speak, nor to write, nor to move - even supposing that I had the right to do so, and I clearly deny it. I am, by virtue of my position, the last one who can put myself forward and organize anything. The leader is missing"... Hanoi, January 26 [1895?] Lyautey spoke of his life in Hanoi and his political concerns: "I am still not well oriented. [I live among strong and simple people who have all paid a high price in terms of fatigue and danger, and that alone is comforting. [The snobs are very far away and from here, [...] the succession of ministers, presidents, blackmailers seem like a game of clowns whose strings are held by an unconscious person. Alas this unconscious is the French people, and in this regime our dear, our beautiful, noble nation where we have felt so often you and me and others the most generous pulsations, undergoes harsh assaults "... A visiting card of General Pétain is attached.