APPENDIX I 



My Paris Diary of 1870 



The fragment of Diary here printed was begun by me at Paris in the 

 early summer of 1870, a few weeks only before the rupture of relations 

 between France and Prussia. I already knew Paris well, having been a 

 member of the British Embassy there in Lord Cowley's time, and I had 

 remained in pleasant personal relations with my successors on the Em- 

 bassy staff, and so found myself in close touch with all that was going on 

 diplomatically. There were few days when I did not see one or other of 

 my Embassy friends. I had only just left the diplomatic service, and now 

 on my marriage I had come to Paris with my wife, meaning to make our 

 temporary home there, before settling down finally to country life in 

 Sussex. I had a romantic feeling about the great capital of the world's 

 pleasure and was deeply interested in all that concerned France when the 

 war broke out, and was fired with a corresponding sympathy when it re- 

 sulted in her unlooked for overthrow. 



Of Germany, too, her adversary, I had had experience. Among the 

 many posts I had filled as attache and secretary I had been twice at Frank- 

 fort, a place at that time of first diplomatic importance as capital of the 

 Germanic Confederation and seat of the Diet, and had made there my 

 apprenticeship in Central European politics. When I was first appointed 

 to Frankfort in i860, Bismarck, though already noticed as leader of the 

 Junker party at Berlin, was still at the outset of his political career. The 

 old King Frederick William was still King of Prussia, and Bismarck was 

 not much in his good graces. His place at Frankfort had just been taken 

 by his rival, Count d'Usedom, who was in better favour at Court. Use- 

 dom was a highly intellectual man, a leading member of the Liberal party 

 in Prussia, and his sympathies were with the movement for a United Ger- 

 many, then a Liberal movement having for its acknowledged head the 

 Duke of Saxe Coburg, elder brother of our English Prince Consort, nor 

 was it till Frederick William's death that Bismarck's power with the Ho- 

 henzollerns found its opportunity. 



With Usedom I was intimate, spending most of my time at the Prussian 

 Legation, where I held in some sort the position of child of the house 

 through the favour of Madame d'Usedom, the good-natured Scotchwoman 

 who figures in Bismarck's memoirs under the name of Olympia as his 

 bete noire, the subject of his unsparing jests. Both she and Usedom were 

 too outspoken to please the Bismarckian ideas of diplomacy; and in their 

 society, though I took little interest as yet in the great world's politics, 

 I learned much that I have not forgotten of Berlin policy and of the 

 hopes and fears of German patriotism in which the Hohenzollerns under 



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