282 President Faure's Death [ T 9°9 



the lady herself there in his student days. The Geoffroys had quar- 

 relled with Mme. Steinheil, and Geoffroy's father had even given evi- 

 dence against her at the trial. As to her connection with President 

 Faure's death Neville gives me this account of it. She met Faure at 

 some watering place ' aux Eaux,' and obtained an influence of passion 

 over him ; and it was in her arms that he died. She had been introduced 

 privately into the Elysee, and his hand in death was so tightly clutched 

 in her hair that the hair had to be cut off. This fact and the possibility 

 of political revelations regarding it seem to have influenced the prosecu- 

 tion into giving her every opportunity of an acquittal ; and an acquittal 

 seems intended. 



" igth Nov. — Lord Lansdowne has made the sensational announce- 

 ment that he will propose an Amendment to the Budget Bill in the 

 House of Lords to the effect that the Lords are not justified in passing 

 it without an appeal to the country. This means a General Election in 

 January. Margot, in a note to me of the nth writes: 'The Lords 

 are mad ; but I pray that they may help us to a good majority in 

 January. There will be hot fighting for four weeks and not much 

 holiday.' 



' In Egypt the quarrel over the Suez Canal concession, against which 

 there has been a strong Nationalist protest, has been solved by the 

 Canal Company's refusing the terms proposed. I have written to con- 

 gratulate Farid on what is a victory for his party. 



" 22nd Nov. — I have been reading the traveller Stanley's autobi- 

 ography. The description of his early life as a workhouse boy, and 

 at sea, and as a vagabond in the Southern States of America is ex- 

 tremely interesting; and his wife, whom I used to know before her 

 marriage, would have been well advised for his fame to have ended her 

 volume there ; for the later record, which is not strictly autobiography, 

 reveals him as the type of all that is most repulsive in what are called 

 our ' Empire Builders.' No book ever showed more clearly the de- 

 moralizing influence contact with savage life exercises on the average 

 white man. Stanley, before he went exploring in Africa, though ill- 

 bred and ill-educated, was a decent working-man with a modest opinion 

 of himself and a good heart, but the position he found himself in in 

 Africa filled him with the usual idea of being the representative of a 

 superior race, with right of command over the people of the country 

 he was travelling through, and little by little he got into the way of 

 shooting them if they did not obey his orders, or provide him with 

 food. All his later writing is an attempt to show that he had a high 

 motive in excuse for these violences, the cause of Christianity, civiliza- 

 tion and the rest, till he became a contemptible humbug. His journal- 

 ism, too, as he gets to that point of his career, gives him the nauseous 

 flamboyant style I remember in his lecture at the Albert Hall. He re- 



