Note 31 — Chapter I

This version has, I believe, not been refuted. Still, I must look on it with suspicion. No Minister, who had done so much to stir up the war-feeling, ought to have made any such confession--least of all against a lady, who could not answer it. M. Seignobos in his Political History of Contemporary Europe, vol. i. chap. vi. p. 184 (Eng edit.) says of Gramont: "He it was who embroiled France in the war with Prussia." In the course of the parliamentary inquiry of 1872 Gramont convicted himself and his Cabinet of folly in 1870 by using these words: "Je crois pouvoir déclarer que si on avait eu un doute, un seule doute, sur notre aptitude à la guerre, on eût immédiatement arrêté la négociation" (Enquête parlementaire, I. vol. i. p. 108).