leon was--a real goodhearted fellow, but so
stupid!' which naturally excited great mirth among the military
scholars. I fear that your Majesty is thinking of me much as General
von Canitz thought of his pupils."

The King laughed and said: "You may be right; but I am not
sufficiently acquainted with the present Napoleon to be able to impugn
your impression that his heart is better than his head." That the
Queen was dissatisfied with my view I was enabled to gather from the
external trifles by which impressions are made known at court.

The displeasure felt at my intercourse with Napoleon sprang from the
idea of "Legitimacy," or, more strictly speaking, from the word
itself, which was stamped with its modern sense by Talleyrand, and
used in 1814 and 1815 with great success and to the advantage of the
Bourbons as a deluding spell.

* * * * *

III

THE EMS TELEGRAM

On July 2, 1870, the Spanish ministry decided in favor of the accession
to that throne of Leopold, Hereditary Prince of Hohenzollern. This gave
the first stimulus in the field of international law to the subsequent
military question, but still only in the form of a specifically Spanish
matter. It was hard to find in the law of nations a pretext for France
to interfere with the freedom of Spain to choose a King; after people in
Paris had made up their minds to war with Prussia, this was sought for
artificially in the name Hohenzollern, which in itself had nothing more
menacing to France than any other German name. On the contrary, it might
have been assumed, in Spain as well as in Germany, that Prince
Hohenzollern, on account of his personal and family connections in
Paris, would be a _persona grata_ beyond many another German Prince. I
remember that on the night after the battle of Sedan I was riding along
the road to Donchery in thick darkness, with a number of our officers,
following the King in his journey round Sedan. In reply to a question
from some one in the company I talked about the preliminaries to the
war, and mentioned at the same time that I had thought Prince Leopold
would be no unwelcome neighbor in Spain to the Emperor Napoleon, and
would travel to Madrid _via_ Paris, in order to get into touch with the
imperial French policy, forming as it did a part of the conditions under
which he would have had to govern Spain. I said: "We should have been
much more justified in dreading a close understanding between