At 11 A.M. on the 17th of March a Chancery attendant arrived in a cab with a message that the Prince requested me to come to him immediately. On my entering the antechamber, Bleichröder was with him, and afterwards Herbert, and so I had to wait. At length Rottenburg, who had already declared that he, too, would retire, told me that they had gone upstairs to lunch, but that he would immediately again announce my arrival to the Prince. He returned in a few minutes with an invitation from the Chief to take lunch with him. At table upstairs I met a nephew or cousin of the Prince, to whom I was introduced as “Büschlein,” and who remembered having seen me at dinner in Versailles--doubtless the then lieutenant of dragoons with the red collar. The Princess and Count Herbert came in later. The conversation first turned on a foreign diplomatist, who would have married Countess Marie if her father had not been warned against him as a spendthrift. “Besides, I am altogether against marriages with foreigners,” said the Chief, “and particularly in the case of diplomatists.” He then spoke of the alleged second visit of Windthorst. It had displeased the Emperor, but it was merely a newspaper invention and ought to be contradicted. “Such intercourse, however, is useful,” he said. “It is well that I should in that way keep in touch with the parties, and for that reason I have always been accessible to them. Every member of Parliament could come to me at any time, day or night, and be received immediately. But they have taken little advantage of this. They do not want to be considered by their party as having Government sympathies, and prefer to be able to abuse me for having no relations with them. It is only the Ultramontanes who come sometimes, such as Windthorst, Schorlemer and Hüne, also Frankenstein, who is now dead. The _cartel_ parties hardly ever put in an appearance.” He recommended me to try the caviar. “It has been sent to me by the Minister of the Imperial Household at St. Petersburg, and I take it that it is the same as that which is served to the Emperor Alexander. It is the best I have ever had.” He also praised the Moselle and Yquem. On Herbert coming in he laid before the Chief a portfolio connected with the negotiations in progress respecting a partition of East Africa, and the latter gave his opinion as to the frontiers. I accompanied him downstairs, and he handed me out of the green portfolio on the table in the large room nine or ten copies in his own handwriting of letters addressed by him to the Emperor William I., during the years 1872 to 1887. “Copy these and keep the copies by you, and bring me back the originals, as well as that of the letter of introduction of 1852.”