France was in a state of internal fever; the German was waiting for an opportunity to spring at her throat; the fates were indeed busy with the thread of the Empire’s life. No man felt this more profoundly than Louis Napoléon—no man was less fitted at that time to deal with such a situation. Older than his years, he was only sixty-two, racked by a torturing disease, it seemed easier to him to embark upon a foreign war than to face the horrors and the risks of a second _coup d’état_. That this latter alternative was inevitable unless the attention of the Belleville mob could be turned by a cry of patriotism, was manifest. The whole influence of the Emperor’s surroundings—including the Empress—was cast into the balance for war. In the summer of 1871, after the Commune, the Duc de Persigny, with whom, when he was French Ambassador in London, I had been on intimate terms, came to England. I saw him several times at the St. James’s Club, and we had much conversation, always about the war and the events that led to it. Although he was not in office during Emile Ollivier’s premiership, he, as one of the Emperor’s oldest and most familiar friends, always had access to His Majesty. He told me that, one day, in the late spring of 1870, he went to the Tuileries to pay his respects. He found the Emperor looking ill and careworn, and it was not long before His Majesty began to pour out his anxieties and fears, asking counsel of his tried and faithful servant. The Emperor said that nothing was open to him but one of two alternatives—a foreign war or stern measures of repression at home. Persigny implored him not to think of a foreign war. The Emperor answered that it was easy enough to say that, but what ministry would take office with the understanding to “balayer Belleville”—would Persigny himself form a government with such a programme? The Duke asked for forty-eight hours in which to consult his friends. The Emperor dismissed him in the kindest way, apparently much cheered by the hope of avoiding a war, and bade the Duke come back in forty-eight hours. Persigny did not tell me who were the friends with whom he conferred, but he said that he had no difficulty in obtaining promises of assistance from men who, in his judgment, would have formed a very strong administration pledged to throttle disaffection and all revolutionary conspiracies.