On his arrival with the headquarters staff and the King of Prussia at Versailles in September 1870, Stieber took up his lodgings at an important hotel belonging to the Duc de Persigny and here he also housed his corps of active-service agents, numbering altogether 120. It is hard to credit the statement, but the authority, M. Paul Lanoir, declares that the police-minister was successful in enlisting the services of some 10,000 persons in Versailles who, in consideration of the payment of one franc daily, agreed to "acclaim with cheers and hurrahs the Prussian monarch and princes whenever they made their excursions into the neighbourhood." Another first-class authority, M. Victor Tissot, seems by his remarks to disprove the statement of Renan to the effect that it is well-nigh impossible to find a traitor among Frenchmen. Tissot assures us that Stieber's work in France was much facilitated by the fact that the Prussian secret service was paying large salaries to important men in French public life, in return for information supplied. The same Paul Lanoir whom we have quoted above also states that Prussian gold has been active in French political life up till within quite recent times. He has met and still knows men, he says, who entered politics without a decent coat to their names who have become as if by magic possessed of splendid mansions, and whose wives, formerly milliners or washerwomen, have now taken to giving receptions on a lavish scale. These politicians would seem to be political only to the extent that they represent a purely personal policy of their own, for, says Lanoir, they continue to "champion the cause of the people," the assumption being that they are paid _agents provocateurs_ in the service of Germany whose duty it is to keep the Republic in a state of such unrest that it must fall an easy prey to an attack from outside. M. Lanoir's statements apply, it is only right to add, to that period of grave unrest in France which succeeded upon the Church crisis and the Moroccan difficulties, and which may be said to have closed by 1911.