It is essential before passing from Stieber to consider his methods of covering a foreign country with a fully organised system of German spies, and all the more so because the work done in modern days by Steinhauer and his congeners is based altogether on the conceptions of Bismarck's sleuth. We have seen that in 1870, when the German armies crossed the frontiers of France, they had already been assured, through the energies and foresight of Stieber, of the co-operation of some 36,000 spies in Northern and Eastern France who were to smooth the way for von Moltke's advancing legions. Indeed, Stieber's work largely discounts that of both Bismarck and von Moltke, if it does not wholly supersede it. In his Memoirs the sleuth tells how Bismarck, when told that Jules Favre was putting out feelers for the surrender of Paris in 1871, sent for his lieutenant, instructing him to keep Favre under the closest possible observation during the course of the negotiations. The Prussian and French statesmen met at Versailles, where Stieber had made all necessary arrangements for lodging the visitor. He selected for this purpose, and unknown, of course, to Favre, the headquarters of the German Secret Police Service—Stieber's own office. The Frenchman was given as valet a man whom the proprietor highly recommended. This valet was Stieber himself, who, during Favre's whole stay at Versailles, acted for the statesman in the most menial capacities, taking care during his master's absence to ransack the latter's luggage and examine all his voluminous correspondence entering from Paris. Stieber boasts that much of the information he thus obtained formed the basis of the negotiations on which peace terms were concluded. Moritz Busch in his Memoirs makes no especial mention of the sleuth's services in this regard, and we may dismiss Stieber's claim to have counted for much in the peace negotiations as being characteristically overdrawn.