In England, also, the Foreign Secretary could not discern “a cloud in the sky.” _The Hohenzollern Candidature._ One week later, not only M. Ollivier and Lord Granville, but Europe, nay, the whole world, saw plainly enough the signs and portents of discord and convulsion. On the 3rd of July the Duc de Gramont learned from the French Minister at Madrid that Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, with his own full consent, had been selected as a candidate for the vacant throne of Spain, and that, at no distant date, the Cortes would be formally requested to elect him. The French Government quivered with indignation, and the political atmosphere of Paris became hot with rage. Not that the former were unfamiliar with the suggestion. It had been made in 1869, considered, and apparently abandoned. Indeed, the Emperor himself had, at one time, when he failed to obtain the Rhenish provinces, proposed that they should be formed into a State to be ruled by the King of Saxony, and at another, that the Sovereign should be the Hereditary Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen; the very Prince put forward by Marshal Prim. He had been grievously hampered and perplexed in the choice of a Sovereign of Spain by some Powers, especially by France; but now the Imperial Government turned the whole tide of its resentment, not upon Madrid, but Berlin, which, it was assumed, aimed at establishing an enemy to France beyond the Pyrenees. Explanations were demanded directly from the Prussian Government, but M. Le Sourd, the chargé d’affaires, could extract no other answer than this—that the Prussian Government knew nothing about the matter. The Duc de Gramont, who had succeeded Lavalette, in May, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, regarded the statement as a subterfuge, and forthwith determined to fasten on the King a responsibility which he could not fasten on the Government. The Duc de Gramont was not a wise counsellor; he was deep in negotiations having for their object an offensive and defensive alliance against Prussia, and he was hardly less moved by a noisy external opinion than by his own political passions. He ordered M. Benedetti, who had only just sought repose at Wildbad, to betake himself at once to Ems, whither King William, according to custom, had repaired to drink the waters. The French Ambassador reached the pleasant village on the Lahn late at night on the 8th of July, and the next day began a series of interviews with the King, which take rank among the most curious examples of diplomacy recorded in history.