“England,” writes Sir Theodore Martin, “conceded the phrase _mon frère_ without a grudge.”[80] That is a somewhat misleading statement. It was certainly decided in England that the Emperor should be recognised some little time before the Empire was proclaimed, because everybody knew that its proclamation was inevitable. Having determined that the Prince-President was to be recognised in some fashion as Emperor, a question as to style was raised by the pedants of diplomacy, which showed where the “grudge” lay. It gave rise to that most grotesque of diplomatic struggles--the once famous but now forgotten Battle of the Numeral. Charles Louis Bonaparte, through his envoys, let it be known at the Court of the Queen that he meant to call himself Napoleon III. “Why Napoleon the Third?” asked alarmed Diplomacy. “Clearly he means to filch from us a recognition of the ephemeral title of the Duc de Reichstadt, the son and heir of Napoleon I., who was proclaimed when the First Empire crashed into ruins.” It was a crafty device to avenge Waterloo with the blast of a herald’s trumpet, and to wipe out fifty years of French history, just as the Parliament of the Restoration tried to efface the Commonwealth by dating the statutes of 1660, as of the twelfth year of the Merry Monarch’s reign. The usurper might be recognised by England as Napoleon II., perhaps, but never, argued Lord Malmesbury, as Napoleon III., for that would have countenanced more than our recognition of the Second Empire was actually meant to convey. It would have implied a recognition of the Emperor’s _hereditary_, as distinguished from his _elective_, title to the Throne. Most wearisome were the disputes and most tiresome the conferences between Lord Malmesbury, then Foreign Secretary, and the French Ambassador on this subject. At last it was agreed that we should accept the disagreeable numeral, after the French Government admitted in writing that it was not to imply our recognition of the Emperor’s hereditary right to the Imperial Crown of France. From first to last, however, Lord Malmesbury and the other diplomatists were mistaken. Very little reflection might have taught them that if the numeral were meant to efface Waterloo, and the Monarchies of the Bourbons and the Barricades, the usurper would have styled himself Napoleon V., and not Napoleon III., for his elder uncle Joseph and his father Louis both survived the young and ill-fated Duc de Reichstadt. A hereditary title, moreover, would not need to have been consecrated by a _plebiscite_, and the reign of its wearer would not have been dated from 1852, but from the date of Louis Bonaparte’s death. It is, therefore, natural to ask how Charles Louis Bonaparte came to style himself the Third and not the Second Emperor. The explanation illustrates the facility with which the tragicomedy of fussy English diplomacy is transformed into farce at the touch of fact. Lord Malmesbury, who is rendered supremely ridiculous by the story, tells it