His friendship with M. Joseph Reinach, so often mentioned, dates back to the days when the latter was Gambetta's secretary. 'C'est par Gambetta que j'ai connu Dilke,' says M. Reinach. 'Gambetta avait pour lui une vive affection.' In London and in Paris they met and talked and fenced, and kept in touch by close political correspondence. 'Dilke was a great friend of mine, and I thought him a true and intrepid patriot and citizen,' said M. Reinach; and perhaps of all M. Reinach's great qualities it was his courage which most provoked the admiration of Sir Charles and of his wife. They knew all the three brothers, and M. Salomon Reinach, asking Sir Charles to come and discuss manuscripts, signs himself 'in admiration of your enormous knowledge'--a happy tribute from one of whom it was said 'il sait tout.' 'Salomon Reinach, the outgoing President of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres,' writes Sir Charles in 1908 to Lord Fitzmaurice, 'is what Arthur Strong (Librarian of House of Lords) was, and Acton tried to be, "universal." He asked me to listen to him for two whole evenings, till we became a nuisance to our hosts--on the way in which, despite our Historical Manuscripts Commission, we still lock up papers. His strongest examples were Horace Mann's letters to Horace Walpole, and the letters received by the Duke of Wellington (the loss of nearly all the letters written by J. S. Mill moves me more).' M. Pallain, Regent of the Bank of France, was another friend whose acquaintance with Sir Charles dated back to the days when he was Gambetta's secretary. His book on Talleyrand, the 'fameux livre de Pallain,' as Sir Charles calls it in a letter to M. Jusserand, was hardly less interesting to him than his mastership of French finance. The Siegfrieds, representatives of the wealthy and serious Protestant world, were friends who shared Sir Charles' interest in questions of social reform, as was that wisest of permanent officials, M. Fontaine, head of the French Labour Department; and he discussed these matters also with the great representative of Roman Catholic Socialism, Count Albert de Mun. The list of his Diary engagements, ranging over a long period of time, is filled with the names of French writers, from Ludovic Halevy, the novelist and dramatist (passages from whose _Belle Helene_ he would recite and whistle), to Anatole France; and of politicians of every school of thought, from Leon Say, 'a statesman of rare competence,' to M. Delcasse, whom he saw often, Deschanel, Leon Bourgeois, Millerand, Viviani, and that great friend of Greece--M. Denys Cochin; Calmette, the editor of the _Figaro_, assassinated by Mme. Caillaux; and Lepine, the Prefect of Police; while Jaures was a London as well as a Paris guest.