The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2)Fontenoy, marquise de
History
The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2)
Fontenoy, marquise de
Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, 1830-1916; William II, German Emperor, 1859-1941
Prince Bismarck was not the sort of man to submit in silence to the
enmity of his former secretary, and a few years after his retirement
to Friedrichsrüh he took occasion, during the course of a public
discussion of the circumstances which led to the disgrace and ruin
of Count Harry Arnim, for a long time German ambassador at Paris, to
disclose for the first time in speech, and in print, the part which
Baron Holstein had played in the affair. According to the prince,
Baron Holstein, while first secretary of the German embassy at Paris,
and though treated by Count Arnim as an inmate of his home, living
in fact under his roof, and eating at his table, was in the habit
throughout an entire year of sending secret reports to Berlin against
the chief under whom he was serving--reports which subsequently
furnished the basis of the charges upon which Count Arnim was tried,
convicted and disgraced.
It is true that some mention was made in the Parisian and English
press at the time of the Arnim trial of the questionable rôle which
Baron Holstein had played in the affair, and there were a number of
Parisian papers that did not hesitate to hold up the baron to, at
any rate, French obloquy, as a man guilty of the base betrayal of the
kindest and most indulgent of chiefs. The only person on that occasion
who had the courage to take up the baron's defence was M. de Blowitz,
French correspondent of the London _Times_, of which he is described
on the banks of the Seine, as the "ambassador," and who possesses
an immense amount of influence with the Parisian press. Blowitz's
championship of the baron's cause was sincerely appreciated by the
latter. He called upon the correspondent, thanked him effusively, and
declared that it was his intervention alone that had made his stay at
Paris possible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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