As Prime Minister of Poland, Paderewski moved his household into the Zamek. Did he remember the many times that the young music student had passed the royal palace and prayed for the day when a Polish leader would once more be in residence there? Perhaps. But Paderewski was too busy to spend much time reminiscing. The work of forming first a National Council of a hundred men and then a coalition cabinet of sixteen was incredibly difficult. In the course of his former career he had grown accustomed to long, hard work, but it was nothing compared to this! Poles, as we have seen, were not the easiest people in the world with whom to do business politically. And complicating life almost beyond endurance was Pilsudski. The Chief enjoyed long, drawn-out, usually pointless conferences that accomplished nothing except the complete exhaustion of the Prime Minister. He enjoyed them most at two or three o’clock in the morning, preferably just after Paderewski had finally managed to retire for the night. “There is a smell of sulphur in the air whenever that man walks into a room!” Paderewski said, and he looked forward with increasing eagerness to the day when he could leave Warsaw for Paris and the Conference. What a joy not to be in the same city as Józef Pilsudski! If the full story of Paderewski’s accomplishments at the Paris Peace Conference were told in this book, there would scarcely be room in it for anything else. The work of the next three months was the climax and the crowning achievement of his second career. When Paderewski finally reached Paris, the Conference was in its eleventh week. His unavoidable delay in Poland, he quickly realized, had been a costly one. Dmowski had done his best in presenting the Polish claims. His five hour speech to the delegates was acknowledged as a masterful and scholarly treatise. But here was Dmowski himself to tell Paderewski that the Polish questions were all but decided and decided in the negative! Somehow nothing was going according to plan. Hostility, open and hidden, dogged his best efforts. “There is nothing to be done about it,” he announced flatly. “Everything is settled.” The opposition of Lloyd George to every one of his points, for example, practically guaranteed failure. What nation would go against the British leader just because of a minor issue like Poland? [Illustration: _Nothing was going according to plan._]