Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 10.djvu/186

 mean to criticize my political conduct, but at the time did not want to let others see his approval of me.

In the summer of 1855 Count Hatzfeldt, our ambassador in Paris, invited me to visit the Industrial Exhibition; he still shared the belief then existent in diplomatic circles that I was very soon to be Manteuffel's successor at the Foreign Office. Although the King had entertained such an idea on and off, it was already then known in the innermost Court circles that a change had taken place. Count William Redern, whom I met in Paris, told me that the ambassadors continued to believe I was destined to be made a minister and that he himself had also believed this; but that the King had changed his mind—of further details he was ignorant. Doubtless since Rügen.

August 15, Napoleon's day, was celebrated among other ways by a procession of Russian prisoners through the streets. On the 19th the Queen of England made her entry, and on August 25 a State ball was given in her honor at Versailles at which I was presented to her and to Prince Albert.

The Prince, handsome and cool in his black uniform, conversed with me courteously, but in his manner there was a kind of malevolent curiosity from which I concluded that my anti-occidental influence upon the King was not unknown to him. In accordance with the mode of thought peculiar to him, he sought for the motives of my conduct not where they really lay, that is, in the anxiety to keep my country independent of foreign influences—influences which found a fertile soil in our narrow-minded reverence for England and fear of France—and in the desire to hold ourselves aloof from a war which we should not have car-