his promise the king refused to give,
but he notified the ambassador that he would inform him when he had
received a confirmation of the renunciation. When this was received, he
sent word to M. Benedetti by an aide-de-camp, refusing him the third
audience which he requested, stating that he approved of the prince's
decision, but declining to bind himself with regard to any future
negotiations.

An official statement of these interviews was drawn up under the eyes of
the king by his private councillor Abeken, and telegraphed to Bismarck,
with authority to publish it. This statement contained nothing that need
inflame the national feeling in either Germany or France, but, as
re-edited by the chancellor, it represented the French ambassador as
unduly importunate, and as having received a flat refusal from the
monarch. The patriotism on both sides took fire; and war was declared on
the 19th of July. The Germans assert that it would have been inevitable
in any case, without this falsification of the despatch of Ems, but the
Iron Chancellor is convicted, on his own testimony, of having desired it
and of having wrought to bring it about.

M. Emile Ollivier, Louis Napoleon's minister, president of the Conseil,
whose "light heart" for the "great responsibility" of the war with
Germany has earned him a special measure of obloquy, has within the last
two or three years appeared again in public, in his own defence. In an
interview granted an editor of the _Gil Blas_ on the twenty-sixth
anniversary of his fall, the ex-minister made a series of statements
justifying the men and measures of that fatal period, and contributing
some very important assertions to history. "We committed no faults,"
said M. Ollivier; "we were unfortunate, that was all, and I have
nothing, nothing with which to reproach myself." France, he declares,
was assured of the alliance of Austria and Italy, even after
Reischoffen; the plan of campaign, which has been so much criticised,
the scattering of the troops along the frontier, was imposed by the
Austrian general staff. Sedan, however, chilled these allies, and
delivered Germany, as Bismarck himself wrote, from all danger of a
coalition against her. The inertia of the Emperor, who was ill with the
stone, who could not command himself, and "would suffer no one to take
the command in his place;" the errors of the generals, including
Mac-Mahon; the treason of Bazaine, and the council of war held by the
minister