HIS Britannic Majesty's Ambassador at Paris is usually a considerable figure in world business. Even in days when the terrors of rapid communication tend to deprive diplomats all over the world of any opportunity of personal initiative, the Paris Embassy, the nearest of them all to London, is regarded as a prize. Within more or less recent years the post has been held by men of most varied distinction and attainment. There have been Pro-Consuls such as Dufferin and Hardinge, men of letters such as Lytton and Crewe, heads of great English families such as Derby, steadygoing diplomats of the Monson type, and men more dependent upon the sturdiness of their character than upon the finesse of their intelligence, such as the late Lord Bertie of Thame.

They have all left their patine of history behind them on No. 39 Rue du Faubourg St Honoré, which was purchased by the Iron Duke as an Embassy for the ridiculous sum of £40,000. Each temporary occupant has shown off with pride to a changing set of guests the beauties of the garden, the splendour of the famous gold plate, once the property-as was the house-of Pauline Borghese. Lytton was

a polished cultured man of literary tastes. Under his reign the Embassy became a centre of fashionable and artistic life in Paris. With Monson its guests were found rather more strictly in official circles. Soldiers and great names of the aristocracy figured most frequently in the entertainment book of Lord Derby's days. Lord Bertie, who for a Paris Ambassador was a man of moderate means, was, with great injustice, sometimes reproached by the ignorant for never doing any entertaining at all. Such complaints were usually to be found in the mouths of self-important bores and social climbers, whose acquaintance with the Embassy was limited strictly by an invitation to the annual reception on the King's birthday or to the annual garden party. As a matter of fact, Bertie, for a man so inherently Tory, indeed almost snobbish in his social ideas, had a very large acquaintance in all kinds of the many forms of Society in France. He entertained a curious ous mixture of Rothschilds, Gunzbourgs, and old French aristocracy of the Saint Germain vintage, leavened by frequent visits from British Ministers, men from the front, and Members of Parliament,

among whom were several representatives of Labour.

An Ambassador even nowadays is very much in the position of the captain of a battleship. Although the father of his official family, he nevertheless occupies an aloof eminence. He has not to dine in solitary state, but just the same he is a person apart. He represents his Sovereign, and for that reason is forced to surround himself with circumstances of state, with barriers against indiscretion, with social barbed wire entanglements which are not required by the ordinary politician or even statesman.

An Ambassador is very much more really the personal representative of his Sovereign than is imagined by the general public. He constantly has to report directly to the King, and to convey personal messages to the head of the State to which he is accredited. Every action he performs, every house he visits, every friendship he makes, is therefore invested with special significance. He has to be further above criticism than Cæsar's wife, and more royalist than the King. He can never let himself go, and, like the clergyman pitied by the child, does not even get his Sundays off. Moreover, as well as being the personal representative of the King, he has to be that anonymous freak, the personification of personification of his country's policy.

An ordinary humdrum Ambassador-and Heaven knows

there have been too many of them-acts up to the specification without too much selfrepression, moves through his daily round of ceremonial duties with distinction, carries out his task as royal postman with becoming dignity, retires full of honours, and is forgotten by his grateful countrymen about a week afterwards. But the really big man manages by sheer force of character to remain himself amid all the flummery of diplomatic existence, and succeeds in putting flesh upon the skeleton of traditional policy, and in sending the blood of reality coursing through its veins.

Such a man was Lord Bertie, and it will be a thousand pities if the extracts from his diary, edited by Lady Algernon Gordon Lennox, are not as quickly as possible followed up by a more serious picture of a great servant of the public. Naturally it is far too soon for official archives to yield up the true story of the many occasions, both before the war and during the war, when his intervention carried decisive weight in European affairs. Lady Algernon Gordon Lennox would have been better advised to wait until all these materials for a fitting memorial to Lord Bertie were available, than to have published a book consisting of nothing but the random thoughts of an old man jotted down at the end of the day in front of his study fire in dressing-gown and slippers. A picture thus drawn

can only give an idea of a man who was a great Ambassador, and filled a great part in the greatest tragedy history has yet produced.

Lord Bertie came to Paris from Rome in 1905, and it was not long before the German Foreign Office considered that he, Cartwright of Vienna, and Lord Hardinge, were the three ablest instruments of the British policy associated with King Edward. In 1904 the AngloFrench Convention had laid a firm foundation for the Entente Cordiale by removing all over the world most of the points of friction between the two countries. In the very year of Bertie's arrival at the Paris Embassy, Germany began the policy of rudely testing the strength of this new understanding, a policy which eventually led to war in 1914.

France was but little able to resist German pressure. The last hopes of victory for her Russian ally had been sent to the bottom in Tsushima's straits. The French Army was thoroughly disorganised, lacked artillery, munitions, and, above all, confidence in itself. Delcassé, the ablest and certainly the most secretive Foreign Minister the Third Republic has had, suddenly found himself confronted with the fact that in the long run foreign policy, however skilful, is only worth the weight of the punch behind it. So when Germany, under threat of war, demanded his

Delcassé throughout his long seven years of office had been the consistent advocate of Franco-Russian and of AngloFrench co-operation. His departure constituted a formidable set-back for those causes. It led at the very outset of Bertie's career as Ambassador in Paris to an almost complete reversal of policy. It gave a free field to those French politicians, notable among whom was Monsieur Caillaux, who saw in an arrangement with Germany based upon acceptance of the loss of AlsaceLorraine, and upon co-operation in the economic and colonial field, the best guarantee of peace for France. Such a policy could then clearly have had but one result-namely, to isolate Britain in Europe, and to put to death the frail new-born child, the Entente Cordiale.

Almost simultaneously the great Tory landslide in Britain had brought men into power, the general tendency of whose Party was to disbelieve in the possibility of there being people mad enough to contemplate a European war. They trusted overmuch to the efficacy of vague or, at best, but sloppilydefined friendships between peoples, and the general brotherhood of man, to ensure the continuance of peace. During the first years of Bertie's stay in Paris he had therefore to deal with a French Government

which throughout the Moroccan negotiations until the fall of Caillaux was engaged in a surreptitious, but none the less vigorous, flirtation with Germany, and with a British Government which, looking askance at any binding agreement with France, was by every means in its power encouraging the development of Anglo-German relations. Only with considerable difficulty could Lord Bertie justify to his French friends the reception given officially to the constant stream of German burgomasters, German editors, German doctors, and delegations of every kind which poured into England at that time. Similarly it was impossible for him to explain away to his own Government the backstairs efforts of Caillaux to make a secret bargain with Germany at British expense. Frenchmen who were in favour of an understanding with Great Britain always sought throughout that twilight period to show that Great Britain was more definitely committed to come to the military support of France in the event of war than was actually the case, while in France André Tardieu and many another spokesman of the Government constantly hinted at the existence of a definite defensive military alliance. British Ministers, taking their stand upon the extremely elastic terms of the letters exchanged, rose time after time in Parliament to blunt the curiosity of mem

bers, stating that Great Britain was in no way committed to come to the help of any one in Europe.

Bertie saw long before the war the risks Britain ran of again being called "perfide Albion " so long as French public opinion was being educated up to a firm faith in the existence of this non-existent alliance. This business of telling France that she was exaggerating the nature of a very vague commitment into a definite military and diplomatic document was carried out in the most ruthless manner by the Ambassador.

He was a man of strong character, violent likes and dislikes, and unconquerable prejudices. He was also a thoroughly loyal gentleman; for a liar and a humbug he had an unerring nose. He never concealed his opinion, and scorned to soften its expression. He was rude-brutally, needlessly rude if you like-to the hundreds of people who passed through Paris who had some little axe to grind, or who just imagined that they should call upon the Ambassador because they bore an introduction from some otherwise omnipotent personage in England. His scorn for the average politician was immeasurable. He loathed their manners, denied denied their honesty, and suspected their bodily cleanliness. At a private dinner-party arranged by Lord Murray of Elibank for discussion of a new shell scandal, Stephen Pichon, then Minister