Excerpt from A Diplomat's Memoir of 1870: Being the Account of a Balloon Escape From the Siege of Paris and a Political Mission to London and ViennaIt is a record of a somewhat remark able episode in a stormy and remarkable year. It describes, possibly not without the inevitable bias of one sent on a'forlorn hope, the necessary refusals of Gladstone and Lord Granville to intervene in favour of France. But, as the writer quite pro phetically declares, the surrender of Alsace Lorraine and the aggrandisement of Prussia were fated to bethe inevitable stumbling block' to peace in Europe, and so not without moment to England. This we now know only too well. 1870 was to be the prelude of 1914.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.