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 Vienna At a time when Englishmen and Frenchmen are brothers-in-arms, a translation of this curious and little known narrative may be of interest. It is a record of a somewhat remarkable 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 prophetically declares, the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine and the aggrandisement of Prussia were fated to be the 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 Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This 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.