June 12. During the morning our quiet excursion in celebration of our twenty-third wedding anniversary. In the evening a few guests at dinner,—Bihourd, the French ambassador at The Hague, Captain Sheïn, of the Russian navy, Léon Bourgeois, Bloch, and Theodor Herzl.
I hardly ever had a more interesting table companion than Bourgeois. What made our conversation so particularly enjoyable was our complete agreement in matters concerning peace. The former—and perhaps the future, who knows?—French Premier is enthusiastic for the objects of the Conference. The task which he has to fulfill here seems to him far more productive and important than the formation of a cabinet. In Paris a ministerial crisis is at hand and Bourgeois will probably be recalled; but he firmly intends to return so as to bring to an end to the best of his ability the work here, “which promises to be useful to the world and at the same time to his fatherland.”
We talk among other things of the French national press. I regret the hectoring tone, especially in that portion of the press which the people at large read.
“That is not so bad,” he replies. “Nowhere else do the people—especially the workingmen—read the newspapers so much as with us; but they have no faith in them. The French laborer buys a newspaper, reads it, chatters about it, but doesn’t pin his faith to it. His mind is open, awake, and he is thirsty for everything that is free and upright. Race hatred disgusts him. I know what is thought in the workingmen’s circles, for I myself come from them.”
I ask him about the “dead point” in the arbitration question.
“I cannot say anything just now,” is his reply, “but be assured—nothing will be left untried.”
We conclude the evening in the great music hall, where a concert arranged by Manager Goldbeck is given in honor of the delegates. Bourgeois is obliged to depart before the other guests; he must go back to the city, he explains apologetically.
After a while Count Nigra comes up to me: “Do you know the news? The French ministry fell some hours ago. M. Bourgeois has just been summoned to Paris by telegraph.”
June 13. The Neues Wiener Tagblatt prints a dispatch from The Hague: “The negotiations regarding the court of arbitration, as we learn by telegraph from Brussels, have completely gone to pieces.”
I send a line to Chevalier Descamps, requesting him, if the above-mentioned news is false, to write a denial and let me send it immediately to the paper. Descamps himself comes to bring me the answer. The news is false, and he allows me to make the desired correction. At the same time he begs me to write this very day to Émile Arnaud, asking him if he will not cease attacking in the Indépendance belge the projected system of a permanent bureau and pleading for permanent treaties instead; one at a distance cannot judge what at the moment is to be attained, and what an obstacle it is in the way of the workers here if what has been secured with difficulty meets with the opposition of its own friends.