“Of Ceuta?” she echoed. “And what do you at your Embassy know regarding it?”
“We’ve heard a good deal,” I laughed.
“No doubt you’ve heard a good deal that is untrue,” the clever old lady replied, her powdered face again puckering into a smile. “Do you want to know my honest opinion?” she added.
“Yes, I do.”
“Well,” she went on, “I attach very little importance to the rumours of a projected sale or lease of Ceuta to us. I might tell you in confidence,” she went on, dropping her voice, “that from some words I overheard at the garden-party at de Wolkenstein’s I have come to a firm conclusion that, although during the next few years important changes will be made upon the map of the world, Ceuta will remain Spanish. My country will never menace yours in the Mediterranean at that point. A Ministry might be found in Madrid to consider the question of its disposal, but the Spanish people would rise in revolution before they would consent. Spain is very poor, but very proud. Having lost so many of her foreign possessions, she will hold more strongly than ever to Ceuta. There you have the whole situation in a nutshell.”
“Then the report that it is actually sold to France is untrue?” I asked eagerly.
“A mere report I believe it to be.”
“But Spain’s financial indebtedness to France might prove an element of danger when Europe justifies Lord Beaconsfield’s prediction and rushes into war over Morocco?”
“Ah, my dear M’sieur Ingram, I do not agree with the prediction of your great statesman,” the old lady said vehemently. “It is not in that direction in which lies the danger of war, but at the other end of the Mediterranean.”
Somehow I suspected her of a deliberate intention to mislead me in this matter. She was a shrewd woman, who only disclosed her secrets when it was to her own interests or the interests of her friends at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to do so. In Paris there is a vast network of French intrigue, and it behoves the diplomatist always to be wary lest he should fall into the pitfalls so cunningly prepared for him. The dividing line between truth and untruth is always so very difficult to define in modern diplomacy. It is when the European situation seems most secure that the match is sufficiently near to fire the mine. Fortunate it is that the public, quick to accept anything that appears in the daily journals, can be placed in a sense of false security by articles inspired by one or other of the embassies interested. If it were not so, European panics would certainly be of frequent occurrence.