"I am very much pleased, but the shadow remains in the background. I was already as good caught for the Ministry. Perhaps when I am out of their sight they will discover another Minister-President. I expect to start for Paris to-morrow; whether for long, God knows; perhaps only for a few months or even weeks. They are all conspired together that I should stay here. I have had to be very firm to get away from this hotel life even for a time."
He did not really expect to be away more than ten days or a fortnight. At a farewell audience just before he started, the King seems to have led him to expect that he would in a very few days be appointed as he wished, Foreign Minister.
He arrived in Paris on the 30th, to take up his quarters in the empty Embassy. He did not wait even to see his wife before starting and he wrote to her that she was not to take any steps towards joining him.
"It is not decided that I am to stay here; I am in the middle of Paris lonelier than you are in Reinfeld and sit here like a rat in a deserted house. How long it will last God knows. Probably in eight or ten days I shall receive a telegraphic summons to Berlin and then game and dance is over. If my enemies knew what a benefit they would confer on me by their victory and how sincerely I wish it for them, Schleinitz out of pure malice would probably do his best to bring me to Berlin."
Day after day, however, went by and the summons did not come; on the contrary Bernstorff wrote as though he were proposing to stay on; he did not
