on the German and Italian frontiers in the event of a war with the Dreibund. These plans went into the most minute details, prescrib ing the particular railway which each regi ment should take and at what points on the frontier the different detachments should converge. It was observed that whenever these plans were changed, so far as they re spected the Italian frontier, the Italian troops on their frontier were changed from their previous positions, with the obvious purpose of meeting these changes of French plan. This led to the almost unavoidable inference that the secrets of the proposed method of mobilizing the French army were leaking out, and evidently through the treason or negligence of officers of the gen eral staff, and getting into the hands of the possible enemies of France. As the official spy of the high staff, it be came the duty of Esterhazy to find out from whom these important secrets were leaking. We say it became his duty to find out, but we say it in view of the very strong doubt whether he was not the traitor himself. At that time there was attached to the German embassy in Paris, as its military attache, an officer of the rank of major, whose name we will not print, but will call him S. It will be sufficient to say, concerning him per sonally, that he is one of those very able men that have made the general staff of the German army the most powerful body of men in the world, with the single exception of the Roman priesthood, and that he is now un derstood to be commanding a regiment at Berlin. This man, Major S., had the weak ness — or the strength, as you may choose to call it — of other strong men. He fell desperately in love with a French woman of the average character, and his love was warmly reciprocated, and she gave him the tenderest possible proofs of that fact. This woman lived in apartments with a single servant, a maid, the latter a perfectly re spectable girl. Major S. was, from time to time, admitted to the apartments of his
mistress at night, Esterhazy caught on to this fact, and determined to use it for what it was worth, either for the purpose of dis covering the real traitor through whom the leakage of military secrets was taking place, or else — what seems equally probable — for the purpose of diverting suspicion from himself and casting it upon some scapegoat. To this end he had one of his creatures make love to the maid of the mistress of Major S. This love affair progressed so favorably that Esterhazy's creature actually married her, and thereby obtained an entree to her room in the apartment of her mis tress. One night, while this attache of the German embassy was in the bedroom of his mistress, "fondly locked in beauty's arms," and — as he thought — "safe from all but love's alarms," — the servant of the mistress actually locked them both in from the outside and gave the tip to the creatures of Esterhazy. They immediately — to use a police phrase — "raided" the apartments of Major S., actually burglarized his apart ments — burglarized the sacred precincts of a foreign embassy, — and there ransacked the pockets in his clothing and other recep tacles, and found one or more incriminating documents, which they immediately photo graphed and returned to the places from whence they were taken. They then de camped, leaving his door locked and every thing just as he had left it. When this disclosure was made to General Mercier, Secretary of War, and through him to the government, the government had upon its hands the task of doing two things, the one an affirmative act, the other an act of negative concealment: (1) to discover, con vict and punish the traitor; and (2) without letting the German government know that the French government had deliberately bur glarized the German legation. The latter was a matter of great importance; because, although the French had developed their military system to a supposed superiority over that of Germany, and had — just as
