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Frustrated, but awed by Hitler's successes, the Duce and Ciano were reduced to scoffing privately at their opposite numbers. "Ribbentrop ... is vain, frivolous and loquacious. The Duce says you only have to look at his head to see that he has a little brain." On a visit to Goring, Ciano found him in mufti: "A tie ... passed through a ring with a ruby. More large rubies on his fingers. In his buttonhole, a great Nazi eagle with diamonds. A slight suggestion of Al Capone." When Hitler visited Italy, Ciano recorded: "The King . . . told the Duce and me that the first night of his stay at the Palace, at about one in the morning, Hitler asked for a woman. This caused a great commotion. Then it was explained—apparently he can't get to sleep, unless with his own eyes he sees a woman remake his bed . . . Mussolini believes that Hitler puts rouge on his cheeks in order to hide his pallor."
Spain Led to Speculation. Not love of the Germans, as such entries make plain, but contempt for French and British indecision made the vacillating Duce pick the German side. When the French and British governments failed to rouse after Italy's pro-Franco intervention in Spain, Ciano writes: "I am surprised. [It] is enough to make one speculate about the decline of the French and British peoples." In September 1938, when Ciano phoned Mussolini that Chamberlain was flying to meet Hitler at Berchtesgaden, the Duce exclaimed: "There will not be war, but this is the liquidation of English prestige." Ciano, who could "cry like a small child" when he heard Mussolini's voice on the radio, was hardly the man to change the Duce's mind.
As Ciano tells it, British and French envoys came to him "literally overwhelmed," "groggy," "white as a sheet." He greeted them with "perfect serenity" and "absolute calm." An occasional voice of sanity tries to puncture this ham acting. Flying General Italo Balbo told Ciano: "There no longer exists a taste for sincerity in Italy." He warned that the Germans "will let us down." Heedless and unprincipled, Ciano, at the end of 1938, was plotting the annexation of Albania, stirring up anti-French demonstrations, egging on the Japanese, like a retarded boy playing with homemade fireworks.