Best thanks for the article you kindly sent me regarding your admirable work; I am returning it herewith, as soon as I have read it. Carneri has wielded his pen like a master and written just after my heart. The other printed sheets which I also inclose are the last pages of the second volume, which is soon to be out, of my Recollections. On the last page of all you will find how it was I came to be sent from Berlin to Paris as a peace man and a free-trader. The thing was so suddenly arranged that I had no time left to prepare a speech. And besides, I could not have said anything that was not already included in the Berlin letter of adhesion which I was to deliver. Moreover, I had never yet spoken in public, and had no desire to make my first experiment in a foreign language. So everything would have been sure to go off without a ripple had not Richard Cobden insisted on making me make a speech, and that in the very first session. I had taken my place in one of the front rows of the hall, which held between five and six thousand people, and I had been calmly listening to a half-dozen addresses—among them a very good one by Bastiat—when Cobden perceived me and immediately came down from the platform, seized me by the hand, and made me go with him and take a place in a chair next him on the platform. As vice president he sat at Victor Hugo’s left, and, when Victor Hugo opened the congress with solemn grandiloquence, had immediately followed with an address in fearful French but immensely effective.
I obstinately refused his insistence that I also should be heard, and I believed that I had safely got out of it, when suddenly my ear caught a whispered conversation between him and Victor Hugo:
“Il faut le faire parler de quelque façon que ce soit.”
“Mais il m’a prévenu, déjà hier, qu’il n’a pas préparé un discours.”
“Donnez-lui toujours la parole; il faut donc bien qu’il dise quelque chose!”[[24]]
The next moment the bell tinkled and the voice of the president was heard,
“Je donne la parole à Mr. Fr. Bodenstedt de Berlin.”[[25]]
I got to my feet in some trepidation, and said, in as good French and in as loud a voice as I could just then command, that the president had been aware ever since my arrival that I had not come to make a speech; “mais même si j’avais préparé un discours, je ne le prononcerais pas aujourd’hui ici....”
“Pourquoi pas? Pourquoi pas?”
“Je vous en dirai la raison tout franchement. Je viens de promener mes regards à travers cette vaste salle, où l’on voit représentées par leurs drapeaux toutes les nations civilisées du globe, mais le drapeau de la nation la plus civilisée, le drapeau allemand y manque!”—[[26]]