¶ Also, he could bluff and swagger, or he could speak in the polite accents of the distinguished gentleman; he could gulp a quart of champagne without taking the silver tankard from his lips; in younger years he used to eat from four to eleven eggs at a meal, besides vegetables, cakes, beer, game and three or four kinds of meats; his favorite drink was a mixture of champagne and porter.
¶ He was a chain-smoker, lighted one cigar with another, often smoked ten or twelve hours at a stretch. His huge pipes, in the drawing room; his beer, in the salons of Berlin; his irritability, his bilious streaks, his flashes of temper; his superstition about the number 13; his strange mixing of God with all his despotic conduct; his fondness for mastiffs; his attacks of jaundice; his volcanic outbursts; his belief in ghosts, in the influence of the moon to make the hair grow; his mystical something about seven and combinations of seven; his incessant repetition of the formula that he was obeying his God—were but human weaknesses that showed he had a side like an everyday common man.
¶ On top of it all he was great, because he knew how to manage men either with or without their consent; but he always studied to place himself in a strategic position from which he could insist on his demand for his pound of flesh.
¶ Sometimes, it took years before he could lull to sleep, buy, bribe or win over the men he needed; again when the game was short and sharp, he kicked some men out of his path contemptuously, others he parleyed with, still others he thundered against and defied; but always at the right time, won his own way.
¶ Yes, even Bismarck’s card-playing is subordinated to the shrewd ends of diplomacy. Dr. Busch, the press-agent of Bismarck during the Franco-Prussian war, tells us that Bismarck once made this frank confession:
¶ “In the summer of 1865 when I concluded the Convention of Gastein with Blome (the Austrian), I went in for quinze so madly that the rest could not help wondering at me. But I knew what I was about. Blome had heard that this game gave the best possible opportunity for discovering a man’s real nature, and wanted to try it on with me. So I thought to myself, here’s for you then, and away went a few hundred thalers, which I really might have charged as spent in His Majesty’s service. But at least I thus put Blome off the scent, so he thought me a reckless fellow and gave way.”
3
Despite vast areas of political bogs, quaking under foot, that one must traverse, our Otto is not inaccessible!
¶ For many years they hate him like hell-fire itself, this Otto von Bismarck. The Prussians hate him, the Austrians, the Bavarians, to say nothing of the intervening rabble; but our tyrant is strong enough, in the end, to win foreign wars, and then the haters veer about, almost in a night, come up on bended knees and kiss the hand that smites—that hand of Bismarck, at once the best-beloved and the most-hated hand of his time. What more pray do you ask of human nature?