It was just as the English diplomat had predicted. The French people, indignant at the supposed slight to their ambassador, in their mad hostility to England, lost tight of themselves; and while in this rabid condition, another grand slice was quietly cut from their fast attenuating freedom.
And the programme of that more extensive, and still more sanguinary, conspiracy was also carried out to the letter.
Before the year had ended, the perjured King of Prussia had marched his myrmidons into South Germany, trampling out the revived flame of Badish and Bavarian revolution; the ruffian soldiers of the Third Napoleon had forced back upon the Roman people their detested hierarch; while a grand Cossack army of two hundred thousand men was advancing iron-heeled over the plain of the Puszta to tread out the last spark of liberty in the East.
This is not romance: it is history!
Chapter Twenty Four.
A Treacherous Staging.
Men make the crossing of the Atlantic in a Cunard steamer, sit side by side, or vis-à-vis, at the same table, three and sometimes four times a day, without ever a word passing between them, beyond the formulary “May I trouble you for the castors?” or “The salt, please?”
They are usually men who have a very beautiful wife, a rich marriageable daughter, or a social position of which they are proud.