"The mob who rode roughshod over General Trochu, and his Council of lawyers and orators, appear to be actuated by the desire of fighting things out with us. They burn for a chance, it appears, to pit their undisciplined courage against the Army of United Germany. They are hardly to be blamed for accepting literally the theatrical bombast with which they have been fed by Favre!"
He laughed, and said, with a galling imitation of the rhetorical manner of the Democratic barrister of Lyons:
"'Not a stone of our fortresses'—do you remember? 'Not an inch of our territory!'—have you forgotten?... When it was in the power of the person to whom he boasted to have said to him: Every inch. Every stone!..."
He rose up, towering over the unhappy personage who sat opposite to him, in a little wicker easy-chair that would have suited a child. His greedy vitality physically sucked energy from his victim. The stare of his great eyes oppressed, the roughness of his speech had a wounding brutality.
"Which Party governs France? The Blue Republicans or the Reds, answer me? Can one treat with a State that has no responsible heads?"
"Monsieur le Comte!" screamed the personage thus cruelly prodded. "Do you not know that you are insulting me?"
He had grown deadly pale, and now flushed red, making a passionate gesture as though to strike himself on the forehead, as the other asked him with bitter irony:
"Is the truth so offensive to you as all that?... If you did not wish to hear it, you have come to the wrong shop. The day for compliments and flatteries has passed with the tinsel Empire of your Napoleon, unless you compel us to bring him back and set him up again at the Tuileries. Believe me, he has contemplated this eventuality!—has his carpet-bags ready packed, and his eagle in a traveling-cage.... And certainly we could discuss the military questions at issue better with him than with you civilian gentlemen, who do not understand the language of War."
It was not possible to get a word in edgeways.... The rasping voice tore the nerve-fibers as with a saw-edge, the towering figure overwhelmed, the powerful stare fascinated and terrified as the pitiless gaze of the snake when fixed upon a frog or a bird.
And Bismarck went on, deliberately lashing himself into a passion: