"Are you and your colleagues aware that I suffer in my reputation for these procrastinations? It is said at home in Germany that I am over-lenient toward the French, our treacherous enemies ... that I delay to reap for United Germany the glory and profit for which she has paid so terrible a price in blood. Yourself with MM. Ducrot and Favre have considered my terms for an armistice inadmissible.... In return I tell you you have forfeited the right to criticize any terms that I may propose.... You would hold the elections—even in those provinces of France which we hold as conquerors! You would reprovision Paris and her fortresses! We should be hellish unpractical if we listened to you!... What the big devil!... Are we to permit the levies, and the recruiting by which the French Republic may hurl against us a new army to shoot down? Himmelkreuzbombenelement!... Do you take us for sheep's heads?"
The unhappy Minister protested in a faint voice:
"Monsieur le Comte, I do not even comprehend the meaning of the term!"
"Ah, by God!" thundered the terrible voice, "you are ignorant indeed of German words and German meanings, and the word that you understand least of all when applied to yourselves is WAR! Silk gloves are not our wear in War, and therefore the iron gloves with which we have handled you have pinched your soft flesh and made you squeal. We might complain of your Francs-tireurs, who hide in woods and houses, and shoot our soldiers unawares; and of the inhumanity of your mitrailleuses which cut red lanes through whole regiments. But no! You are the sufferers—you are to be pitied—even for the injuries you wreak upon yourselves...."
He struck with his clenched fist the top of the chiffonier near which he stood, and the dull shock of the contact of that sledge-hammer of muscle and bone with the solid marble, made the pictures shake upon the wall, the windows rattle in their frames, and the bewildered listener leap as if he had been shot.
"I rode over to St. Cloud yesterday," he went on, "to look at the palace you have set on fire with your shells from Mont Valérien. It is burning still, as I don't doubt you know. A well-dressed French gentleman stood looking at the smoldering ashes of the conflagration. Near him was a French workman in a dirty blue blouse—'C'est l'œuvre de Bismarck!' said the gentleman to the plebeian, little dreaming who was near.... But the cad in the blouse only said to him: 'Why, our —— gunners did that themselves!' That workman had more sense in his pumpkin than the whole lot of you!"
M. Thiers revived under the fresh insult sufficiently to plant a sting:
"It is said, Monsieur, and on excellent authority, that the Imperial Palace was sacked by German troops before it was set on fire."
The Chancellor lowered his heavy brows and demanded almost menacingly:
"Do you assert that His Majesty the King or the Crown Prince of Prussia were parties to a crime of this kind?"