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]
After all eyes had looked in vain for the German flag, which was
nowhere to be found, M. E. de Girardin arose to his full height and
cried in a solemn nasal tone, “Monsieur, vous êtes le drapeau vivant
de l’Allemagne ici!”[27]
During the storm of applause that followed these words, I remembered
that at breakfast I had seen in the _Charivari_ a cartoon of Girardin,
with these words for a legend: “Mr. de Girardin commence à flotter
avec le vent.”[28] So I got up, as soon as the hall was quiet again,
and said, “Merci du compliment, bien que je ne puisse pas l’accepter
dans toute la force du terme, attendu que je ne flotte pas avec le
vent, moi!”[29]
Indescribable effect. Hundreds of Americans and Englishmen cried, “The
translation! The translation!”
M. de Coquerel, curé de Ste. Madelaine, _translateur officiel_, gets
up and begins:
“The learned gentleman has said—”
I interrupt him, politely begging permission to translate my words
into English myself; in doing so I make an allusion to our Anglo-Saxon
relationship, and arouse great enthusiasm.
Now arose M. de Cormenin (Timon) to protest against Germany’s being
_la nation la plus civilisée du globe_: only France, said he, could be
so designated.
“Let us put it to the test,” I cried.... “How is the greatness of a
nation known? By its great men. Name me six of your great living men
and I will wager that every German schoolboy knows their names; then I
will mention six Germans who are their peers, and I will acknowledge
myself beaten if you yourself can give me any tolerably satisfactory
account of their importance.”
So the matter was thrashed back and forth without its being possible
to speak of it as a speech; I myself was farthest of all from having
the idea that I had made one. But Fate often plays strange tricks with
us. Szarvady, Wilhelmine Claus’s husband, was my guide through Paris,
and we had agreed to dine at the Hotel Rougemont at six o’clock with
some of his acquaintances. He had not been at the meeting, but had
taken me to Victor Hugo’s the day before and had there learned that I
was not going to make a speech. Great was his astonishment at reading
in all the evening papers the most contradictory reports of the speech
I did not make. John Lemoine in the _Journal des Débats_ was praising
my fine English, and _Galignani’s Messenger_ remarked as follows about
my French:
“The learned gentleman delivered himself in a most exquisite French.”
That is the only sentence which my memory retains as an attestation of
my oratorical triumph. In Paris I was called _le drapeau vivant de
l’Allemagne_ for a few days, and from there the phrase went over into
all the German papers, where it kept its vogue for a few years. Now it
is to be read only on a “triumph cup” which a fascinating young lady
presented me; on it she had painted me as I then was, in my thirtieth
year, with a full head of curly hair, slender, and vivacious. This
young enthusiast afterwards married the famous Orientalist, Professor
Matzstein, and is still living in Berlin.
But, to turn from this swift success of a witticism to a soberer tone,
I must tell you briefly of a soirée which I attended at Alexis de
Tocqueville’s. He was at that time Minister of Foreign Affairs and was
the most intelligent Frenchman whom I ever knew. With him, Cobden, and
Bastiat I had a long conversation in which the peace question was
treated more exhaustively than was possible in the Congress. We agreed
that the fruit of peace could be ripened only on Germanic soil, while
France and Russia would remain disturbing elements as long as they
should have the power to be such.
As far as I personally am concerned, I have always found myself in a
difficult position as an apostle of peace. My father-in-law was a
colonel. One of my sons-in-law is likewise a colonel. Two of my wife’s
brothers went to fight against France as young captains in 1870. One
of them did not come back at all; the other lost a leg at the storming
of the heights of Spichern, and now hobbles round as a major. All my
wife’s tears could not keep my only son from going as a volunteer
against France, where he won the Iron Cross and the Order for Valor,
with swords. He is now living in St. Paul on the Mississippi....
Yesterday I was interrupted while writing the first sheet of this, and
now the second is drawing to an end. I will only call your attention
to a poem entitled Die kriegerische Nazarener (“The Warlike
Nazarenes”), which went through all the papers in 1854, before the
breaking out of the Crimean War, and which you will find on page 120
of the ninth volume of my collected works (Berlin, Decker, 1867). It
might be very appropriate for reprinting in the new edition, as is
shown by the utterances of three ecclesiastical potentates, which it
illustrates:
The issue is the battle of the Cross against the heathen.