" We
remember, too, his dissection of St. Arnaud, as before all things a
type of his nation; "he impersonated with singular exactness the
idea which our forefathers had in their minds when they spoke of
what they called 'a Frenchman;' for although (by cowing the rich
and by filling the poor with envy), the great French Revolution had
thrown a lasting gloom on the national character, it left this one
man untouched. He was bold, gay, reckless, vain; but beneath the
mere glitter of the surface there was a great capacity for
administrative business, and a more than common willingness to take
away human life."
"I relish," Kinglake said in 1871, "the spectacle of Bismarck
teaching the A B C of Liberal politics to the hapless French. His
last mot, they tell me, is this. Speaking of the extent to which
the French Emperor had destroyed his own reputation and put an end
to the worship of the old Napoleon, he said: 'He has killed
himself and buried his uncle.'" Again, in 1874, noting the contre
coup upon France resulting from the Bismarck and Arnim despatches,
he said: "What puzzles the poor dear French is to see that truth
and intrepid frankness consist with sound policy and consummate
wisdom.
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