第46章 CHAPTER IV THE COUSIN FROM BERLIN(9)

"I repeat my counsel. If you do not like danger, go! It may be that I am mistaken, and that this nation, convinced of the uselessness of defense, may give itself up voluntarily. . . . At any rate, we shall soon see. I shall take great pleasure in returning to Paris when the flag of the Empire is floating over the Eiffel Tower, a mere matter of three or four weeks, certainly by the beginning of September."

France was going to disappear from the map. To the Doctor, her death was a foregone conclusion.

"Paris will remain," he admitted benevolently, "the French will remain, because a nation is not easily suppressed; but they will not retain their former place. We shall govern the world; they will continue to occupy themselves in inventing fashions, in making life agreeable for visiting foreigners; and in the intellectual world, we shall encourage them to educate good actresses, to produce entertaining novels and to write witty comedies. . . . Nothing more."

Desnoyers laughed as he shook his cousin's hand, pretending to take his words as a paradox.

"I mean it," insisted Hartrott. "The last hour of the French Republic as an important nation has sounded. I have studied it at close range, and it deserves no better fate. License and lack of confidence above--sterile enthusiasm below."

Upon turning his head, he again caught Argensola's malicious smile.

"We know all about that kind of study," he added aggressively. "We are accustomed to examine the nations of the past, to dissect them fibre by fibre, so that we recognize at a glance the psychology of the living."

The Bohemian fancied that he saw a surgeon talking self-sufficiently about the mysteries of the will before a corpse. What did this pedantic interpreter of dead documents know about life? . . .

When the door closed, he approached his friend who was returning somewhat dismayed. Argensola no longer considered Doctor Julius von Hartrott crazy.

"What a brute!" he exclaimed, throwing up his hands. "And to think that they are at large, these originators of gloomy errors! . . .

Who would ever believe that they belong to the same land that produced Kant, the pacifist, the serene Goethe and Beethoven! . . .

To think that for so many years, we have believed that they were forming a nation of dreamers and philosophers occupied in working disinterestedly for all mankind! . . ."

The sentence of a German geographer recurred to him: "The German is bicephalous; with one head he dreams and poetizes while with the other he thinks and executes."

Desnoyers was now beginning to feel depressed at the certainty of war. This professor seemed to him even worse than the Herr Counsellor and the other Germans that he had met on the steamer.

His distress was not only because of his selfish thought as to how the catastrophe was going to affect his plans with Marguerite. He was suddenly discovering that in this hour of uncertainty he loved France. He recognized it as his father's native land and the scene of the great Revolution. . . . Although he had never mixed in political campaigns, he was a republican at heart, and had often ridiculed certain of his friends who adored kings and emperors, thinking it a great sign of distinction.

Argensola tried to cheer him up.

"Who knows? . . . This is a country of surprises. One must see the Frenchman when he tries to remedy his want of foresight. Let that barbarian of a cousin of yours say what he will--there is order, there is enthusiasm. . . . Worse off than we were those who lived in the days before Valmy. Entirely disorganized, their only defense battalions of laborers and countrymen handling a gun for the first time. . . . But, nevertheless, the Europe of the old monarchies could not for twenty years free themselves from these improvised warriors!"