othing 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 co