One sees by these letters that M. de Bismarck handled at an early hour and with predilection this irony, in which he is without a master; a cold, crafty irony, and which too often approaches sneering. He used it later in his speeches, in his conversations with ministers and ambassadors, and even in diplomatic negotiations, in the most important, most decisive moments of history. At such moments this irony sometimes affects a great frankness, sometimes a great politeness, but a frankness to make you fall on your knees before the first lie, however brazen, a politeness to make you implore an incivility without forms as a veritable charity. One day, on the very eve of the war of 1866, Count Karolyi, ambassador of Austria, and acting in the name of his government, summoned M. de Bismarck to declare categorically if he expected to break the treaty of peace, the treaty of Gastein.[15] "No," was the reply, "I have not that expectation; _but, if I had, would I answer you differently_?" There is an example of that frankness which disconcerts, which confounds, and seems to cry in your ear with that devil from the "Inferno":
As to the murderous politeness, which sometimes clothes the sarcasm of M. de Bismarck, let us recall here the _mot_ which he launched later at the negotiators of Versailles, coming to treat with him concerning the surrender of famished Paris, and to offer him two hundred millions in contributions. "Oh," said he, "_Paris is too great a personage_ that we should treat it in such a shabby manner; let us do it the honor of a milliard." That is truly an original turn which the rival of Heine thought to give to the _maxima reverentia_ which one owes to misfortune! When one is destined in a ripe age to exercise his _humor_ with such ease at the cost of princes and of peoples, how is it possible when young not to jest pleasantly about that poor fellow of a peasant in Pomerania who drank too much water? In one of his letters to his dear Malvina, the young country gentleman describes with a hilarious spirit an inundation which swept over his domain which is divided by a little branch of the narrow river Hampel. This inundation severed him from all his neighbors, carried off so and so many casks of _eau-de-vie_, "introduced an anarchical interregnum from Schievelbein to Damm," and he ends by this stroke: "_I am proud to be able to say_, that in my little branch of the Hampel a wagoner was drowned with his horse and his whole load of tar!" How proud in a different degree was this gentleman one day when, Europe having become his domain, he saw disappearing in the midst of the billows, billows of blood this time, a whole army and its chief, a whole empire and its emperor,--_currus Galliæ et auriga ejus!_ That did not prevent, at another time, the young country gentleman from jumping bravely into the water to rescue his groom and gaining the medal for saving life. During many years this medal was the only one to decorate the broad chest of the Prussian minister at Frankfort. Asked one day by a colleague to the _Bund_ about a decoration to which the diplomatic corps is but little accustomed, he replied in the tone which he alone possesses, that he sometimes happened to rescue a man,--in his leisure moments, be it understood. Probably, if he had been further pressed, he was capable of adding that he only did it for exercise.