He Walked Around the Horses | Page 8

come to the aid
of the Americans, he doomed himself and his regime. A successful resistance to royal
authority in America was all the French Republicans needed to inspire them. Of course,
we have Louis's own weakness to blame, too. If he'd given those rascals a whiff of
grapeshot, when the mob tried to storm Versailles in 1790, there'd have been no French
Revolution."
But he had. When Louis XVI ordered the howitzers turned on the mob at Versailles, and
then sent the dragoons to ride down the survivors, the Republican movement had been
broken. That had been when Cardinal Talleyrand, who was then merely Bishop of Autun,
had came to the fore and become the power that he is today in France; the greatest King's
Minister since Richelieu.
"And, after that, Louis's death followed as surely as night after day," Bathurst was saying.
"And because the French had no experience in self-government, their republic was
foredoomed. If Bonaparte hadn't seized power, somebody else would have; when the
French murdered their king, they delivered themselves to dictatorship. And a dictator,

unsupported by the prestige of royalty, has no choice but to lead his people into foreign
war, to keep them from turning upon him."
It was like that all the way to Berlin. All these things seem foolish, by daylight, but as I
sat in the darkness of that swaying coach, I was almost convinced of the reality of what
he told me. I tell you, Uncle Eugen, it was frightening, as though he were giving me a
view of Hell. Gott im Himmel, the things that man talked of! Armies swarming over
Europe; sack and massacre, and cities burning; blockades, and starvation; kings deposed,
and thrones tumbling like tenpins; battles in which the soldiers of every nation fought,
and in which tens of thousands were mowed down like ripe grain; and, over all, the
Satanic figure of a little man in a gray coat, who dictated peace to the Austrian Emperor
in Schoenbrunn, and carried the Pope away a prisoner to Savona.
Madman, eh? Unrealistic beliefs, says Hartenstein? Well, give me madmen who drool
spittle, and foam at the mouth, and shriek obscene blasphemies. But not this
pleasant-seeming gentleman who sat beside me and talked of horrors in a quiet, cultured
voice, while he drank my cognac.
But not all my cognac! If your man at the Ministry--the one with red hair and the bulldog
face--tells you that I was drunk when I brought in that Englishman, you had better believe
him!
Rudi.

(From Count von Berchtenwald, to the British Minister.)
28 November, 1809
Honored Sir:
The accompanying dossier will acquaint you with the problem confronting this
Chancellery, without needless repetition on my part. Please to understand that it is not,
and never was, any part of the intentions of the government of His Majesty Friedrich
Wilhelm III to offer any injury or indignity to the government of His Britannic Majesty
George III. We would never contemplate holding in arrest the person, or tampering with
the papers, of an accredited envoy of your government. However, we have the gravest
doubt, to make a considerable understatement, that this person who calls himself
Benjamin Bathurst is any such envoy, and we do not think that it would be any service to
the government of His Britannic Majesty to allow an impostor to travel about Europe in
the guise of a British diplomatic representative. We certainly should not thank the
government of His Britannic Majesty for failing to take steps to deal with some person
who, in England, might falsely represent himself to be a Prussian diplomat.
This affair touches us as closely as it does your own government; this man had in his
possession a letter of safe-conduct, which you will find in the accompanying dispatch
case. It is of the regular form, as issued by this Chancellery, and is sealed with the

Chancellery seal, or with a very exact counterfeit of it. However, it has been signed, as
Chancellor of Prussia, with a signature indistinguishable from that of the Baron Stein,
who is the present Prussian Minister of Agriculture. Baron Stein was shown the signature,
with the rest of the letter covered, and without hesitation acknowledged it for his own
writing. However, when the letter was uncovered and shown to him, his surprise and
horror were such as would require the pen of a Goethe or a Schiller to describe, and he
denied categorically ever having seen the document before.
I have no choice but to believe him. It is impossible to think that a man of Baron Stein's
honorable and serious character would be party to the fabrication of a paper of this sort.
Even aside from this, I am in the thing as deeply as he; if it is