The King and the French Ambassador had remained perfectly courteous, and the next day, at the railway station, they took leave of each other with marks of respect. Things were not yet hopeless, until Bismarck, by a trick of which he afterwards bragged, caused a dispatch to be published implying that Benedetti had been so persistent in pushing his demands that King William had been obliged to snub him. The French were led to believe that their representative had been insulted, and neutrals sided with Prussia as the aggrieved party. After deliberation the French Ministry decided on war and the decision was blindly ratified by the Corps législatif on July 15. At this meeting Emile Ollivier made his famous remark that the Ministry accepted responsibility for the war with a "clear conscience." His actual words, "le coeur léger," seemed, however, to imply "with a light heart", and thereafter weighed heavily against him in the minds of Frenchmen. CHAPTER II THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR--THE GOVERNMENT OF NATIONAL DEFENCE September, 1870, to February, 1871 On July 19 the French Embassy at Berlin declared a state of war. Paris was wild with enthusiasm and eager for an advance on Berlin. The provinces were for the most part cool, but accepted the war calmly because they were assured of an easy victory. The leaders of the two nations had for each other equal contempt. "Ce n'est pas un homme sérieux," Napoleon had once said of Bismarck, and Bismarck thought Napoleon "stupid and sentimental." Meanwhile each nation had eyes on the territory of the other: France was ready to claim the Rhine frontier; Prussia wanted all it could get, and certainly Alsace and Lorraine. The idea, so often repeated by the Germans since the war, that these provinces were annexed because they had once been German, was not in Bismarck's mind,--"that is a Professor's reason," he said.[1] He wanted Strassburg because its commanding position and the wedge of Wissembourg could cut off northern from southern Germany. The frontier of the Vosges was as desirable to the Germans as the Rhine to the French.