¶ Bismarck's grandfather, Karl Alexander, leaned toward the namby-pamby intellectual rather than to the social and convivial. He is remembered for his affected poetical style. Karl, brave soldier, attracted the eye of no less a judge of valor than the Great Frederick, who appointed this Karl Alexander von Bismarck an attache of the Prussian embassy at Vienna. ¶ Karl, like other Germans of the sentimental period, aped the French poets; but when a German is sentimental, the mush-pots boil over. Karl's writings show that peculiar over-inflated quality, "sentimentality," so much admired in the rococo period. * * * * * ¶ Karl William Ferd., Otto's father, and Louise Wilhelmina, Otto's mother, born Mencken, lived at Schoenhausen in troublous French times. Oct. 14th, 1806, the terrible defeat at Jena put Prussia in the hands of the enemy. Fortresses surrendered without firing a shot, and the panic-stricken king fled to the far eastern side of his domains, near Russia. All this took place within three months after the marriage of Karl and Louise, who had now set up housekeeping at Schoenhausen. ¶ The Bismarcks tried to escape in a coach, but the French unexpectedly appeared and ordered Karl back to the house. The French ransacked every room; Louise fled to the library and locked the massive oak door; to this day it bears the marks of French bayonets; the Bismarcks then hid in the forest where they remained all night with panic-stricken neighbors; at dawn Karl and Louise ventured out, to find Schoenhausen a scene of destruction. ¶ The one galling fact that Karl could not overlook, in Marshal Soult's raid, was the desecration of the genealogical tree. This huge painting with its shields of the Bismarck descent was slashed from end to end, with bayonets! ¶ Oh, Otto von Bismarck remembered this many, many years later, in making terms with the French after Sedan--do not for a moment forget that! Such is the amazing power of hereditary loves and hates;--and certainly the Bismarcks had no reason to admire the French. CHAPTER III The Gothic Cradle 8 Idyl of the child Otto, in his huge Gothic cradle at Schoenhausen; wonders that gather 'round his destiny, a forecast and a reality. ¶ Otto Edward Leopold von Bismarck, the great central figure in our story, was the fourth of six children, three dying in infancy. He was born April 1, 1815, but a few months before the crowning defeat at Waterloo--that year big with the hammer-blows of Destiny! ¶ In lonesome Schoenhausen on the Elbe, the village lately devastated by Marshal Soult and his plundering soldiers, the infant Otto sleeps peacefully in his oak-carved Gothic cradle. A century later, we still see that huge cradle as one of the souvenirs in the famous Bismarck museum at Schoenhausen. ¶ Schoenhausen house is one of those thick-walled monuments of mediæval masonry.