"Börne?" he said, softening. "_Ach_, what have I against Börne? Two baptized German Jews exiled in Paris should forgive each other in death. My book was misunderstood. I wish to heaven I hadn't written it. I always admired Börne, even if I could not keep up the ardor of my St. Simonian days when my spiritual Egeria was Rahel von Varnhagen. I had three beautiful days with him in Frankfort when he was full of Jewish wit, and hadn't yet shrunk to a mere politician. He was a brave soldier of humanity, but he had no sense of art, and I could not stand the dirty mob around him with its atmosphere of filthy German tobacco and vulgar tirades against tyrants. The last time I saw him he was almost deaf, and worn to a skeleton by consumption. He dwelt in a vast, bright silk dressing-gown, and said that if an Emperor shook his hand he would cut it off. I said if a workman shook mine I should wash it. And so we parted, and he fell to denouncing me as a traitor and a _persifleur_, who would preach monarchy or republicanism, according to which sounded better in the sentence. Poor Lob Baruch! Perhaps he was wiser than I in his idea that his brother Jews should sink themselves in the nations. He was born, by the way, in the very year of old Mendelssohn's death. What an irony! But I am sorry for those insinuations against Mme. Strauss. I have withdrawn them from the new edition, although, as you perhaps know, I had already satisfied her husband's sense of justice by allowing him to shoot at me, whilst I fired in the air. What can I more?" "I am glad you have withdrawn them," she said, moved. "Yes; I have no Napoleonic grip, you see. A morsel of conventional conscience clings to me." "Therefore I could never understand your worship of Napoleon." "There speaks the Englishwoman. You Pharisees--forgive me--do not understand great men, you and your Wellington! Napoleon was not of the wood of which kings are made, but of the marble of the gods. Let me tell you the "code Napoleon" carried light not only into the Ghettos, but into many another noisome spider-clot of feudalism. The world wants earthquakes and thunderstorms, or it grows corrupt and stagnant. This Paris needs a scourge of God, and the moment France gives Germany a pretext, there will be sackcloth and ashes, or prophecy has died out of Israel." "_Qui vivra verra_," ran heedlessly off her tongue. Then, blushing painfully, she said quickly, "But how do you worship Napoleon and Moses in the same breath?"