Some years later when Bismarck had been appointed to the Legation at Frankfort (a post which he owed to the delight with which Frederick William IV. had read his bluff speeches in the Prussian Lower House), he was present at a public ball, where a member of the French Corps Législatif, M. Jouvois de Clancy, was pointed out to him as a noted fire-eater. This gentleman had been a Republican, but had turned his coat after the _coup d'état_. He was a big man with dandified airs, but evidently not much accustomed to society, for he had brought his hat—not a compressible one—into the ball-room; and in waltzing he held it in his left hand. The sight of the big Frenchman careering round the room with his hat extended at arm's length was too much for Bismarck's sense of fun; so, as M. Jouvois revolved past him, he dropped a copper coin into the hat. One may imagine the scene. The Frenchman, turning purple, stopped short in his dancing, led back his partner to her place, and then came with flashing eyes to demand satisfaction. There would have been assault and battery on the spot if friends had not interposed; but on the following day the Frenchman and the Prussian met with pistols and the former was wounded. Unfortunately for Bismarck, M. Jouvois knew Louis Schneider, the ex-comedian, who had become Court Councillor to Frederick William IV., and was that eccentric monarch's favorite companion. Schneider had but a moderate fondness for Bismarck, and he represented his act of _gaminerie_ in so unfavorable a light to the King that his Majesty instructed the Foreign Office to read the newly appointed diplomatist a severe lecture. Bismarck has never liked Frenchmen. His feelings towards them savor of contempt in their expression, but there is more of hatred than of genuine disdain in them, and much of this hatred has its source in religious fervor. Bismarck is a believer. The sceptical levity of most Frenchmen, the profanity and licentiousness of their literature, their want of reverence for all things, whether of Divine or of human ordinance—all this shocks the statesman, who still reads his Bible with a simple faith, and who has attentively noted the doom which is threatened to nations who are disobedient, During the Franco-German War, Countess Bismarck, hearing that her husband had lost the travelling-bag in which he carried his Bible, sent him another with this naïve letter: “As I am afraid you may not be able to buy a Bible in France, I send you two copies of the Scriptures, and have marked the passages in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel _which relate to France_—also the verse in the Psalms which says that 'The unbeliever shall be rooted out.'”