About a week later, on the 12th of August, I met Renan. He had returned from the far North before the appointed time. I have never seen him so deeply moved. He was desperate; this trivial word is the only appropriate one. He was beside himself with exasperation. "Never," said he, "was an unhappy people so governed by imbeciles as we are. One might have supposed that the emperor had had an attack of insanity. But the fact is, he is surrounded by the most contemptible flatterers. I know officers of high rank, who were well aware that the Prussian cannons far surpassed our much-lauded _mitrailleuses,_ but; who dared not tell him so, because he had taken an active part in the preparation of these machine-guns himself, had done a little drawing on the design, which is expressed in official language by the statement that he is the inventor of the _mitrailleuse_. Never was there so great a lack of brains (_si peu de tête_) in an imperial ministry; he was himself sensible of it. I am acquainted with a person to whom he said so, and yet he undertook a war with such a ministry. Was ever such folly known? Is it not heart-rending? As a people, we are vanquished for a long time to come. And to think that all that we men of science have been striving to build up for the past fifty years--sympathy between nations, mutual understanding, fruitful co-operation--is overthrown with one blow. How such a war destroys the love of truth! What lies, what calumnies, will not for the next fifty years be eagerly believed by one people of the other, and separate them from one another for immeasurable time! What a delay of European progress! We cannot raise up again in a hundred years what these people have tom down in a day." No one could have been more grieved at the rupture between the two great neighbors than Renan, who had so long stood in France as the representative of German culture. Nor could any one have spoken with greater gratitude than he, of German thought. One of his favorite remarks was: "There is nothing that can hold so much as a German head." He seemed to have little liking for the Germans personally, but he spoke with respect of their noble intelligence. To the South German, however, in every other respect than in a capacity for the affairs of government, he ascribed a far higher endowment than to the North German, an opinion shared by the majority of cultivated Frenchmen.