The telegraph swiftly bore the news that the ambassador had been publicly insulted by the King of Prussia. The French heart was industriously fired, and the leaven worked well. The insolent Germans must be taught that the great French Empire was not to be insulted with impunity. Did not the beautiful empress herself buckle the sword upon the emperor, and even upon the boy Prince Imperial, who should go and witness for himself his father's triumphs, and receive an object lesson, as it were, in avenging insult to the imperial dignity, which would one day be in his keeping? The miserable end came quickly! In less than one month the emperor was a prisoner, and in seven months his empire was swept out of existence; the Germans were in Paris--and King William, Unser Fritz, Bismarck, and Von Moltke were quartered at Versailles. Here it was that the dramatic climax was reached when King Ludwig II. of Bavaria, in the name of the rest of the German States, laid their united allegiance at the feet of King William of Prussia, as the head of the German Empire, begging him to assume the crown of Charlemagne, which should be hereditary in his family! Poor, mad suicide though he was, for this act Ludwig's memory should be forever enshrined in the German heart, for he certainly first suggested, and then carried to completion, this splendid consummation, apparently indifferent to the fact that his own kingly dignity would be abridged. Adoring the picturesque and dramatic as he did, perhaps it seemed to this royal spendthrift not too much to pay a kingdom for the privilege of acting in one scene so imposing and dramatic! So, in January, 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors in the palace of Versailles, King William assumed the title of "Emperor of Germany"--a Germany richer by two French provinces and an enormous indemnity from the conquered state; great in prestige and under the best of emperors and greatest of prime ministers, augmenting hourly in all that constitutes power in a state. In less than one decade--not yet ten years from Bismarck's return to Berlin--a new Germany had arisen from the fragments of the old, a Germany so great and powerful she was likely to forget the degradation and humiliation of only a quarter of a century ago. CHAPTER XII.