He travelled about his dominions, making himself as pleasant as he could; he released two thousand political prisoners, and reduced the sentences of others. The mere possibility of such a magnanimous act shows how terribly cruel the previous repression had been; but the clemency produced a certain effect. No doubt Francis Joseph’s reception in Hungary was, to some extent, stage-managed; but it was at least possible to pretend that it had been enthusiastic. The fact that he sat his horse like a centaur and spoke Hungarian like a native produced its effect; and he knew what to ignore, and how to turn a compliment. “I have met many Hungarians,” he said on his return from his first journey, “and every one of them was a man of heart.” It was what the French call _le mot de la situation_; and it helped. Another thing which helped was the attempt made on his life at about this time by the journeyman tailor Libenyi, who tried to stab him in the back of the neck while he was walking on the Vienna ramparts, but struck a bone at the base of the skull, which turned the edge of the blade. He bore himself gallantly on the occasion, making light of the wound. “Do not be frightened, dear mother. My neck is merely a little stiff,” he said to the Archduchess Sophia. “It is no great matter,” he said to his officers. “After all, I was in no greater peril than my brave soldiers in Italy.” These, again, were _mots de la situation_, appealing to the imagination. The Hungarians had a chivalry of their own which bade them repudiate the dagger as a weapon. Batthyany’s widow and Karolyi’s mother—she who had uttered the curse—would no doubt have been equally ready to pray God to smite the Emperor, and to thank God for sparing him, in order that he might suffer; but the Empire as a whole—not the Austrian section of it only—saw him as a gallant young man who had had a fortunate escape. Deputations came from the remotest parts of his dominions to congratulate him. He was making a good impression, too, on shrewd observers. Bismarck, then a young man, being sent on some mission to him, spoke of “the fire of his twenty years joined to the dignity and thoughtfulness of a riper age,” adding: “Were he not an Emperor, he would seem to me almost too grave for his years.” The King of the Belgians, a little later, reported very favourably of him to Queen Victoria:—