And to think that in his time he aroused the enthusiasm of the majority of our women of France! About the year 1913, when I alone was beginning to nail him to the pillory, they were exalting his name and flaunting his colours. "Paladin of the Cross"--as such he was popularly known among us. Oh, a sincere paladin he was, to be sure, wearing the scapular, steeped in Masses, after the fashion of Louis XI., yet one fine morning secretly forcing apostasy upon his son. Moreover we know that to-day, for our entertainment, he is making preparations for a second comedy of conversion to the Catholic faith, which he recently renounced for political reasons, and over there he will find priests ready to bless the operation and to keep a straight face the while. He, too, has a Gorgon's head, and his face, like the Kaiser's, is marked with the stigmata of knavery and crime. Twenty-five years ago, at the railway station of Sofia, when for the first time I came under the malevolent glance of his small eyes, I felt my nerves vibrate with that shudder of disgust which is an instinctive warning of the proximity of a monster, and I asked: "Who is that vampire?" Someone replied in a low, apprehensive voice: "It is our prince; you should bow to him." Ah, no indeed; not that! In private life this man has proved himself a cowardly assassin, committing his murders from a safe distance, for he prudently crossed the border whenever his executioner had "work to do" by his orders. And then, as soon as any particular headsman threatened to compromise him he would take effective steps to cripple him.[4] And this man, too, offers up prayers in imitation of that other. Recently, when there was a hope that his great accomplice was at last about to die of the hereditary taint in his blood, he knelt for a long time between two rows of Germans, convoked as audience, to plead with heaven for his recovery--a monster praying on behalf of another monster--and he arose, steeped in divine grace, and said to the audience: "I have never before prayed so fervently." Those heavy-witted Boches, for whose benefit these apish antics were performed, were even they able to restrain their wild laughter? In political life, likewise, he is an assassin, attempting the life of nations. After his first foul act of treason against Serbia, his former ally, whom he took in the rear without any declaration of war, he endeavoured, it will be remembered, to throw upon his ministers the blame of a crime which was threatening to turn out badly. And again without warning he deals another traitorous blow to the same race of heroes, already overwhelmed by immense hordes of barbarians, like a highwayman who, under pretence of helping, comes from behind to give the finishing stroke to a man already at grips with a band of robbers.