"
Upon turning his head, he again caught Argensola's malicious smile.
"We know all about that kind of study," he added aggressively. "We are
accustomed to examine the nations of the past, to dissect them fibre by
fibre, so that we recognize at a glance the psychology of the living."
The Bohemian fancied that he saw a surgeon talking self-sufficiently
about the mysteries of the will before a corpse. What did this pedantic
interpreter of dead documents know about life? . . .
When the door closed, he approached his friend who was returning
somewhat dismayed. Argensola no longer considered Doctor Julius von
Hartrott crazy.
"What a brute!" he exclaimed, throwing up his hands. "And to think that
they are at large, these originators of gloomy errors! . . . Who would
ever believe that they belong to the same land that produced Kant, the
pacifist, the serene Goethe and Beethoven! . . . To think that for so
many years, we have believed that they were forming a nation of dreamers
and philosophers occupied in working disinterestedly for all
mankind! . . ."
The sentence of a German geographer recurred to him: "The German is
bicephalous; with one head he dreams and poetizes while with the other
he thinks and executes."
Desnoyers was now beginning to feel depressed at the certainty of war.
This professor seemed to him even worse than the Herr Counsellor and the
other Germans that he had met on the steamer.
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