Some day the world will
learn to have a greater respect for the workers than for the
thinkers, who are idle, wordy persons, frequently thinking wrong.
Desiree remembered the siege and the occupation of Dantzig by French
troops. She was at school in the Jopengasse when the Treaty of
Tilsit--that peace which was nothing but a pause--was concluded.
She had seen Luisa of Prussia, the good Queen who baffled Napoleon.
Her childhood had passed away in the roar of siege-guns. Her
girlhood, in the Frauengasse, had been marked by the various woes of
Prussia, by each successive step in the development of Napoleon's
ambition. There were no bogey-men in the night-nursery at the
beginning of the century. One Aaron's rod of a bogey had swallowed
all the rest, and children buried their sobs in the pillow for fear
of Napoleon. There were no ghosts in the dark corners of the stairs
when Desiree, candle in hand, went to bed at eight o'clock, half an
hour before Mathilde. The shadows on the wall were the shadows of
soldiers--the wind roaring in the chimney was like the sound of
distant cannon. When the timid glanced over their shoulders, the
apparition they looked for was that of a little man in a cocked hat
and a long grey coat.
This was not an age in which the individual life was highly valued.
Men were great to-day and gone to-morrow. Women were of small
account. It was the day of deeds and not of words.
Desiree had never been oppressed by a sense of her own importance,
which oppression leaves its mark on many a woman's face in these
times.
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