Why should you risk your life over there in defending me when at the time you had nothing to hope for from me ?' 'It was because I felt that you stood for France, Sire.' During this conversation he had still walked up and down the room, twisting his right arm about, and occasionally looking at one or other of us with his eyeglass, for his sight was so weak that he always needed a single glass indoors and binoculars outside.

Sometimes he stopped and helped himself to great pinches of snuff from a tortoise-shell box, but I observed that none of it ever reached his nose, for he dropped it all from between his fingers on to his waistcoat and the floor.

My answer seemed to please him, for he suddenly seized my ear and pulled it with considerable violence.
'You are quite right, my friend,' said he.

'I stand for France just as Frederic the Second stood for Prussia.

I will make her the great Power of the world, so that every monarch in Europe will find it necessary to keep a palace in Paris, and they will all come to hold the train at the coronation of my descendants--' a spasm of pain passed suddenly over his face.