.

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.

His distress was not only because of his selfish thought as to how the catastrophe was going to affect his plans with Marguerite.