“William, however,” continues Monsieur Ayme, “was the thinker, prudent and circumspect; the wise head which knew that it was not all truths which bear telling.  He was not less loyal and constant in his opinions.  He admired the French Revolution, and the declaration contained in ’The Rights of Man,’ though this did not prevent his declaiming against the Terrorists.”

One incident in particular must have appealed to the French tutor.  Monsieur Ayme and his Prussian pupil one day began discussing the delicate question of the war of 1870.  In the course of the discussion both parties lost their tempers, until at last Prince William suddenly got up and left the room.  He remained silent and “huffed” for some days, but at last he took the Frenchman aside and made him a formal apology.  “I am very sorry indeed,” he said,

“that you took seriously my conduct of the other day.  I meant nothing by it, and I regret it hurt you.  I am all the more sorry, because I offended in your case a sentiment which I respect above any in the world, the love of country.”

But it is time to pass from the details of the Emperor’s early youth, and observe him during the two years he spent, with interruptions, at the university.  From Cassel he went immediately to Bonn, where, as during the years of military duty which followed, we only catch glimpses of him as he lived the ordinary, and by no means austere, life of the university student and soldier of the time; that is to say, the ordinary life with considerable modifications and exceptions.  He did not, like young Bismarck, drink huge flagons of beer at a sitting, day after day.  He was not followed everywhere by a boar-hound.  He fought no student’s duels—­though a secret performance of the kind is mentioned as a probability in the chronicles—­or go about looking for trouble generally as the swashbuckling Junker, Bismarck, did; for in the first place his royal rank would not allow of his taking part in the bloody amusement of the Mensur, and his natural disposition, if it was quick and lively, was not choleric enough to involve him in serious quarrel.  His studies were to some extent interrupted by military calls to Berlin, for after being appointed second lieutenant in the First Regiment of Foot Guards at Potsdam on his tenth birthday, the Hohenzollern age for entering the army, he was promoted to first lieutenant in the same regiment on leaving Cassel.

For the most part the university lectures he attended were the courses in law and philosophy, and he is not reported to have shown any particular enthusiasm for either subject.  The differences between an English and a German university are of a fundamental kind, perhaps the greatest being that the German university does not aim at influencing conduct and character in the same measure as the English, but is rather for the supply of knowledge of all sorts, as a monster warehouse is for the supply of miscellaneous goods.