His domestic affections were by no means limited to those united to him by ties of blood; he cherished strong patriarchal feelings for every member of his household, past or present.  He possessed in a high degree the German tenderness for little things.  He never forgot a service rendered to him, however small.  In the midst of the most engrossing public activity he kept himself informed about the minutest details of the management of his estates, so that his wife could once laughingly say that a turnip from his own fields interested him vastly more than all the problems of international politics.

His humor, also, was entirely of the German stamp.  It was boisterous, rollicking, aggressive, unsparing—­of himself as little as of others—­cynic, immoderate, but never without a touch of good-nature.  His satire was often crushing, never venomous.  His wit was racy and exuberant never equivocal.  Whether he describes his vis-a-vis at a hotel table, his Excellency So-and-So, as “one of those figures which appear to one when he has the nightmare—­a fat frog without legs, who opens his mouth as wide as his shoulders, like a carpet-bag, for each bit, so that I am obliged to hold tight on by the table from giddiness”; whether he characterizes his colleagues at the Frankfort Bundestag as “mere caricatures of periwig diplomatists, who at once put on their official visage if I merely beg of them a light to my cigar, and who study their words and looks with Regensburg care when they ask for the key of the lavatory”; whether he sums up his impression of the excited, emotional manner in which Jules Favre pleaded with him for the peace terms in the words, “He evidently took me for a public meeting”; whether he declined to look at the statue erected to him at Cologne, because he “didn’t care to see himself fossilized”; whether he spoke of the unprecedented popular ovations given to him at his final departure from Berlin as a “first-class funeral”—­there are always the same childlike directness, the same naive impulsiveness, the same bantering earnestness, the same sublime contempt for sham and hypocrisy.

And what man has been more truthful in intellectual and religious matters?  He, the man of iron will, of ferocious temper, was at the same time the coolest reasoner, the most unbiased thinker.  He willingly submitted to the judgment of experts, he cheerfully acknowledged intellectual talent in others, he took a pride in having remained a learner all his life, but he hated arrogant amateurishness.  He was not a church-goer; he declined to be drawn into the circle of religious schemers and reactionary fanatics; he would occasionally speak in contemptuous terms of “the creed of court chaplains”; but, writing to his wife of that historic meeting with Napoleon in the lonely cottage near the battlefield of Sedan, he said:  “A powerful contrast with our last meeting in the Tuileries in ’67.  Our conversation was a difficult thing, if I wanted to