PERSONAL TRAITS OF PRINCE BISMARCK.

Otago Witness, Issue 1894, 9 March 1888, Page 31

PERSONAL TRAITS OF PRINCE BISMARCK.

He has always been a great eater, a deep drinker, and a heavy smoker. In his earlier days, indeed, he was what the Germans call a " chain smoker " — a species of the weedconsuming genus whose morning and night is connected by a cable of cigars, each link of which is lighted at the stump of its predecessor. Bismarck has related that in this way he has for example smoked all the way from Cologne to Berlin, a railway journey of about 10 hours. " Happy man !" once sighed Gambetta to a friend who was talking to him about the German Chancellor. "Happy man ! beer and smoke agree with him." He might have added that everything agreed wilh him, and that the more he drank the better he felt.

During the French war Bismarck related how he had once grown " all wrong in the inner man," and how even " two days' hunting and fresh air had done nothing for him." But at last, according to Dr Eusch, he hit upon a remedy. " I went the day after to

the cuirassiers at Brandenburg, who had been getting a new cup. I was to drink out of it first and handsel it, and then it was to go round. It might have held a bottle. I held my breath, drank it out to the last drop, and set it down empty. I astonished them greatly, j for thej didn't expect much from men of the pen. But it was the Gottingen way. The remarkable thing, though perhaps ' there was little in it, was that I was never so right inside as in the four weeks after that. I tried to cure myself in the same way on other occasions, but I never had such delightful success again. I remember, too, once when we were at the Letzlingen hunt with Frederick "William IV, one of those puzzle bottles of the time of Frederick William I was emptied at a draught. It was so made that the drinker could not put the mouth of the horn, which might hold three-quarters of a bottle, to his lips, and yet he was not allowed to spill a single drop. I took it up and emptied it, though it was very dry champagne, and not a single drop fell on my white waistcoat. The company stared when I said, 'Another. 1 But the King said, 1 No, there must be no more,' and the thing had to remain bo. Formerly feats of thai sort rrvc* the indispensable passports into the diplomatic »erTice< They drank the weak-headed «nea below the table, then they asked them nil sort* of things which they wanted to know, and forced them to make all sorts of concessions which they had no authority to make. They then made them sign their names, and when the poor fellows grew sober they could not imagine how their signatures gofc there." "Once," said the Chancellor, "I never thought of the amount 1 was drinking. What things I used to do— the heavy wines, especially the Burgundies 1" In his wild youth a mixture of champagne and porter used to be his favourite beverage, but gradually he improved on this potation. With a heavy drinking friend (Dietze), near Madgeburg, "he had once, in five or six hours, shot IGO hares. After the sport waa over, he had been with Molfcke, where ho had tasted a new kind of drink, a sort of punch made with champagne, hot tea, and sherry, an invention of the great strategist." Once he laid it down that " red wine was the natural drink of the North German," and ho preferred to see his countrymen drinking honest brandy to muddling their heads with beer. " The widespread use of beer," he remarked, "is much to be deplored. Beer drinking makes men stupid, lazy, and impotent. It is the cause of all the democratic pot-politics which people talk orer it. Good corn-brandy would be better." So, suiting the"action to the word, he asked his servant, after once returning from dining with the King at Versailles, "to pour him out a glass of corn-brandy, and. then told us that a general, talking of drinks, had laid down the principle, 'Red wine for children, champagne for men, schnaps for generals.'" About the same time some one " suggested that saver-kraut was not wholesale, and the Chancellor said, ' Ido not think so. I eat it precisely because I belieTe it to be wholesome. But, Engel, give us a schnaps.' " A couple of Germans living in Warsaw wagered 100 roubles as to whether the Chancellor drank more wine or beer, and applied to him directly for a settlement of the point. " His Highness," replied his secretary, '• directs me to inform you that you are both right, as he is equally fond of good wine and good beer, and, with the exception of those days when he is ill, drinks the one as well as the other." Not his the heart that could be cheered by blue ribbon liquors ; not his the frame sustainable by the {esthetic cates of lily worshippers. It is part of the man's attributes which hare secured him the love and admiration of his countrymen, that in an age of dyspepsia and dainty pecking at hygienic dishes, their hungry Chancellor sits down to his meals like an Homeric hero, or a Saxon lord in "Ivanhoe," and feeds his faithful dog with his own hand from the trencher remnants of his copious board. It is also interesting to learn that the chief representative of the " one man power " in politics is also virtually a " one meal" man. " To-day," he once said musingly during the French war, referring to the amount he had eaten, "to-day a beefsteak and a-half and two slices of,pheasaut. It is a good deal but not too much, as it is my only meal. I breakfast, certainly; but only on a cup of tea without milk; and a couple of eggs ; after that nothing till the evening. If I eat too much, then I am like the boa-constrictor, but I can't sleep." And again : "I see that I eat too much, or perhaps too much at a time. I can't get out of the stupid habit of eating only once a day. Some time ago it was even worse. I used to drink my cup of tea early in the morning, and tasted no food at all till 5 o'clock at night. I smoked ' eren on,' and it did me a great deal of harm. Now my doctors make me take at least a couple of eggs in the morning, and I don't smoke much. But I ought to eat oftener, only if I take anything late I am kept awake all night digesting it." An irreyerent Frenchman once remarked that "if the Colossus ever died it would be in consequence of a colossal fit of indigestion ;" and, indeed, the Chancellor has frequently exposed himself to danger in this respect. Once he remarked that he was very fond of " hard-boiled eggs, though now he could only manage three, but the time was when he could make aw.ay with 11." "In our family," he said on another occasion, "we were all great eaters. If there were many in the country with such a capacity the State could not exist. I should have to emigrate." And again : "Iflam to work well, I must be well fed. I can make no proper peace if they don't give me proper food and drink ; that is part of my pay ;" which reminds one of the reply of Clearchus to the envoys of the. Persian King — " that there was no one who would dare to talk to the Greeks of a truce without first supplying them with a breakfast." "My only objection to their house," wrote Bismarck of his French colleague at Frankfort (Count Montessuy), " is that there is bad eating and worse drinking in it." And that no one is a better judge of good fare may be seen from the gastronomic disquisitions with which he frequently treated his companions in France. Once, speaking of his own preferences, "he came to talk oi' caviare, the different kinds of which he characterised with the feeling of an amateur." " In my young days," he said upon another occasion, "when I lived at Aix-la-Chapelle,

I conferred a benefit on the inhabitants, snob as Ceres did when she revealed the art oil agriculture to mankind ; in fact, I taught them how to roast oyster&."--Lowe's " Bis* ■ marck."