Samuel Byers - Twenty Years in Europe

In this way, and in guarding against frauds on the customs, the time passed.

In the meantime my official position secured me the entrée into Swiss society. It enabled me at last to know Swiss life and to meet men and women worth the knowing. Many of them living in Zurich, or passing there, had European reputations, for the city, like Geneva, had that about it that attracted people of intellect. Zurich is called the Swiss Athens. Novelists, poets, historians, statesmen and renowned professors occupied chairs in the great University, or whiled away pleasant summers among the glorious scenery of the Alps near by.

August 10, 1870. -On this day I made the acquaintance of a remarkable man. It was Lorenzo Brentano of Chicago. He called at the consulate, and, after first greetings, I found out who he was. It was that Brentano who had been condemned to death after the Revolution of 1848 in South Germany. He had been more than a leader; he had been elected provisional president of the so-called German Republic. When the cause failed on the battlefield, he fled to America, and there, for many years, struggled with voice and pen for the freedom of the slaves, just as he had struggled in Germany for the freedom of his countrymen. The seed he helped to sow in Germany, at last bore fruit there, and he also lived to see American slavery perish. He was a hero in two continents. He had made a fortune in Chicago and was now educating his children in Zurich. His son is now an honored judge of the Superior Court of Chicago, a city Brentano’s life honored. He was also at this time writing virile letters for European journals, moulding public opinion in our favor as to the Alabama claims. We needed his patriotism. Americans will never know the great help Brentano was to us, at a time when nine-tenths of the foreign press was bitterly against us. I once heard a judge on the bench ask Brentano officially if he wrote the letters regarding America. “Yes,” said Brentano, who was trying a case of his own, and was a witness, “I wrote them.” “Then that should be reckoned against you,” said the judge, so bitter and unjust was the feeling abroad concerning our country, especially among Englishmen traveling or living on the Continent at this time. A kind word for America or Americans was rare.

Through Brentano’s friendship, I secured many notable acquaintances. The Revolution of 1848 in Germany was led by the brightest spirits of the country. Its failure led to death or flight. Many had crossed into the Republic of Switzerland and formed here in Zurich a circle of intellectual exiles. They were authors, musicians, statesmen, distinguished university professors. Brentano naturally stood high among them all.

The Orsini Cafe. -Around a corner, and not a block away from our home, stood a dingy, old building, known as the Cafe Orsini. Every afternoon at five, a certain number of exiles, and their friends, among them men of culture and European fame, met and drank beer at an old oak table in a dark corner of the east room. It was the room to the right of the entrance hall. Many people frequented the Orsini, for it was celebrated for its best Munich beer, and they could catch there glimpses sometimes of certain famous men. Johannes Scherr, the essayist and historian, called the “Carlyle of Germany,” came there, and Brentano, the patriot. So did Gottfried Keller, possibly the greatest novelist writing the German language, though a Swiss. There was Gottfried Kinkel, the beloved German poet, whom our own Carl Schurz had rescued from death in a German prison, now a great art lecturer at the University. Beust, the head of the best school without text-books in the world; Fick, the great lawyer and lecturer, and sometimes Conrad Meyer, the first poet of Switzerland. Earlier, Richard Wagner was also among these exiles at the Orsini, for he, too, had been driven from his country. That was in the days when the celebrated Lubke, the art writer, was lecturing at the Zurich University, together with Semper, the architect. Often the guests around the little table were noted exiles, who, even if pardoned, seldom put a foot in the German fatherland. The lamp above the table was always lighted at just five in the evening, and the landlord’s daughter, in a pretty costume, served the beer. It was my good fortune, through Mr. Brentano, to join this little German Round Table often, to listen to conversations, that, could they be reported now, would make a volume worth the reading.

Almost nightly, in the winter, at least, the little circle came together, shook hands, and sat around that table. Each paid for his own beer. To offer to “treat” would have been an offense. “How many glasses, gentlemen?” the pretty waitress would ask. Each told what he had drunk and how much cheese or how many hard-boiled eggs he had added; the pretzels were free. “Gute Nacht, meine Herren, und baldiges Wiedersehen,” called out the little waitress, as they would again shake hands and go out into the fog and darkness. For years that little waiting-girl lighted the lamp over the table, served us the beer, and found a half-franc piece under one of the empty glasses. She knew what it was for. Had she been a shorthand reporter, she could have stopped passing beer long ago, and the Orsini Café might have been her own.

IN THE ORSINI CAFE-GREAT NEWS FROM FRANCE-WHAT THE EXILES THINK-LETTER FROM GENERAL SHERMAN-I GET PERMISSION TO GO AND LOOK AT THE WAR-IN THE SNOW OF THE JURAS-ARRESTED-THE SURRENDER OF THE 80,000-ZURICH IN THE HANDS OF A MOB-A FRIENDLY HINT.

August 15, 1870. -At six in the evening of this day I was sitting with these other friends in the little corner of the Orsini, when a boy called out:

“Great news from France!”

Yesterday (August 14, 1870) was a day to be forever remembered in history, the day that was to begin the foundation of the German Empire. Louis Napoleon had declared war against Prussia. The news came into our little corner of the Orsini like a clap of thunder-but the exiles around that table went right on drinking beer. Pretty soon, grave Johannes Scherr, the historian, spoke: “It is good-by to Napoleon’s crown, that.” “They don’t know Bismarck in Paris yet,” said Beust. Beust did not like Bismarck very much either. “And what can we do?” said another. “Nothing,” replied Brentano. “Look on. We are exiles.” They all loved Germany.

Twenty years they had been waiting in Switzerland, to see what would happen. A new war tocsin was now really sounding. One empire was dying-great, new Germany was about at its birth. Almost that very night the strongest-souled, most dangerous man in modern times was playing his cards for empire. Even then, in a little German town, Bismarck was manipulating telegrams, deceiving the people, “firing the German heart,” deceiving his own Emperor, even. That was diplomacy. A hundred thousand men were about to die! What of it? Get ready, said the man of blood, dig their graves. The hour for Prussian vengeance on the name of Napoleon had arrived. “We are ready for war, to the last shoe-buckle,” wrote the French war minister to Louis Napoleon. Bismarck knew that to be a lie. His spies and ambassadors in Paris had not spent their time simply sipping wine on the boulevards. They had been seeing things, and he knew ten times more about the shoe-buckles of the French army than the French themselves did.

The next morning (August 16) things sounded strange enough to American ears in Zurich. A trumpeter rode through every street, blowing his bugle blasts between his cries for every German in Zurich to go home and fight for fatherland. But the exiles were not included and the little meetings in the Orsini went on. Then came a note from Napoleon to the Swiss government: “Can you defend your neutrality?” If not, he would instantly surprise Bismarck and Von Moltke by overrunning Switzerland and suddenly pour his armies all over South Germany. Then the Rhine would be behind him, not in front.