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Every Frenchman becomes furious when his Alsace is claimed to Germany by the right of language or the borders of his Pyrenees to Spain but there are some amongst the very men who feel revolted at this idea, who claim of Germany that it should yield up large territory because one part of the inhabitants speak a different tongue, and would claim from Hungary to divide its territory, which God himself has limited by its range of mountains and the system of streams, as also by all the links of a community of more than a thousand years; to cut off our right hand, Transylvania, and to give it up to the neighbouring Wallachia, to cut out like Shylock one pound of our very breast the Banat and the rich country between the Danube and Theiss to augment by it Turkish Serbia and so forth.
All seemed lost, but Madame Cantacuzène began to speak to Quinet in the most Wallachian words in the world, with incredible assurance and volubility, so much so that the gendarme, convinced that he had to deal with all Wallachia in person, and seeing the train ready to start, returned the passport to Quinet, saying to him, "There! be off with you!" a few hours afterwards Edgar Quinet was in Belgium.
"Of course there was; and he held me in his arms, and comforted me, and told me how to behave; just as you would do a little girl. It's all over now, of course; and if there be a mistake, it is his fault. I feel that all responsibility is gone from myself, and that for all the rest of my life I have to do just what he tells me." "And what says the divine Wallachia?" "Poor Wally!
On this bloody field over thirty thousand lay headless, armless, legless, all cut and mangled, who gave knowledge to the world how dear the Turk paid for his conquest of Transylvania and Wallachia a conquest that might have been averted if the three Christian armies had been joined against the "cruel devouring Turk."
Napoleon was over-reached by Russia, whose avarice, far from being glutted by the possession of Finland, great part of Prussian and Austrian Poland, Moldavia, and Wallachia, still craved for more, and who built her hopes of Napoleon's compliance with her demands on his value for her friendship. Belgrade was seized, Servia demanded, and the whole of Turkey in Europe openly grasped at.
But in his forty-second year he began freely to speak and to gather disciples, wandering about Podolia and Wallachia, and teaching by discourse and parable, crossing streams by spreading his mantle upon the waters, and saving his disciples from freezing in the wintry frosts by touching the trees with his finger-tips, so that they burnt without being consumed.
He then proceeded through Herzegovina and Bosnia to Seraievo, where he passed three days, and he informed me that from Seraievo to the frontiers of Servia was nearly all forest, with here and there the skeletons of robbers hung up in chains. Mr. Holman subsequently went, as I understood, to Wallachia and Transylvania.
The 'four points' which formed the basis of the negotiations were that Russia should abandon all control over Moldavia, Wallachia, and Servia; that the new Czar, Alexander II., should surrender his claim to command the entrance of the Danube; that all treaties should be annulled which gave Russia supremacy in the Black Sea; and that she should dismiss her pretensions to an exclusive right to protect in her own fashion the Christians in the Ottoman Empire.
"That young girl, who has just given a proof of her erudition is Helena Ghika, now famous under the literary pseudonym of Dora d'Istria. The old man is the Prince Michael, her father, whose family, originally of Epirus, has for the last two centuries been established in the Danubian Principalities, and has supplied Wallachia with Hospodars. The other young lady is Helena's sister."
From a military point of view the importance of its capture was in that it was a railroad junction and that the Germans now held the line of communication between the Orsova region, constituting the extreme western portion of Wallachia, and the rest of Rumania.
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