Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 07.djvu/133

Rh only an impotent rage which springs here and there like a wild beast.

Many of the latest speeches of Perier concerning projects of laws, as, for instance, that on the Peerage, are not composed by him; for time is wanting to a Minister for such great elaborate works, and he must now become more irritable, petty, and passionate in his addresses, the more doubtfully difficult, worthless, and ignoble the system is which he must defend. What is most to his advantage, according to public opinion, is his contrast to Monsieur Sebastiani, the coquettish old man with an ashy-grey heart and yellow face, on which many a bit of red may yet be seen, as on autumnal trees where many a scarlet leaf grins out among dead orange-coloured leaves. Truly there is nothing so repulsive as this puffed-up nothing, who, though invalided, still comes often into the Deputies and sits upon the Ministerial benches, a fetched and feeble smile upon his lips, and some dull and silly remark on his tongue. I can hardly understand that this neatly gloved, nicely shod, weak dwarf with swimming vapoury eyes once did great things in field and council, as the historians of the Russian campaign