M. de Benedetti had, however, pretended to know his man, to have _followed_ him for fifteen years! He had followed him in any case during the negotiations of the spring which brought about the treaty between Prussia and Italy; he had then contemplated the magnificent tilt between the _viper_ and the _charlatan_, and himself very judiciously judged a situation in which the plenipotentiaries of the two countries had surpassed one another in miracles of the true Punic faith. "M. de Bismarck and General Govone distrusted and still distrust one another," M. Benedetti wrote in his dispatch of the 27th of March, 1866. "It is feared at Florence that, finding itself in possession of _an act which places Italy in a certain degree at its discretion_, Prussia will make known the stipulations of it at Vienna and will persuade the Austrian cabinet, by intimidation, to peacefully make the coveted concessions. At Berlin, they fear that Italy, if they promised to negotiate on these bases, will directly inform Austria before concluding any treaty, and will thus try to obtain from it the abandonment of Venice." After a similar experience _in anima vili_, how could M. Benedetti have left on the table of the president of the council of Berlin his compromising autograph on the subject of Belgium, _an act which in a certain degree placed France at the mercy of Prussia_? How could he be astonished at seeing his interlocutor "open to certain suspicion," and did he not on the contrary make the same calculations for his own account and profit? It was, however, very foolish to suppose that M. de Bismarck had the will to do unto others that which he declared he did not wish others to do unto him! And the ambassador of France would have scarcely been wrong in crediting this charitable thought to his interlocutor, however unevangelical, for the amusing or rather the sad part of the affair,--the true humor of all this imbroglio, as the Bardolph of Shakspere would say,--is that the cavalier of the Mark had already executed precisely the manoeuvre, indifferently chivalric surely, of which he pretended to suspect Napoleon III., and that the thing was done at the moment when he demanded if they had nothing in their hands and pockets. They had left in his hands two very secret and dangerous documents, the two plans of the treaties on the Rhine and Belgium,[96] and he took care not to avail himself of them immediately at the expense of the interested parties, whom he had every interest to attach to himself.