At the same time that the ancient "Austrian religion" underwent with its former ardent confessor a transformation so radical, a no less curious change was wrought in his mind in regard to several other articles of the _credo_ of his party. Removed from the _mêlée_ and participating no longer in the parliamentary struggles, he began to observe more coldly certain questions important in those times, and to temper more than one antipathy of past days. Since 1852, on returning from a trip to Berlin, he writes: "There is something demoralizing in the air of the chamber; the best men of the world become vain there and cling to the Tribune as a woman to her toilet.... I find parliamentary intrigues hollow and unworthy of any notice. While one lives in their midst, one has illusions concerning them, and attaches to them I do not know how much importance.... Every time that I arrive there from Frankfort, I experience the feelings of a temperate man who falls among drunken people." Many things in old times disgraceful and abhorred, take now a less repulsive aspect to the eyes of the statesmen maturing great projects for the future. "The chamber and the press can become the most powerful instruments of our external policy," wrote in 1856 the former despiser of parliamentarism and friend of M. Thadden-Triglaff, and it is thus that one finds in the correspondence of these times the vague idea of a national representation of the _Zollverein_, even a pronounced desire for universal suffrage itself, provided that these means could become the _instrumenta regni_. The example of the second empire exercised then an influence which the historian should carefully bear in mind. This system of absolutism tinged with popular passions, "spotted with red," to employ a characteristic expression of M. de Bismarck, seduced the imagination of more than one aspirant for _coups d'état_ and _coups d'éclat_, and the former colleague of the Doctor d'Ester must have opened his cigar case more than once and contemplated there the little sprig of olive plucked from the tomb of Petrarch and Laura.
Yet the goal seemed distant, and how veiled was the future, still indistinctly seen! It was not under King Frederick William IV., whose mind became more and more clouded, that he was permitted to think of action; even the accession of the regent, the present King William, seemed at first to make no change in the exterior situation. The new ministers of the regent, the ministers of the _new era_, as was said then, were honest doctrinarians who spoke of the development of conceded liberties and of the strengthening of the representative _régime_. The good and _naïf_, they even allowed William I. to proclaim solemnly one day that "Prussia need only make _moral conquests_ in Germany!" Evidently the _new era_ was not yet the era of M. de Bismarck. During the years which passed after the war of the Orient until his embassy in Russia, one sees the representative of Prussia to the Germanic Confederation in constant motion, on continual journeys across Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Courland, and Upper Italy, seeking subjects for distraction, or perhaps also subjects for observation, and each time returning to Frankfort only to raise a difficulty, break some _bric-à-brac_, and to press to the utmost the nervous and bilious Count Rechberg, Austrian representative and president of the _Bundestag_. His frequent excursions to Paris caused him to have a presentiment of the events which were preparing in Italy; he only became more aggressive, and there was a time when his recall was considered at Frankfort as indispensable for the maintenance of peace. It was at this moment that he thought of definitely abandoning this career, of throwing off the uniform, and of going into politics in his "swimming drawers." He consented, however, to do it in "a bear-skin and with caviar," as he expressed himself in one of his letters; in other words called to exchange his post at Frankfort for that at St. Petersburg. One hoped thus to remove him from the burning ground, to "put him on ice" (another expression of M. de Bismarck); as for himself, he perhaps attached other hopes to this removal, and in any case found consolation in seeing his former colleague of Frankfort become principal minister of a great empire, and with whom he was always on such good terms. The 1st of April, 1859, "the anniversary of his birth," M. de Bismarck arrived in the capital of Russia.
