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60
Recollections of
[Ch. VI.

the success of injustice, will at last hardly know right from wrong; so it is, he remarked, with politics, a man must have a conventional conscience. Of the church, also, (les ecclesiastiques,) he spoke harshly, saying that too much was expected from its members, and that they became hypocrites in consequence. As to soldiers, they were cut-throats and robbers, and not the less so because they were ready to send a bullet through your head if you told them your opinion of them. But surgeons, he said, are neither too good nor too bad. Their mission is to benefit mankind, not to destroy, mystify, or inflame them against each other; and they have opportunities of studying human nature as well as of acquiring science. The emperor spoke in high terms of Lorrey, who, he said, was a man of genius and of unimpeachable integrity.[1]

On the emperor's first arrival in St. He-

  1. ↑ The above conversation is from a note of my father's.
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