Page:Reminisences of Captain Gronow.djvu/201
me and requested me to report what I had witnessed to the Duke of Wellington. Upon my telling them it would be of no avail, they one and all said the English ought to blush at having allies and friends capable of such wanton brutality.
One afternoon, when upwards of a hundred Prussian officers entered the galleries of the Palais Royal, they visited all the shops in turn, insulting the women and striking the men, breaking the windows, and turning everything upside down: nothing, indeed, could have been more outrageous than their conduct. When information was brought to Lord James Hay of what was going on, he went out, and arrived just as a troop of French gensdarmes were on the point of charging the Prussians, then in the garden. He lost no time in calling out his men, and, placing himself between the gensdarmes and the officers, said he should fire upon the first who moved. The Prussians then came to him and said, "We had all vowed to return upon the heads of the French in Paris the insults that they had heaped upon our countrymen in Berlin; we have kept our vow, and we will now retire." Nothing could equal the bitter hatred which existed, and still exists, between the French and the Prussians.