I pass over the frenzied state of feeling in which we found the meeting.  Fear, or rather horror, did not promote harmony; many quarreled with each other in discussing the suggestions brought forward, and Maximilian was the only person attended to.  He proposed a nightly mounted patrol for every district.  And in particular he offered, as being himself a member of the university, that the students should form themselves into a guard, and go out by rotation to keep watch and ward from sunset to sunrise.  Arrangements were made toward that object by the few people who retained possession of their senses, and for the present we separated.

Never, in fact, did any events so keenly try the difference between man and man.  Some started up into heroes under the excitement.  Some, alas for the dignity of man! drooped into helpless imbecility.  Women, in some cases, rose superior to men, but yet not so often as might have happened under a less mysterious danger.  A woman is not unwomanly because she confronts danger boldly.  But I have remarked, with respect to female courage, that it requires, more than that of men, to be sustained by hope; and that it droops more certainly in the presence of a mysterious danger.  The fancy of women is more active, if not stronger, and it influences more directly the physical nature.  In this case few were the women who made even a show of defying the danger.  On the contrary, with them fear took the form of sadness, while with many of the men it took that of wrath.

And how did the Russian guardsman conduct himself amidst this panic?  Many were surprised at his behavior; some complained of it; I did neither.  He took a reasonable interest in each separate case, listened to the details with attention, and, in the examination of persons able to furnish evidence, never failed to suggest judicious questions.  But still he manifested a coolness almost amounting to carelessness, which to many appeared revolting.  But these people I desired to notice that all the other military students, who had been long in the army, felt exactly in the same way.  In fact, the military service of Christendom, for the last ten years, had been anything but a parade service; and to those, therefore, who were familiar with every form of horrid butchery, the mere outside horrors of death had lost much of their terror.  In the recent murder there had not been much to call forth sympathy.  The family consisted of two old bachelors, two sisters, and one grandniece.  The niece was absent on a visit, and the two old men were cynical misers, to whom little personal interest attached.  Still, in this case as in that of the Weishaupts, the same twofold mystery confounded the public mind—­the mystery of the how, and the profounder mystery of the why.  Here, again, no atom of property was taken, though both the misers had hordes of ducats and English guineas in the very room where they died.  Their bias,