"If the devil challenges me I shall ask: Foils, sir, or Spanish swords?
But there's one person I do fear, and that's my best and at the same time my worst friend, a Netherlander, like yourself, the man who rides here beside you.

Yes, when rage seizes upon me, when my beard begins to tremble, my small share of sense flies away as fast as your doves when you let them go.

You don't know me, Wilhelm." "Don't I?
How often must one see you in command and visit you in the fencing-room ?" "Pooh, pooh--there I'm as quiet as the water in yonder ditch--but when anything goes against the grain, when--how shall I explain it to you, without similes ?" "Go on." "For instance, when I am obliged to see a sycophant treated as if he were Sir Upright--" "So that vexes you greatly ?" "Vexes?
No! Then I grow as savage as a tiger, and I ought not to be so, I ought not.

Roland, my foreman, probably likes--" "Meister, Meister, your beard is beginning to tremble already!" "What did the Glippers think, when their aristocratic cloaks--" "The landlord took yours and mine from the fire entirely on his own responsibility." "I don't care! The crook-legged ape did it to honor the Spanish sycophant.

It enraged me, it was intolerable." "You didn't keep your wrath to yourself, and I was surprised to see how patiently the baron bore your insults." "That's just it, that's it!" cried the fencing-master, while his beard began to twitch violently.