Not quite prepared to go to the stake himself in place of any other victim of Prussian cruelty, but ready to make some effort to soften hardships and reduce sentences.
(There were others like him--Saxon, Thuringian, Hanoverian, Wuerttembergisch--or the German occupation of Belgium might have ended in a vast Sicilian Vespers, a boiling-over of a maddened people reckless at last of whether they died or not, so long as they slew their oppressors.) He hoped through the pieces played at the theatres and through his censored, subsidized press to bring the Belgians round to a reasonable frame of mind, to a toleration of existence under the German Empire.

But his efforts brought down on him the unsparing ridicule of the Parisian-minded Bruxellois.

They were prompt to detect his attempts to modify the text of French operettas so that these, while delighting the lovers of light music, need not at the same time excite a military spirit or convey the least allusion of an impertinent or contemptuous kind towards the Central Powers.

Thus the couplets "Dans le service de l'Autriche Le militaire n'est pas riche" were changed to "Dans le service de la Suisse Le militaire n'est pas riche." These passionate lines of a political exile: "A l'etranger un pacte impie Vendait mon sang, liait ma foi, Mais a present, o ma patrie Je pourrai done mourir pour toi!" were rendered harmless as "A l'etranger, en reverie Chaque jour je pleurais sur toi Mais a present, o ma patrie Je penserai sans cesse a toi!" The pleasure he took in recasting this doggerel--calling in Vivie to help him as presumably a good scholar in French--got on her nerves, and she was hard put to it to keep her temper.
Sometimes he proposed that she should take a hand, even become a salaried subordinate; compose articles for his subsidized paper, "_L'Ami de l'Ordre_" (nicknamed "L'Ami de L'Ordure" by the Belgians), "_La Belgique_," "_Le Bruxellois_," "_Vers la Paix_." He would allow her a very free hand, so long as she did not attack the Germans or their allies or put in any false news about military or naval successes of the foes of Central Europe.

She might, for instance, dilate on the cruel manner in which the Woman Suffragists had been persecuted in England; give a description of forcible feeding or of police ferocity on Black Friday.
Vivie declined any such propositions.