Word: canossa
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Dates: during 1874-1874
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...enough in his character to impress you with a sense of its unusual dignity; nor can you follow the history of the wretched Emperor with unbated breath; he shows his teeth like a hunted rat, now in one corner, now in another; at last he exposes his neck at Canossa to the spring of the cat that for twenty years has patiently waited in the Vatican. But endow him with an instinct amounting to foreknowledge, with a tact in the management of men that turns them into passive instruments in his hands, and renders him long invulnerable to counterplots...