Part 49
As though the out-at-elbows refugee, the borrowing adventurer, the temporary occupant of the Presidential armchair had never existed, you are to see him Sire my Friend as the Ally of Great Britain, the gracious patron and protector of the Sick Man. He had had his will; his plot had blossomed in this gorgeous flower of International War--the Allied Fleets were in the Black Sea--France was rent with the shouting of trumpets and the screaming of bugles; she quaked with the tramping of cavalry, the ceaseless passing of batteries of artillery, and trains of wagons and ammunition-carts. And day by day his crowded transports steamed for the East from Toulon and Brest and Marseilles.
He was happy. The Northern potentate who would not call him brother--the Army he had bribed with stolen millions to enthrone him--which he feared, and which openly ridiculed him--the English Sovereign and her Consort, who had despised and condescended to him--these were destined to drink of a cup that had taken years to mix.
England’s trust in him entertained him hugely. She took the leap, with all its tragic possibilities, like a generous horse ridden by a reckless sportsman at a killing fence; ignoring the deadly possibilities of the stake, and the barbed wire, and the back-breaking deep ditch beyond.
To gratitude, good faith, rectitude, loyalty to vows a stranger--all must smart sooner or later, who had trusted this man.... Thus, France paid in the end in other things than her virtue for that furious midnight ride upon the saddle-bow. But her new owner amused her; and she was prosperous, or seemed to be.
For this was the era of great Booms in zinc, and charcoal, and foreign bonds, and American steel rails. It was also the age of folly, flummery, flippancy, and frolic. The ponderous classicism of the Empire style, the rococo ugliness of the Monarchy, both were kicked into the dustbin on the arrival of the Second Empire. Gaudy colors, _bizarre_ fashions, gay, sparkling music, _chic_ saucy women, men who amused themselves--where Sire my Friend reigned, these reigned. Ashtaroth, Belphegor, and Belial were worshiped at the Tuileries and Compiègne. But the High-Priest of their mysteries improved Paris if he corrupted her--that must be allowed.
After Nero, he was possibly the greatest designer of landscape-gardens, the most gifted layer-out of streets and promenades, that has ever existed. He inspired Haussman. He dreamed in avenues wide enough to maneuver cavalry in; he thought in boulevards down which whole batteries of artillery could sweep. He who had been immured in a prison loved Freedom, Air, Light, Space--and he gave these good things to his capital. Also he gave her the Cocodette.
The _lionne_ of 1848--of her we know something.... She was passionate, wayward, exquisite, and unprincipled. In three words, she was Henriette. But in exchanging her for the cocodette of the Second Empire, France paid in the resultant loss of beauty. With her limbs eased in the steel cage of the crinoline that hid the fault; with her little hat tilted above her mountains of bleached hair; with her fringe, her panniers puffed above the artificial deformity that later became the bustle--with her huge and tasteless lockets and chains, belts and dog-collars of precious metal--she is a type of the decadence of the Age of Sire my Friend.
The cocodette was giddy of brain, false from the love of deceit, impure without passion, hideous in the extreme; and knew not her absurdity or her ugliness any more than the Frenchwoman of to-day--whom her English and American sisters ape, in their hobble or harem skirts, and their waste-paper-basket hats, trimmed with patches of brocade, whole fowls, and lumps of velvet. Elegance has fled--Grace has departed--Good Taste conceals her face--Beauty has ceased to exist, in France, since Religion was abolished. How should it be otherwise when from His peculiar country, men have driven out God?
When the Athenians lost the sense of loveliness that lies in the pure vigorous line, that was the commencement of Greek degradation. In like manner the boneless ugliness called The New Art was a symptom of disease and decay. Buildings without angles are as faces without noses. Design that is all curves marks exhaustion in the brain that conceived it, and impotence in the hand that executed--nothing more.
But Sire my Friend was pleased, and extremely well contented. In the popular acclamations accorded to H.R.H. the Duke of Bambridge and the Commander of Britannia’s Forces, their host had had his share. Also, the Empress’s Monster Ball at the Élysée--given in honor of these distinguished visitors--had come off successfully. Though M. Chose, Secretary to the venerable Duchesse de Viellecourt, and Mademoiselle Mirepoix, amanuensis of the aged and purblind Marquis de l’Autretemps, had returned their respective employers’ cards, with the intimation that neither enjoyed the acquaintance of M. and Madame Bonaparte.
All through Good Friday, and its night, and the following day, sleepless workmen toiled at the Palace of the Élysée; and there rose under their cracked and bleeding hands a vast and flimsy edifice, of unseasoned wood and hurriedly-laid brick.... One may regard it as a typical and apt representation of the Second Empire, when, its walls of wet plaster covered with satin draperies, their gaping cracks concealed with gilded moldings, huge mirrors, trophies of arms and garlands of real and artificial flowers, it stood at length complete and challenged admiration.
Christ hung upon the Cross--the Tabernacles stood empty of the Blessed Sacrament--the faithful crowded the black-draped churches--priests, gaunt with fasting, succeeded one another in the pulpit; but still the workmen toiled like busy ants, and still the great ballroom went on growing--in honor of the bluff Protestant Duke, who in his own way, with a high hat and a black coat, hot-cross buns, a service in church, and salt fish at dinner, held sacred that Day of Days.
The Soul of Man’s Redeemer, breathed forth on Calvary, passed downwards on the way to Purgatory, with the saved thief trotting in His footsteps like a dog. He descended to those regions where souls under penalty lie writhing in the torture of purifying fires. His tidings of pardon and salvation fell like cooling dews upon their expiatory anguish, ere He rose like the sun upon the spirits of the Blessed, walking before His dawn in the calm fields of Paradise. But before he ascended to His Throne of Glory He came to comfort a little knot of sorrowing men and women gathered together in a bare chamber at Jerusalem--and to rejoice His Mother with the sight of her risen Son.
But the honored guests of the Empire attended a Review on the Champ de Mars, and inspected the Barracks of the famous Regiment of Guides, and dined at the Tuileries in state, and entertained Ministers of the Crown, Foreign Ambassadors, Nobles of the Empire and distinguished members of the Senate, royally at the British Embassy; and the Monster Ball went off like an Arabian Night before they departed--amidst the united strains of massed bands playing the British National Anthem, and _Partant Pour La Syrie_--and cries of “_Vive la Reine Victoria!_” “_Vive le Duc!_” “_Vivent les Anglais!_” for Marseilles. They and their Staffs were banqueted there by Marshal de St. Arnaud and his Staff--while the great screw-transports, chock-full of men and horses, guns and stores of all kinds, were scurrying away from Toulon and Brest and Marseilles as fast as steam could carry them--_en route_ for the Dardanelles.
And presently--both French and English Commanders-in-Chief with their Staffs having sailed for Constantinople--Sire my Friend could draw unhampered breath. Despite his boast of belonging to the genus of Imperturbables, his pulses had been unpleasantly quickened by something that had happened. For a moment he had seen the basilisk that Time and opportunity had hatched out of that egg of his, in danger; he had known the torture bred of long-meditated, almost-consummated vengeance that is about to be foiled. But all was well!--prompt measures had been taken.... Still, it was inconvenient that the man had lived to return....
LXXXI
The inconvenient thing had happened on the night of the Ball at the Élysée. Sire my Friend had dined early in private with the Empress--the dinner at the English Embassy taking place upon that night--and now at seven of the clock, the fairyland of imitation marble halls and green gauze grottos filled with real and artificial flowers and illuminated with blue and pink and yellow Chinese lights, not being appointed to open before nine-thirty, he was smoking in his peculiar snuggery at the Tuileries, one of a suite of low-ceiled rooms on the ground-floor between the Pavillon d’Horloge and the Pavilion de Flore, containing a splendid collection of arms, many priceless miniatures, and exquisite articles of furniture and bijouterie and priceless Sèvres that had belonged to Marie Antoinette. And with him were the Duke de Morny, Persigny--also elevated to the Peerage--and the Commander-in-Chief of his Eastern Forces, Marshal de St. Arnaud.
Time and an excessive indulgence in the pleasure of the senses had not added to the personal attractions of Sire my Friend. He looked--despite the artistic make-up of his valets and dressers--sick and sleepy, sluggish and old. His person was soaked with scent; the side of the middle and the top-joint of the first finger of the right hand were dyed yellow with perpetual cigarette-smoking. It had played havoc with his digestion, and his nerves, and his throat.... And the bevy of enameled, dyed and bewigged _roués_ surrounding him, looked not one whit better for world’s wear than their master. They bored him by grumbling--perpetually grumbling.... He had poured out money in floods upon them, and yet they were not content....
De Morny had had a million--Persigny a million--de Fleury the appointment of aide-de-camp in chief and half-a-million--Kate Harvey a quarter-of-a-million and the title of Comtesse de Belletaille. Only some few who had loved and served him disinterestedly may have been forgotten in this hour of his prosperity.... And how many of the Henriettes were left to chew the cud of broken promises and disappointed hopes....
To more than these he had been prodigal of promises, liberal of vows, forgetting that these are birds that sooner or later come back to roost. That oath of the Carbonari was presently to haunt his pillow, dog his steps with the assassin’s soundless footfall; explode bombs--in the hour of his triumph--that strewed his fated pathway with the dying and the dead.
He sat and smoked and ruminated, upon this April night of ’54, much as he had done upon that November night of ’51, when he had received news of the laying of the Channel Cable. There was one now that reached from Marseilles to Constantinople; he could dictate his will by the mouth of his Ambassador to the Sublime Porte without delay or hindrance; by tugging at the fiery rein of the live wire he would presently be able to make his Army curvet or demivolt without exposing himself to the discomforts of a campaign beyond seas. And the burden of his hidden thought was that his Star had again befriended him. For when the time came to broach the great secret, his followers would believe the master-plan was solely his. There was no one now to start up before him and claim the credit. Months back he had information.... Today decisive intelligence had confirmed the report. The officer who had devised the undertaking, the emissary who had been dispatched to carry out the indispensable survey and make the secret treaties, was dead.
Dead.... Thenceforth Dunoisse’s vast capacity for toil, his discretion and silence; his powers of concentration, his geographical, topographical, and scientific knowledge; his consummate powers of arrangement and organization, his command of tongues, were lost to his master at the Tuileries. He was--his great task complete--to have had high military rank and a great guerdon in money. He had been asked to name his price, and he had stipulated for One Million One Hundred and Twenty-Five Thousand Francs. Sire my Friend smiled, knowing this to be the exact amount of a fortune its owner had squandered--remembering who had helped Dunoisse to scatter the glittering treasure to the four winds of the world. He wondered whether Madame de Roux had heard of the death of her old lover? She came to Court but seldom now, and then only to those unimportant functions to which the stars of lesser social magnitude were invited. The violent colors and _bizarre_ fashions of the Second Empire did not suit her style of beauty--only ugly women looked really well in them!--or she was getting a little _passée_--the poor Henriette! She had a new _liaison_--an intrigue with one of the Generals of the Army of Algeria, recently appointed to the command of the Fourth Division of his Eastern Forces. It was said that she was to accompany Grandguerrier on the campaign. Pleasant for de Roux, who was still at Algiers--very pleasant! The dull eyes of Sire my Friend almost twinkled as this occurred to him. He smiled, caressing the chin-tuft that had become an imperial.
Said de Morny, Duke and Peer of France, gracefully masking a yawn with three long, slim fingers:
“Sire, if Your Majesty has anything amusing to impart to us--and your smile conveys the idea that you have--we entreat you not to withhold it. We are all dull, drowsy, and damnably out of spirits!... These imported fogs of Britain have chilled us to the bone!”
His Imperial Majesty exhaled a cloud of smoke, leaning his long thick body back in the well-cushioned corner of an Oriental sofa. He wore, as customary upon gala occasions, the levee uniform of a General of Division, adorned with many blazing Orders and Stars. His short legs--clad in white kid knee-breeches fastened with diamond buckles, white silk stockings, and high-heeled pumps of white patent leather, also diamond-buckled--were crossed, and as he ruminated he stroked one well-turned ankle with his dainty womanish hand. He glanced at the hand appreciatively as he dropped his cigarette-ash on the costly carpet. Then, barely lifting those sick, faded eyes of his to the face of de Morny, he answered in his drawling, nasal tones:
“Since my smile must be translated into words, it had at that moment occurred to me how consummately foolish our British guests would look, did they know why they were embarking on this Eastern Expedition.” He caressed his high instep with musing approbation. De Morny said:
“_Sapristi!_ I presume they are no more ignorant than ourselves that this is a war without an adequate reason. Monseigneur the Duke of Bambridge, if he be ever to succeed the Earl of Dalgan at the War Office, must see some Active Service--that is undeniable. M. de St. Arnaud requires a dress-rehearsal with volleys of real ball-cartridge, in his _rôle_ of a Marshal of France. Also, your Army is plethoric--its health requires blood-letting. Beyond these reasons--none that I can see.... Unless you, Sire, by personally leading your hosts to battle, intend to follow the glorious example of the Emperor Napoleon the First?”
Sire my Friend detecting a supercilious smile upon the face of the speaker, bestowed on him between his narrow lids a glance of fraternal hate. De Morny--now President of the Legislative Council--carried the diplomatic swallow-tail of dark blue velvet, heavily encrusted with silver oak-branches and palm-leaves, upon his tall, well-bred figure, with the grace and ease that were distinctive of him. He wore the broad red ribbon of a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor beneath his single-breasted waistcoat of white cashmere. His white lawn cravat was a dream of perfection. His long, well-made legs, encased in silver-striped, faultlessly-cut trousers of white cashmere, and buckled pumps of black patent leather, nearly as small as those of Imperial Majesty, were fraught with offense to Sire my Friend, always sensitively conscious of the shortness of his own.
For this reason that stumpy Jove did not rise to hurl the thunderbolt. He leaned back, with an exaggerated affectation of indolence, and said deliberately:
“As a fact, my dear fellow, I weary of the achievements of my glorious uncle. I am not disposed to emulate them at all! One is not born into the world for the purpose of copying one’s predecessors.... I prefer to strike out a line extraordinary--astounding--marvelous--above all, original and new!”
De Moray merely bowed, but the bow was to Sire my Friend superlatively offensive. He rose up, forgetful of his disadvantages of stature, and said, looking round upon the dyed heads of hair and painted elderly faces surmounting the brilliantly laced and bedizened uniforms--and as of habit, assuming his Napoleonic attitude.
“These English are bound to the East to carry out my Mission--to fulfill the destiny presaged by my Fortunate Star. You, my brother, who found it inconvenient to know me when that Star was below the horizon, have since accused me to your confidants of abrogating to myself the credit of successes that others have helped me to achieve. You taunt me perpetually with the desire to emulate the First Napoleon. Well! I shall show you soon--very soon--some things accomplished that he could not do. I will avenge at one blow the catastrophe of the Moskva, the defeat of Waterloo, and the humiliation of St. Helena. How? Did you ask how? By all means you shall learn!”
He laughed, and that outrageous mirth did such violence to the sense of hearing that even de Moray shuddered, and St. Arnaud made a clicking sound of dismay with his tongue against his teeth. The speaker resumed, looking glassily about him:
“My uncle would have declared War against the nation he designed to crush and conquer. His nephew, wiser than he, will share with her the apple of amity, cut, Borgia-fashion, with a knife poisoned only on one side! Needed only to further my plan that Russia should pick a quarrel with Turkey. The old question of her authority over the Eastern Christians--the smoldering grudge in the matter of her claim to precedence of admission to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher--served me excellently! And I have championed the cause of the Sultan--I take the field against the Northern Power, with England my Ally!”
He lifted the drooping lids of those eyes of his, and they were dim and lack-luster no longer. They blazed with a radiance that was infernal and malign. He said--and the breathless silence of his hearers was intoxicating joy to him:
“And, blinded by that stiff-necked pride of hers, she will walk into a death-trap, planned and devised and perfected by the man she has despised! Russia shall have supremacy over the Danubian Principalities. I may even cede her Constantinople--I am not quite certain.... But Great Britain shall be France’s footstool and East India her warming-pan!”
He fancied de Morny about to interrupt, and said, turning upon him with a tigerish suavity:
“Proofs--you require proofs! Assuredly, you shall have them. Be good enough to follow me. This way, Messieurs!”
He led the way to a room at the end of the suite, the walls of which were hung with maps, plans and diagrams, and lined with bookshelves and presses; whose tables were loaded with models of public buildings, steam-boilers, and engines of artillery; and where the gilded cornices and moldings were chipped with rifle and revolver bullets, as had been those of the smaller cabinet at the Élysée. Lamps burning under green shades illuminated this place of labor. He took a Bramah key from under the setting of a signet ring he wore, unlocked a press and racked back the sliding doors in their grooves with a gesture of the theater. The alphabetically-numbered shelves were loaded with papers. He said, indicating these:
“You see there the fruit of three years of unremitting labor, performed in secrecy. To-night there is an end to secrecy. I hardly thought the hour would come so soon!”
He took from a compartment of the shelves two square sheets of yellow, semi-transparent tracing-paper, and turned to face his audience exactly as an actor would have done upon the stage. He was master of the situation--he was making the great disclosure just as he had mentally rehearsed it. Not for nothing had he trusted in his Destiny and his Star.
“The sealed orders you, M. de St. Arnaud, were to have received from me upon your departure for Marseilles to-morrow,” he said, addressing the Commander-in-Chief of his Eastern Army, “would have made you sole participator in my secret. Yet I feel no hesitation or reluctance at enlarging the circle of my confidence,” he added, as he encountered the satirically-smiling glance of de Morny. “To betray me would be an act of madness. For--insignificant as I may appear--I am the Empire! Remember that, Messieurs!”
He delicately laid one of the semi-transparent, crackling papers upon the lamp-illumined Russia leather surface of a writing-table near him. A pencil tracing of just such a map of Eastern Europe as was habitually in use at his Ministry of War, and in his Military Institutes--only that the tracing was enriched with added lines, diagrams and notes, in red and blue and various-colored inks. He said, as his followers crowded to look at this--and now there was a shiny gray dampness on his cheeks and forehead, and he secretly dried the palms of his hands with his delicate handkerchief:
“These numbered circles and squares in colored inks represent depots of timber, cattle, salted provisions, forage, and grain, established by me--under private names of ownership--at Sinope, Bourgas, Varna, Kustendje, and other places on the shores of the Black Sea. So that, in the case of an Army of Invasion marching from Varna towards the frontiers of Bessarabia, or maintaining a siege, shall we say?--of any fortified harbor on the coasts of the Crimea----You are surprised, M. de Morny? That is gratifying indeed!”
De Morny had given vent to a long shrill street-boy’s whistle, about as expressive of astonishment as it could be. But he did not possess the quality of reverence. He sang, in English, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his wide-hipped, silver-striped, white cashmere pantaloons, and executing a _cancan_ step cleverly and neatly:
“That’s the way the milliard went! Pop! goes the weasel!”
and ceased as Sire my Friend went on, rolling his handkerchief--dampened with his hidden agony of exultation--into a ball between his palms:
“Immense contracts for the further supply of cattle, provisions, cereals and fodder to France, have been signed by the heads of the principal firms in the Levant and Eastern Europe. Much of the land-transport throughout the Danubian Principalities had already been chartered by Russian agents--a partial check, I will admit, to my views in this direction. Yet thousands of wagons, arabas, telegas, and other vehicles; hundreds of teams of horses, yokes of bullocks, strings of baggage-mules, are at my sole disposal--their proprietors having received liberal payment on account, and having before them the hope of treatment still more generous. Do I weary you? Am I prosy? Do stop me if I bore you!” entreated Sire my Friend.
Nobody stirred or spoke. He went on, savoring his triumph, tasting each sentence as a morsel of some delicate dish: