LXXIV
At six o'clock, when the snow had ceased falling and the old moon of December glowed redly through a thinning veil of frost fog, the Crown Prince arrived to dine with the Minister.
The Heir Apparent of Prussia came with an escort of Dragoons of the Bodyguard, driving with one of his aides-de-camp in a closed sledge belonging to the exiled Empress, an exquisite vehicle, finished like an enameled bonbonnière, supplied with a great white Polar bearskin, and drawn by two superb black Orloffs, whose glossy coats had the burnish of old Italian armor in the ruddy light of torches held by orderlies and grooms.
The Minister, followed by Hatzfeldt and his Chief Privy Councilor, went down bareheaded, between a double row of Chancery attendants, dressed in their new dark-blue liveries, with black velvet facings, to welcome his Crown Prince. The broad breast of "Unser Fritz" displayed the Order Pour la Mérite, with the First-Class of the Iron Cross, and the Red Eagle, with an English Order, bestowed by Queen Victoria upon her son-in-law. He sported new shoulder straps, distinctive of his newly conferred rank as Field Marshal, and cut a very gallant figure, as may be supposed.
Perhaps you can see him at the head of the long table in the dining-room of the Tessier mansion, his Chancellor and host upon his left hand. Upon his right sat the Bavarian plenipotentiary, Count Maltzahn. Count Holnstein, another Bavarian Minister, newly arrived from Munich with a letter from his King, and the Bavarian Minister of War, Von Pranky, were severally disposed according to their degrees. Prince Putbus was there, and a certain Herr von Zadowski, a large red-faced man in a green Hussar uniform, wearing a white patch with a red Cross, the badge of the Knights of St. John, and the Iron Cross, was also present, and the Secretaries and Privy Councilors filled the lower end of the board; sporting the new Foreign Office uniform of dark blue, with black velvet side stripes to the trousers, and a black-velvet-collared, double-buttoned military frock. Sword belts and black-hilted swords with gold knots caused the more stout and elderly among the Councilors infinite discomfort, to the secret but acute delight of Bismarck-Böhlen and Count Hatzfeldt. The dinner, composed of love gifts from admiring German patriots to their Chancellor, was of a quality, quantity, lusciousness, and length calculated, as Privy Councilor Bucher piously whispered to a neighbor, "to make a guest imagine himself a banqueter in Abraham's bosom before the time."
Long before his table companions had reached the zenith of their sensuous enjoyment, the Crown Prince had finished his temperate meal. The Chancellor commented mentally, glancing at the clear, rather set features of the great golden-bearded figure seated beside him:
"Fritz is endeavoring to impress myself and these Bavarians, with whom it rests to decide whether he is Emperor or no Emperor, par la fermeté de son attitude with regard to the pleasures of the table, and by the Spartan simplicity of his habits and tastes. How I should like to offer him black broth and barley bread in a special wooden bowl and platter. But that, I suppose, would be lèse majesté."
And closely emulated by Von Holnstein and Von Pranky, he gave free reign to his Gargantuan appetite, taking twice of nearly every course, and washing the huge meal down, as was his habit, with floods from Rheims and Épernay.
When the cloth was drawn and fresh relays of wine appeared, the Prince accepted but a single glass of fine champagne with his coffee. When the costly cigars were offered, he pulled from his pocket a porcelain pipe bearing his crest and monogram, painted and sent him by his English wife as a Christmas present, and said:
"I should prefer to smoke this, if Your Excellency does not mind."
Dinner over, His Royal Highness, with the Bavarians and the Minister, repaired to the salon. Overhead, Mademoiselle de Bayard, lonely in her prison bedroom on the second floor, heard their voices—deep, sonorous bass, shrill tenor, and penetrating, resonant baritone—engaged in discussion or joining in argument. At ten o'clock the Prince took leave, attended to his vehicle as previously by the Chancellor, to whom he said, in a low tone, as he pressed his hand:
"We are now no longer North Germans, but Germans. I shall urge upon my father the speedy proclamation of the Empire with all external state. Names, arms, titles, colors place us before the world in a proper light. I have never coveted a Crown Imperial. I denounce the idea of a bombardment as brutal and unnecessary. But I am willing to reap all the honors and advantages that can be gained from our victory. Impress this upon my father, who treats pomp and solemnity with indifference. As to demanding the old crown of Charlemagne from Vienna, I do not at all see the necessity for that. I shall write to my wife to-night!"
And Unser Fritz got into the exquisite sledge that had been given to the beautiful Empress by the Third Napoleon, and was whirled away in a glittering dust of snow, kicked up by the fiery Orloffs' heels. And the Chancellor, recovering from his deep, ceremonious bow, wheeled and went back up the steps, with his bald head glittering in the ruddy torchlight.... None might guess what savage triumph swelled the heart beating under his white full-dress uniform, upon this the night that set upon the fabric of the man's colossal labors the copingstone of Success.
The Bavarian plenipotentiaries took leave within ten minutes. Count Hatzfeldt had been summoned to the salon a few moments previously. When the unseen bustle of their departure had subsided, the Secretaries and Councilors, smoking and drinking tea in the dining-room, were unexpectedly joined by the Minister.
All rose up as he suddenly opened the folding doors, thrust in his head and shoulders, and surveyed them, smiling. Behind him was Hatzfeldt, pale and excited, and with eyes that seemed dancing out of his head. There was a silence of expectation, then the great figure moved to the table, and men scattered to make space for him as though his contact might have slain.
He wore full-dress White Cuirassier uniform, without the steel cuirass, and the First and Second Classes of the Iron Cross, and the Red Eagle, with the peculiar deporation that he always sported, and which had been given him in his young manhood for saving life. His bald forehead and great domed cranium were studded with shining drops of perspiration, under his tufted brows his blue eyes blazed with a triumph almost fearful; his straight-bridged, snub-ended nose, thick cheeks, and bulldog jowl were crimson and dripping. He drew out his handkerchief and wiped them—and the hand that held the linen palpably shook.
He said to them all, and they held their breath to listen:
"Gentlemen, the Bavarian business is settled, and everything signed and sealed. We have got our German Unity—and our German Empire!"
There was a deep silence for a moment, broken by Busch's request to be allowed to take the pens with which the treaty had been signed. He got permission.
"That little Busch," said the Minister, "will never lose anything for want of a tongue. If he thinks to find there the gold pen set with brilliants, that was sent me by the Hamburg jeweler, he is mistaken. Come!" he added, "this is a great occasion!" and bade Hatzfeldt ring for a servant and order up more champagne.
The wine was brought and opened. He said to the servant who officiated:
"Let the house steward know that some wine is to be sent to the clerks and decipherers in their room. The servants also are to have what they like best for drinking—I fancy Niederstedt will choose Old Nordhausen. But—short of my best liquor, let what each likes best be given to him. No!—not that glass. I will drink out of my biggest goblet!..."
With the fizzing bumper in hand, he waited until all had been served, looking, as he reared his great bulk at the head of the full table, the biggest man, mentally and physically, who had ever served the Hohenzollern. In his most powerful tones, he called the toast:
"Hoch! to His Imperial Majesty, our Kaiser Wilhelm!"
Every man there strained his lungs to the utmost, but the great bull voice of the Chancellor drowned every other there.
He talked a little more: "We should never have hooked the King of Bavaria, but for the pluck of Holnstein, who set off from Munich to tackle His Most Gracious at his Palace of Neuschwanstein, and—there being no railway—made in six days a journey of eighteen German miles on foot and on horseback over mountain passes, agreeably diversified by forest tracks and timber roads."
He drank and went on:
"He arrived, to find His Majesty nursing his toothache in absolute solitude, invisible to human eyes, save those belonging to the dentist, his valets and fiddlers and grooms. At first the King refused to receive him, but Holnstein was clever enough to gain over the dentist to deliver a letter from his own hand, and incidentally one written by myself...."
He went on, with a smile that curved the great mustache into lines of gayety:
"Knowing myself particularly detested by King Ludwig, I had taken pains to make my letter acceptable. I said in it that my family had enjoyed the patronage of his family a trifle of five hundred years ago. I mentioned that reinstitution in the Wittelsbach good graces had been the object of my whole life's labors. I incidentally pressed the claims of the King of Prussia to be made Emperor of Germany. I enclosed, with many apologies, the draft of a letter which expressed the concurrence of Bavaria. 'Your Majesty has only to copy this and sign it,' I added, 'and the troublesome business is closed.' What a prospect to a monarch afflicted by an obstinately throbbing gumboil! There was no paper or pen at hand with which to answer, so the dentist presented his patient with a sheet out of his pocketbook, and the patent ink reservoir pen with which he writes his prescriptions. King Ludwig sits up in bed, scrawls a copy of my draft reply, and the German Empire is made.... The Festival of the Orders and the Proclamation of the Emperor will come off in the Great Hall of Versailles upon a certain date not far off.... I will leave you to guess what the date is likely to be!..."
In the midst of a deafening tumult of joyful outcries and congratulations, he turned his great eyes upon one excited face after another, and drained his capacious glass and set it down.
"And with all this, gentlemen, our hopes might have foundered.... The Royal sign manual might have availed us nothing!... the Treaty might never have been signed!... Everything has depended upon a question as trivial and ridiculous as indeed are most of our human vanities. Imagine the gravity of the question at issue!... Whether the Bavarian officers are in future to wear the marks of their military rank upon their collars as heretofore, or on their shoulders, like us North Germans?... Upon that the German Empire has dangled, do you hear? Ah! how many times," he said, "I have been tempted to break out and tell those fellows in the devil's name to sew their stars and badges on the seats of their breeches. But I comforted myself with the old adage: Politeness as far as the last step of the gallows, but hanging for all that!"
They roared with laughter. He called:
"Fresh bottles! A little excess may be pardoned, upon this of all the nights in the year. Really, I need a buck-up after all that I have suffered, what with this Bavarian business, with Gortchakoff's Note, and the bumptiousness of the English, who, without knowing why or wherefore, are bellowing for war. All that danger has been avoided by the exercise of a little diplomacy.... But how can we expect to be taken seriously by the Powers when we procrastinate in the matter of the Paris Bombardment—which ought to begin at once!"
There was a hubbub of acquiescence, from which only the voices of Hatzfeldt and Abeken were missing.
Bismarck-Böhlen begged leave to propose a toast. The Minister asked, tolerantly regarding his young relative, who vibrated with suppressed hiccups, and was palpably unsteady upon his long legs:
"What is this toast we are to drink?"
Bismarck-Böhlen, in labor with speech, got out with a final effort:
"The—hic!—bombar—hic!—ment! Big—hic!—potarroes for Paris!"
"Ah, as God lives!" he said to them, "I must drink that toast!"
It went round. Hatzfeldt followed with:
"Our glorious Chancellor!"
"Our glorious Chancellor! Our great, ineffable, powerful Kaiser-maker! Hoch! the Fürst von Bismarck-Schönhausen, Imperial Germany's master-mind!"
Sobs mingled with their acclamations. Their faces were now purple red with the exception of Hatzfeldt's, which was ghastly, and Bismarck-Böhlen's, which presented a combination of shades, in which pea green and orange predominated, as, bathed in tears, he staggered to embrace his august relative. He was turned off with a single jerk of the Minister's wrist, to fall weeping on the bosom of Privy Councilor Abeken, who, shocked at finding himself involved in something approaching to an orgie, was in the act of escaping from the room.
"My thanks for the toast!" said the resonant voice in their dulled and singing ears, "but pray all remember that I am no longer the North German Chancellor, or even the Chancellor of the Germanic Federation, but Chancellor of the German Empire, which has a better sound! And this is now, or will be by the New Year—the Imperial German Chancellery, and Foreign Office, while you, my friends, are Imperial Privy Councilors, Secretaries, and so on. We will baptize your green honors in a fresh round of champagne, and then I must leave you. I have yet before me some hours of hard work, and must keep my head clear and cool."
He held his great glass to the now drunken servant to be filled up.
"Prosit!" he said, and lifted the capacious vessel high, and tossed off the wine and dashed the costly goblet into the fireplace, where it exploded in crystal fragments and sparkling dust. Had they tried, his satellites could not have followed his example. Their leaden arms could only lift the wine to their dribbly lips. They drank—and one by one each toper collapsed and buckled as though the solid oak floor had given way under his boneless feet. Hatzfeldt sank prone across a chair. Bismarck-Böhlen had rolled under the table some moments previously, where, judging by the ominous nature of the sounds that asserted his presence, Madame Tessier's Brussels carpet was suffering for his excess. Similar noises, stertorous snores were reëchoed from other quarters as the Minister surveyed his fallen warriors:
"Men cannot drink in these days!" he commented, and left the room.