“A bottle of wine! Explain yourself, sir, the thing begins to interest me.”
“Listen then, your grace; his majesty the King of Sweden—I beg pardon, the Count Haga I should have said—drinks nothing but tokay.”
“Well, am I so poor as to have no tokay in my cellar? If so, I must dismiss my butler.”
“Not so, your grace; on the contrary, you have about sixty bottles.”
“Well, do you think Count Haga will drink sixty bottles with his dinner?”
“No, your grace; but when Count Haga first visited France, when he was only prince royal, he dined with the late king, who had received twelve bottles of tokay from the Emperor of Austria. You are aware that the tokay of the finest vintages is reserved exclusively for the cellar of the emperor, and that kings themselves can only drink it when he pleases to send it to them.”
“I know it.”
“Then, your grace, of these twelve bottles of which the prince royal drank, only two remain. One is in the cellar of his majesty Louis XVI.——”
“And the other?”
“Ah, your grace!” said the maître-d’hôtel, with a triumphant smile, for he felt that, after the long battle he had been fighting, the moment of victory was at hand, “the other one was stolen.”