‘You are certainly determined to make the best of things,’ I could not help saying, for that particular aptitude for making the foot fit the boot in a cheerful and intelligent way is unquestionably French. I felt decidedly interested in my young compatriot, and I asked him to give me a few days to look round for him. Meanwhile I took his address, though with considerable doubt about the final result of his bold journey.
At supper the conversation happened to turn on the sudden resolutions and the unhoped-for and unexpected bits of daring that often determine a man’s whole existence. As a matter of course, instances were quoted, and notably that of General Tettenborn, who, in something like four months had worked his way from major to general-in-chief.
‘I could mention a trait of courage and a reliance on luck which, save for the favourable results to come, is worth all those we have mentioned.’
On being questioned, I told them all about my visitor of that morning, about his economical journey with nothing at the end of it but a simple letter of introduction, and about the coincidence of his reaching Vienna but a couple of days after my own arrival. The Comte de Witt had listened very attentively.
‘Your young man’s courage is worthy of consideration,’ he said, ‘and inasmuch as he has been in the Guards of Honour, he is probably at home on horseback. Send him to me to-morrow morning; I’ll find him something to do.’
I thanked the comte; then, turning to the other guests: ‘This is my countryman’s second step on the road of chance in one day,’ I said, ‘You’ll admit that if a letter of recommendation is often addressed at random, it now and again happens to get into the hands of Dame Fortune.’
‘Yes,’ remarked the young Comte de Saint-Marsan, ‘a letter of recommendation sometimes constitutes a whole fortune. Would you like to have an instance of this?’
And without further ado he told us with his habitual grace and sprightliness the following anecdote in connection with a period which already seemed far removed from us in the past, although the actors had scarcely left the stage.
‘A young Parisian poet,’ began Marsan, ‘named Dubois, who was probably as poor in wit as he was in money, had exhausted all his faculties in singing the powers that were without getting the smallest favour. As a forlorn hope, he addressed an ode to Princesse Pauline, the favourite sister of Napoleon. In his poetical confusion, and without reflecting upon the fate of Racine when the latter presented to Louis XIV. his Memoir on the Wretched Condition of Peoples, Dubois mingled with his praises of the princess counsels to Mars, embroidered on a philanthropic dream of universal peace. The greatest effects are often due to the most trivial causes. It so happened that one of the princess’s waiting-maids was a distant relative of the poet, and she seized a favourable opportunity of presenting the epistle to her highness, who only read the rhymes of “Pauline” and “divine,” recurring at almost every strophe, and promised her influence to the author of such beautiful and kind sentiments. “But where is he?” asked Princesse Pauline. “There,” said the relative, pointing to the ante-chamber. “In that case let him come in,” remarked the princess, and in less time than it takes to tell, the poet enters the perfumed boudoir of Pauline, and finds himself tête-à-tête with his future Providence. “Well, what can I do for you?” asked the princess, after having listened to the usual compliments. “If Madame by her influence could get me some small post in this or that government office, I should for ever be grateful to her.” “A letter of recommendation to Fouché may do the thing. Not later than yesterday he said that I never asked for any favours. I’ll put him to the test. Do you think that this would suit you?” Naturally the poet replied that such a letter could not fail in its effect, and that it would make him the happiest of mortals. Handsome Pauline Borghese immediately opened her escritoire, and being in one of the happy moods when sentences shape themselves on paper, in her petition to his Grace of Otranto she spoke of M. Dubois as a man of superior gifts, apt at many things, and in whom she took the greatest interest.
‘An hour afterwards the protégé was at the door of the dispenser of favours, but being unknown to the ushers, and not specially recommended to them, it may easily be imagined that he got no further than the ministerial ante-chamber, and that he was obliged to remit his letter to the hands of those who did not care a jot. As a matter of course, it was flung with many others into the basket set apart for such epistles, which as often as not went straight from the receptacle into the stove of the ante-chamber. Nevertheless, when Fouché returned that evening from the Council of Ministers, and the basket was, as usual, set in front of him, by the merest accident his eye fell on the paper displaying the imperial arms. Naturally, he opened it at once, read it from the first line to the last, and immediately ordered four gendarmes to accompany his carriage at nine in the morning. Among his entourage it was taken for granted that he was proceeding to Saint-Cloud for some communication of great importance; hence the surprise of his servants was intense when they were ordered to take him to a mean street in the neighbourhood of the Halles. It was there that our favourite of the Muses had established his aerial quarters on the sixth floor.