Meanwhile Madame de Talmont recognized in the gentleman an old friend, a political exile, who had doubtless accompanied the stream of returning émigrés back to Paris.
“Can it be that I have the happiness of seeing once again my dear old friend Monsieur de Sartines?” she interposed, making a most welcome diversion; “and this—is this young lady the little Stéphanie we used to know, whom I have so often held in my arms? Monsieur de Sartines, here is my daughter Clémence,” she added. “She too will have grown almost beyond your remembrance.”
But Clémence was already making friends with the disconsolate Stéphanie, listening to the story of the lost brooch, and comforting her with a tact and gentleness which Ivan was watching with admiring and delighted eyes.
Madame de Talmont soon remembered him, and presented to M. de Sartines “Our young friend Monsieur Pojarsky, a Russian, an officer in his Imperial Majesty’s Chevalier Guard.”
After the usual compliments, Ivan presented a request, framed as gracefully as a Parisian could have done it, that monsieur and mademoiselle would do him the honour to join them at dinner. The proposal was found agreeable, and the whole party adjourned to a handsome dining-hall, where a table exquisitely adorned with baskets of rare fruit and vases of flowers fully satisfied Ivan’s expectations. Nor did the repast that followed disappoint the young Russian, jealous in the lightest matters for the credit of his country. The enterprising Parisian restaurateur, having secured the services of a celebrated French chef de cuisine whom the war had deprived of his lucrative situation in the establishment of a Russian millionnaire, was able to set before his numerous Russian guests just such a banquet as would have awaited them at the table of a Tolstoi, a Narischkin, a Dolgorouki.
The dinner went merrily forward. The names of the dishes were strange, but their quality was unexceptionable. Amongst other specialties, a delicate fish soup gained the approbation of the party, although Ivan lamented that it could only be made in perfection of the sterlet, not to be found anywhere except in the waters of the Oka, the river near which he had spent his childhood. Emile devoted himself assiduously to certain delicious chicken cutlets called “Côtelettes à la Pojarsky” in honour of Ivan’s heroic ancestor; although, when he heard the name, he somewhat ungallantly sought to dissuade Clémence from partaking of them. Rare wines, flavoured with peaches, apricots, and prunes, accompanied the little banquet; and the fruits, ices, and confectionery were voted perfectly “ravishing” by Emile and Stéphanie, nor did any one dispute their verdict.
It would have been well if Ivan’s guests had been equally harmonious upon other subjects. But it was impossible, in a crisis like the present, not to talk of public events, and just as impossible to talk of them without differences of opinion. The party consisted of three ardent Legitimists, a Buonapartist, a Russian devoted to his Czar, and a clever, observant child, whose sole political creed as yet was that everything done in the world ought to contribute to the amusement and gratification of Stéphanie de Sartines.
Ivan’s ideas of politeness, perhaps a little overstrained, led him to say everything he could think of in praise of Paris; and M. de Sartines replied by a tribute to the magnanimity of the conqueror, who spared the splendid city when it lay at his mercy. “Your Emperor,” he said, “has shown himself generous to his fallen enemies.”
“Monsieur,” replied Ivan, “my Czar has no fallen enemies. With him the unfortunate ceases at once to be the enemy.”[53]
“It has been a great disappointment to us,” said Madame de Talmont, “that we failed to see him to-day.”