“I’ll wager a whole chest of Latakia,” said Mars, “that this is a feat of Thierry’s accomplishing. He is well named the ‘King of Good Fellows,’ for he knows how to meet every emergency. He deserves to get a crown in the general scramble.”
“He is a good fellow,” said Prince Leopold, “but he is about as likely to get a crown as I am.”
“Who knows?” asked De Zichy, who cared little for crowns, and felt no envy at kings. “There may be half-a-dozen political earthquakes before another score of years have been added to the register; and another remodelling of kingdoms may strangely affect the market for monarchs.”
In another moment Apollo entered, half laughing, half ashamed, and entirely shaven. The Emperor had really issued an order that the Guard should be shaved; De Wurbna had forthwith submitted, and, in his private quarters, he consummated the heavy sacrifice. The decree however, which had been issued to please the imperial ladies, only lasted for a day. It nevertheless served its purpose; and never was such honour done to the diplomatic abilities of Thierry, as when the mimic Olympus discovered that by his aid a king of men had subdued a refractory deity, and that the consistency of a mythological tableau was saved from shipwreck.
The representation went off with extraordinary éclat. The only persons among the spectators who were not enraptured with the spectacle, were the obese King of Würtemberg, who was sound asleep in his chair, and who was never awake except at dinner-time; his son, the Crown Prince, who was breathing out his soul in the ear of the young Duchess of Oldenburg; and that youthful widow herself, whose eyes beamed with a lustre born, not of the outward show, but of inward feeling.
With these exceptions, all were delighted; and when Thierry, in the intervals of the performance, took up his guitar and discoursed eloquent music, the entire audience declared that they had never heard so exquisite a voice, nor seen so king-like a fellow.
The loudest in his praise, and the best-dressed man among the eulogizers, was the nonagenarian Prince De Ligne; an old dandy, of whom his tailors made, as nearly as dress could do it, a comparatively young-looking man. He was more carefully dressed than ever on this eventful night. It was the night on which he went through the snow, to keep, at least he said so, an assignation of a tender nature on the ramparts, and where he was kept waiting so long in vain by his Cynthia of the minute, that he caught a cold which, within a very short space of time, carried him into a bronze coffin, and covered him up in a marble tomb. All Vienna laughed, except the tailors; for though he patronized these, he never paid them.
Thierry was standing by the burying-place when he first heard of the return of Napoleon.
“Well,” thought he, “there are no crowns to be had here. The kingdom of good-fellowship is a sorry monarchy. Perhaps something may turn up under the Corsican.”