“To think that I should have known him!” cried Simonne. “If only I could have foreseen, I’m the one that would have put some poison in his glass.”
But Blanche, on whose heart the expulsion of her Prussian still weighed, ventured to defend Bismarck. Perhaps he wasn’t such a bad sort. To every man his trade!
“You know,” she added, “he adores women.”
“What the hell has that got to do with us?” said Clarisse. “We don’t want to cuddle him, eh?”
“There’s always too many men of that sort!” declared Louise Violaine gravely. “It’s better to do without ’em than to mix oneself up with such monsters!”
And the discussion continued, and they stripped Bismarck, and, in her Bonapartist zeal, each of them gave him a sounding kick, while Tatan Nene kept saying:
“Bismarck! Why, they’ve simply driven me crazy with the chap! Oh, I hate him! I didn’t know that there Bismarck! One can’t know everybody.”
“Never mind,” said Léa de Horn by way of conclusion, “that Bismarck will give us a jolly good threshing.”
But she could not continue. The ladies were all down on her at once. Eh, what? A threshing? It was Bismarck they were going to escort home with blows from the butt ends of their muskets. What was this bad Frenchwoman going to say next?
“Hush,” whispered Rose, for so much noise hurt her.