"But," said I, with a modest smile, "admitting, monsieur, that which is merely, I believe, a delusion of your kind nature; admitting, I say, that I have had some success in the world, and that, relatively to my years, I am even considered of some account, I do not well see what use my country could derive from these advantages."
"No one can inform you better than I," replied the minister, with awkward alacrity, which proved to me that he had expected this question. "People talk a great deal, make a great fuss, over what is called diplomacy. Now do you know what the great art of diplomacy is?" he asked, with a good-natured smile.
I shook my head with an air of humility.
"Well, it is simply the art of pleasing. As diplomacy consists in asking and refusing, he who can please most will always gain his point; while if he is obliged to refuse, he will make his refusal sufficiently gracious, to avoid its wounding. Here lies the whole secret."
I had some difficulty in suppressing a great inclination to laugh, for it struck me that the minister, jealous of my attentions to Madame de V——, was going to propose to attach me to a foreign embassy, so as to get rid of me.
This was doubtless the solution of this scene; but I found the situation so amusing that I determined not to terminate it abruptly.
"I thought," said I, "that the able negotiators of the most fertile epoch of great treaties and great diplomatic victories, I thought," I continued, "that such men as D'Avaux, Courtin, Estrade, Ruvigny, and Lyonne were possessed of other attributes than the simple talent of pleasing."
"If they did not possess the art of pleasing," said, with some embarrassment, M. de Sérigny, who seemed ignorant of the historic traditions of his special department like the true constitutional minister that he was,—"if they did not possess the art of pleasing, they made use of some other seduction."
"You are right," I rejoined, "they had gold without limit."
"You see, then," cried the minister, "it is always the same; only in modern society the art of pleasing has superseded the seduction by gold."