"He says he'll put you and Beril in a sack and drop you in the Seine, if he has any more trouble with the pair of you—always fighting like a couple of old cats."
"Old, indeed!" replied Joubert. "Ma foi! it well becomes a young man like the Vicomte to think of age! And did I make you lame? More likely it was a curse from one of that lot——"
"Here!" I said, "give me the hair-brushes, and leave 'that lot,' as you call them alone."
I wondered to myself what Joubert would have said had he known the real cause of my lameness, but I had never spoken to anyone of the child, so like little Carl, the mysterious child who had lured me through the bushes into the hidden gravel-pit. If I had, what ammunition it would have given him against "that lot," as he was pleased to call anyone who had been present at the Schloss Lichtenberg that September nine years ago!
I dined tête-à-tête with my guardian, then we played a game of écarté; and at ten o'clock, the carriage being at the door, we departed for the Marquis d'Harmonville's in the Avenue Malakoff.
It was a very big affair; the Avenue Malakoff was lined with carriages; and we, wedged between the carriage of the Countess de Pourtalès and that of the Russian Ambassador, had time on our hands, during which the Vicomte, irritated by the loss of five louis at écarté and the slowness of the queue, continued his strictures on the social life of Paris and the condition of France.
We passed up the stairs, between a double bank of flowers; and despite the condition of the social life of Paris and the state of France, the scene was very lovely.
The great ballroom—with its scheme of white and gold, its crystal candelabra and its extraordinarily beautiful ceiling, in which, as in a snowstorm, the ice spirits whirled in a fantastic dance—might have been the ballroom in the palace of the Ice Queen but for the warmth, the banks of white camellias, and the music of M. Strauss's band.
Following my usual custom, I cast round for someone whom I could bore with my conversation, a fellow-wall-flower; and it was not long before I lit on M. de Présensé, a friend of my guardian, one of those old gentlemen who go everywhere, know everything, talk to everybody, and from whom everyone tries to escape. Delighted to obtain a willing listener, M. de Présensé, who did not dance, drew me into a corner and pointed out the notabilities. We had mounted to a kind of balcony, and presently, when M. de Présensé was engaged in conversation with a lady of his acquaintance, I stood alone and looked down on the assembled guests.
Recalling them now, and recalling the Vicomte's strictures, it seems strange enough that amidst the guests were most of those who, fatuously playing into Bismarck's hands, brought war and the destruction of war on France; all, nearly, of the undertakers of the Second Empire's funeral were there. The Duc d'Agenor de Gramont; Benedetti, who happened to be in Paris at that time; Marshal Lebœuf, that ruinous fool the clap of whose portfolio cast on the council table at Saint-Cloud was answered by the mobilisation of the German Army; Vareigne, the Palace Prefect of the Tuileries; and, to complete the collection, Baron Jérome David, destined to be the first recipient of the news of Sedan.