I was looking on and listening, amused and interested by old M. de Présensé's descriptions, that were not destitute of barbs and points, when through the crowd in my direction, walking beside my old enemy the Comte de Coigny, came a young man.
A young man, pale, very handsome, with an air of distinction which marked him at once as a person above other people, a distinction which, starlike, reduced the surrounding crowd to the level of wax lights and the function of D'Harmonville to a bourgeois rout. He was dressed in simple evening attire, without jewellery or adornment of any description, except an order set in brilliants, a point of sparkling light which gave the last touch to a picture worthy of the brush of Vandyck or Velasquez.
"Quick!" I said, plucking old M. Présensé by the sleeve. "That young man with the Comte de Coigny: who is he?"
"That!—ma foi—he is Baron Carl von Lichtenberg, the new attaché at the Prussian Embassy. Oh, yes; he is the sensation of the moment in Paris. The women rave about him——"
But I did not hear what more the old man may have said, for at that moment Von Lichtenberg, as they called him, looking in my direction, caught my eye and halted dead, with his hand on De Coigny's arm.
He seemed stricken with paralysis; the words he had just been saying to his companion withered on his lips; we stared at each other for ten seconds; then De Coigny, glancing in my direction, broke the spell, and, pulling old Présensé by the arm, I retired precipitately through an alcove which led to the cardroom.
I was terrified, shocked. Terrified as an animal which suddenly finds itself trapped in a gin; shocked as a man who sees a ghost.
All the nameless excitement and soul-terror that had filled me for a moment as a child when Gretel, in the gallery of the Schloss, had held the light to the portrait of Margaret von Lichtenberg, were mine now again, for the face I had just seen was hers. The Baron Carl von Lichtenberg was little Carl.
I said "Good-evening," to M. Présensé, escaped through the cardroom door, got my hat and coat from the attendants, and found myself in the street.