“I!” said Sartines. “I have nothing to do with politicians—my business is with criminals.”
“They are the same thing, my dear man,” replied Rochefort. “The criminals stab each other in the front and the politicians in the back; that is all the difference. Ah, here we are in the ball-room. More flowers! Why, Choiseul must have stripped France of roses for this ball of his.”
“Yes, but there is a Rose that he has failed to pluck with all these roses.”
“Dubarry?”
“Precisely.”
Though Rochefort pretended to know nothing of politics, his acute mind told him at once a secret hidden from others. Sartines belonged to the Dubarry faction. He read it at once in the remark and the tone in which it was made.
Sartines moved through the circles of the Court, mysterious, secretive, professing no politics, yet with his thumb in every pie, and sometimes his whole hand.
He was Fouché with the aristocratic particle attached—a policeman and a noble rolled into one. With the genius of Mascarille for intrigue, of Tartuffe for hypocrisy, acting now with the feigned stupidity of a Sganarelle, and always ready to pounce with the pitilessness of a tiger, this extraordinary man exercised a power in the Court of Louis XV., equalled only by the power of the grey cardinal in the time of Richelieu—with this difference—he was feared less, on account of his assumed bonhomie, an attribute that made him even more dangerous than son éminence gris.
He stood now with his hands behind his back, leaning slightly forward, his lips pursed, and his eyes upon the minuet that had just formed like a coloured flower crystallized from the surrounding atmosphere by the strains of Lully.